Deadlock: Pilgrimage, Volume 6

by Dorothy M. Richardson

“A system” pursued the voice “very generally corrects the fallacy of the preceding system, and leans perhaps in the opposite direction.” She flushed warm beneath the pressure of her longing to remain cool...... “Thus the movements of philosophic thought may be compared to the efforts of a drunken man to reach his home.” The blue eyes remained unaltered, while the large fresh face expanded with a smiling radiance. He was a darling. “He reels against the wall to his right and gains an impetus which sends him staggering to the left and so on; his progress being a series of zigzags. But in the end he gets home. And we may hope that philosophy will do the same, though the road seems at times unnecessarily broad.”

He turned back to his papers, leaving his sentence on the air in an intense silence through which Miriam felt the eager expectancy of the audience flow and hang waiting, gathered towards the fresh centre whence, unless he suddenly vanished, would come, through the perfect medium of the unobstructive voice, his utmost presentation of reasons for the tantalising hope.

At the end of the lecture she sat hurriedly sorting and re-sorting what she had gleaned; aware that her attention had again and again wandered off with single statements that had appealed to her, longing to communicate with other members of the audience in the hope of filling up the gaps. Perhaps the questions would bring back some of the things she had missed. But no one seemed to have anything to ask. The relaxation of the hearty and prolonged applause, had given way to the sort of silence that falls in a room after vociferous greetings, when the anticipated occasion vanishes and the gathered friends become suddenly unrecognisably small and dense. She looked at the woman at her side and caught a swift responsive glance that shocked her, clear blue and white and remote in limpid freshness though it was, with its chill understanding familiarity. Something had gone irrevocably from the evening and from herself. The strange woman was exactly like somebody .... a disguise of somebody. Shattering the silence came a voice from the back of the hall. “If the lecturer thinks, and seems to deprecate the fact, that theology deals with metaphysical problems in an unmetaphysical way, that is, from the point of view of metaphysic, in an unscientific way ....” compared to Dr. McHibbert’s his voice was like the voice of an intoxicated man arguing to himself in a railway carriage ..... “may we not say that when metaphysic takes upon itself to criticise the validity of scientific conceptions, it does so, from the point of view of science in an unscientific way?”

This Miriam felt, was terribly unanswerable. But the hushed platform was alive with the standing figure almost before the muffling of the last emphatic word told that the assailant had re-assumed his seat.

“I think I have said” his face beaming with the repressed radiance of an invading smile, was lifted towards the audience, but the blue eyes modestly addressed the frill of green along the platform edge, “that metaphysic, with respect to some of the conceptions of science, while admitting that they have their uses for practical purposes, denies that they are exactly true. Theology does not deny the problems of metaphysic, but answers them in a way metaphysic cannot accept.”

“In that case Theology” began a rich, reverberating clerical voice .....

“This is veggy boring” said the woman.

He was going to claim, thought Miriam, noting the evidence of foreign intelligence in her neighbour’s pronunciation, that religion, like metaphysic and science, had a right to its premises and denied that metaphysic was adequate for the study of the ultimate nature of reality, exactly as metaphysic denied that science was adequate.

“Yes, isn’t it” she murmured, a little late, through the deep caressing thunder of the clerical voice, wondering how far she had admitted her willingness to be at the disposal of anyone who found, in these tremendous onslaughts, nothing but irrelevance.

“If one could peacefully fall asleep until the summing up.”