“Surely not that the machine was thinking!”
“Certainly not. But would you allow thought concerned in it? Would you allow that thought must have preceded and occasioned its existence? Would you allow that thought therefore must yet be interested in its power to produce thought, and might, if it chose, minister to the continuance or enlargement of the power it had originated?”
“Perhaps I should be compelled to allow that much in regard to a clock even!—Are we coming to the Paley-argument, sir?” said Richard.
“I think not,” answered Wingfold. “My argument seems to me one of my own. It is not drawn from design but from operation: where a thing wakes thought and feeling, I say, must not thought and feeling be somewhere concerned in its origin?”
“Might not the thought and feeling come by association, as in the case of the clock suggesting the flight of time?”
“I think our associations can hardly be so multiform, or so delicate, as to have a share in bringing to us half of the thoughts and feelings that nature wakes in us. If they have such a share, they must have reference either to a fore-existence, or to relations hidden in our being, over which we have no control; and equally in such case are the thoughts and feelings waked in us, not by us. I do not want to argue; I am only suggesting that, if the world moves thought and feeling in those that regard it, thought and feeling are somehow concerned in the world. Even to wake old feelings, there must be a likeness to them in what wakes them, else how could it wake them? In a word, feeling must have put itself into the shape that awakes feeling. Then there is feeling in the thing that bears that shape, although itself it does not feel. Therefore I think it may be said that there is more thought, or, rather, more expression of thought, in the face of the world when the sun is up, than when he is not—as there is more thought in a face awake than in a face asleep.—Ah, there is the sun! and there are things that ought never to be talked about in their presence! To talk of some things even behind their backs will keep them away!”
Richard neither understood his last words, nor knew that he did not understand them. But he did understand that it was better to watch the sunrise than to talk of it.
Up came the child of heaven, conquering in the truth, in the might of essential being. It was no argument, but the presence of God that silenced the racked heart of Job. The men stood lost in the swift changes of his attendant colours—from red to gold, from the human to the divine—as he ran to the horizon from beneath, and came up with a rush, eternally silent. With a moan of delight Richard turned to his gazing companion, when he beheld that on his face which made him turn from him again: he had seen what was not there for human eyes! The radiance of Wingfold's countenance, the human radiance that met the solar shine, surpassed even that which the moon and the sky and the sleeping earth brought out that night upon the face of Barbara! The one was the waking, the other but the sweetly dreaming world.
Richard refused to let any emotion, primary or reflex, influence his opinions; they must be determined by fact and severe logical outline. Whatever was not to him definite—that is, was not by him formally conceivable, must not be put in the category of things to be believed; but he had not a notion how many things he accepted unquestioning, which were yet of this order; and not being only a thing that thought, but a thing as well that was thought, he could not help being more influenced by such a sight than he would have chosen to be, and the fact that he was so influenced remained. Happily, the choice whether we shall be influenced is not given us; happily, too, the choice whether we shall obey an influence is given us.
Without a word, Richard lifted his hat to the stranger, and walked on, leaving him where he stood, but taking with him a germ of new feeling, which would enlarge and divide and so multiply. When he got to the next stile, he looked back, and saw him seated as at first, but now reading.