“Avec tous nos points de repères, Te voyons-nous mieux que nos pères, O fond, fond qui nous désespères, Fond obscur, fond mystérieux? Pour avoir fait glose sur glose, Nous croyons savoir quelque chose; Mais la Cause de tout, la Cause, Qui donc la tient devant ses yeux?” Jean Richepin.
“I mean to say that if, in the pitiful comedy of life, princes seem to command and peoples to obey, it is only a piece of acting, a vain appearance, and that really they are both conducted by an invisible force.”
Anatole France, in Les Opinions de M. Jerôme Coignard.
THE wisest words, probably, that were ever heard in a court-room were uttered by Gamaliel, the Pharisee, at the trial of Peter and John: “Refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God.”
To a similar purport, Montaigne wrote:—
“‘Tis a very great presumption to slight and condemn all things for false that do not appear to us likely to be true, which is the ordinary vice of such as fancy themselves wiser than their neighbours. I was myself once one of these; and if I heard talk of dead folks walking, of prophecies, enchantments, witchcrafts, or any other story, I had no mind to believe.... I presently pitied the poor people that were abused by these follies, whereas I now find that I myself was to be pitied as much at least as they; not that experience has taught me anything to supersede my former opinions, though my curiosity has endeavoured that way; but reason has instructed me that thus resolutely to condemn anything for false and impossible is to circumscribe and limit the will of God and the power of nature within the bounds of my own capacity, than which no folly can be greater. If we give the names of monster and miracle to everything our reason cannot comprehend, how many such are continually presented before our eyes! Let us but consider through what clouds and, as it were, groping through what darkness, our teachers lead us to the knowledge of most of the things we apply our studies to, and we shall find that it is rather custom than knowledge that takes away the wonder, and renders them easy and familiar to us; ... and that, if those things were now newly presented to us, we should think them as strange and incredible, if not more so, than others.... He that had never seen a river imagined the first he met with to be the sea, and the greatest things that have fallen within our knowledge we conclude to be the extremes that nature makes of the kind.”
To have pondered and appropriated these words of the far-sighted Pharisee and the sage of Périgord is to have stricken the word impossible from one’s vocabulary, to have lost the desire to emit shrieks of anger or dismay before new views of life and society, and, without “mockings or arguments,” to simply “witness and wait.”
The philosophic doubt which no one more than Montaigne has approved—the “Que sçais-je?” which forbids the swearing of unconditional allegiance to unproved theories—is, of course, always in order; but doubt becomes most pernicious dogmatism when it assumes the rôle of denial. It plays its proper part when, and only when, it produces a willingness to “leave great changes,” as Stevenson happily puts it, “to what we call great blind forces, their blindness being so much more perspicacious than the little peering, partial eyesight of men.”