The Kernel and the Husk: Letters on Spiritual Christianity

by Edwin Abbott Abbott

I have mentioned a few of the “illusions from the senses”; and now you will probably ask me what purpose they serve, how they can be called “wholesome,” and how they “tend to the ultimate attainment of truth.”

They appear to me to be “wholesome” because they represent and spring from a wholesome belief that “Nature will not deceive us; Nature does not change her mind; Nature keeps her promises.” Sent into the world with but little of the instinctive equipment of non-human animals, we are forced to supply the place of instincts by inferences from sensation. Now if we were always obliged consciously to argue and deliberately to infer, whenever the sensations hand over a report to the Imagination, we should be at a great disadvantage as compared with our instinct-possessing compeers, whom we call irrational. “This inkstand which I see before me was hard yesterday, and the day before—but will it be hard if I touch it to-day or to-morrow?”—if a child were to argue after this fashion every time he reached out his hand to touch anything, the life of Methuselah would be too short for the ratiocinations necessary as a basis for the action of a week. For healthy progress of the human being, trustful activity is needed, and for trustful activity we must trust Nature, or, in other words, we must trust these quasi-instinctive inferences about Nature which we derive from our sensations. This trust or faith in the order of material things within our immediate observation, I have already described as being the germ of a trust or faith in a higher order altogether, that universal order, at present imperfectly realized, which we call the Divine Will.

Now when we say to Nature, “We trust you; you will not deceive us,” Nature replies for the most part, “You do right; I will not deceive you; you will be justified in your faith.” But occasionally she replies in a different tone.

“Yes, I have deceived you; you did not use the means you had of obtaining the truth; therefore you deceived yourselves, or, if you please to say so, I deceived you, in order that, after deceiving yourselves by a prolonged experience, you might learn, while trusting my order and permanence in general, not to trust every conception of your own about that order and permanence in particular.

“Yet in reality, what you call my ‘deceptions’ were, in part, the results of your own defects (some blameworthy, some perhaps inherent and not blameworthy), in part the results of my method of teaching mankind, by line upon line and inference upon inference. How does a child gain knowledge? By generalizing from too few instances: by inferring too soon; then by enlarging the circle of instances from which he generalizes; by correcting his inferences with the aid of experience: thus the progress of every child towards truth is through a continuous series of illusions. But when I break each one of your false and rudimentary conceptions of my Order, I always reveal to you, concealed in the husk of it, the kernel of a better conception. Thus while I teach you daily to distrust your own hastily adopted and unverified assumptions or inferences about my Order, I give you no cause to distrust my Order itself; and by the self same act I strengthen both your faculty of scientific reason and also your faith in me. You may find fault with me that I did not bestow on each one of you, even in the cradle, the perfection of all knowledge and wisdom. Deeper laws, deeper than I can now speak of, forbade that rapid consummation: but, since that could not be, since it needs must be that imperfection should be in the intellectual, as well as in the moral, world, rejoice at least that illusion is made subject to truth.”

Well, after this long but needful account of “illusions,” in the sense in which I use the term, let me now recur to your objection that “the Word of God ought to dispel illusions, not to add to them.” I suppose those who believe in a God at all, will in these days regard Him as the Maker of the world, as a whole, in spite of the evil that is in it. Some of the Gnostics, as you know, believed that the good God who had not made the visible world was opposed to the bad God who had made it; but with them we need not at this time concern ourselves, as there are probably none who now entertain that belief. Those then who believe in a God, Maker of heaven and earth, will not deny that God partially reveals Himself to men by the things He has made. Now by which of all His creatures does God reveal Himself most clearly? You will say perhaps—indeed I have heard you say it—“By the stars and their movements.” I do not believe it. I say, “By the life of the human family first and by the stars of heaven, second. But I will assume that your answer is correct, and that God reveals Himself mainly by the movements of the stars of heaven; and I will try to shew you that in this revelation God leads men to truth through illusion. Then I think it must seem reasonable to you that, if God does not dispense with illusion in that intellectual revelation of Himself which most closely approaches to a direct spiritual revelation, illusion may also have been intended or permitted by Him to play an ordained part in spiritual revelation itself.”

Where, then, I ask, in all the teaching of Nature’s school, has there been more of illusion than in her lessons of astronomy? When I was a boy, I remember, in the midst of a hateful sum of long division that would not come out right, devoting my attention to the sun moving through the branches of certain trees, and announcing to my tutor that “The sun moves.” “No, you are mistaken.” “But I cannot be mistaken, for I saw it.” I rivalled—I exceeded—the obstinacy of Galileo; I was ready to be punished rather than consent to say what seemed to me a manifest falsehood, that the sun did not move. Surely this boyish experience represents the experience of mankind, except that the tutor who has corrected their astronomical illusions, has been their own long, very long experience. Does it not seem sometimes as if God Himself had said, when He made the heavens to declare His glory, “Being what they are, my children must be led to knowledge through error, to truth through illusion”? It may be said that in some cases men have fallen into astronomical mistakes through their own fault; through haste, for example, through the love of neat and complete theories, through carelessness, through excessive regard for authority; and so indeed they have. But is it always so? When you and I last walked out together on Hampstead Heath, you took out your watch, as the sun went down over Harrow, and said, “Now he’s gone, and it’s just eight.” I remember replying to you, “So it seems; but of course you know he ‘went’ more than eight minutes ago.” You stared, and I said no more; for something else diverted your attention at the time, and I felt I had been guilty of a little bit of pedantry. But I said quietly to myself as we went down the hill, “I don’t suppose he knows it, but the sun certainly ‘went’ eight minutes ago; and what my young friend saw was an image of the sun raised by the refraction of the mist, like the image of a penny seen in a basin of water.” Well now, was this your fault, this error of yours? No, it was, in the second place, the fault of the University of Oxford, which has bribed the schools to desist from teaching mathematics to any boy with a taste for classics and literature, so that you had to give up your mathematical studies before you came to optics; and it was, in the first place, the fault of—what shall I say? Shall I say the fault of Nature? That means the fault of God. Say, if you like, that it was the fault of Matter, or of an Evil principle. Say, it was no one’s fault. Say that more good than harm results from it, in the way of stimulating thought and research. Deny it was a fault at all. Yet do not deny that it represents a Law, the Law of the attainment of truth through illusion—a Law which it is folly to ignore.

So far I have been going on the assumption that your answer was correct as to the means by which God mainly reveals Himself. But now let us assume that my answer, and not yours, is correct, and that God reveals Himself mainly by the relations of the family. In that case we must agree that each rising generation is led up to the conception of the divine fatherhood mainly by the preliminary teaching of human fatherhood. Now surely in the domestic atmosphere refraction is as powerful and as illusive as in the material strata of the air. Nay, the better and purer the family, the stronger is the illusion. Unloving children may be logical and critical; but what loving child does not idealise a good mother as perfectly good, and a strong wise father as the perfection of wisdom and strength? To the good child the parents stand in the place of God; and it is his illusive belief in these earthly creatures, which, when it has been corrected and purified, is found to have contained and preserved the higher belief in the eternal Father. You see then that in the family no less than in science, in the spiritual as in the intellectual side of Nature’s school, the pupils pass upwards through illusion to the truth.

I have promised to say nothing of the special illusions of Christianity which I must reserve for a later letter.

But let me say thus much from the a priori ground on which we are now standing, that if illusions in Nature are most powerful in her noblest and most spiritual teaching, then, so far from there being a prejudice against finding illusion in religion, we ought on the contrary to be prepared to find illusion most potent in the early stages of the purest religion of all. Was ever people so illusively trained as the faithless children of faithful Abraham, the rejected Chosen People? Is not the Promised Land to this day a proverbial type of illusion? Do we not recognize illusion in every age of Christian revelation? And if the very Apostles of the Lord Jesus—so much I will here assume—had their illusions both during, and after, the life of their Master; if the early Christians had their illusions also concerning the speedy coming of Christ; if in the Mediæval Church and in the later Roman Catholicism there have predominated vast illusions about transubstantiation, the powers of the priesthood, and the infallibility of the Pope; if the Protestant Churches themselves have not been exempt from illusions about the literal inspiration and absolute infallibility of the Bible; is it not the mark of astounding presumption to suppose that for the Anglican branch of the Reformed Church there should have been reserved a unique immunity from an otherwise universal law?