“Very well,” I said.
“You do not want one yourself,” my Soul said, “you would be bored to death with one—with a mind that’s always reading for principles!”
“I’m not so sure,” I said.
“You always are with other people’s.”
“Well, there’s Meakins,” I admitted.
“You wouldn’t want a Meakins kind of a mind, would you?” (Meakins is always reading for principles.)
I refused to answer at once. I knew I didn’t want Meakins’s, but I wanted to know why. Then I fell to thinking. Hence this chapter.
Meakins has changed, I said to myself. The trouble with him isn’t that he reads for principles, but he is getting so he cannot read for anything else. What a man really wants, it seems to me, is the use of a philosophic mind. He wants one where he can get at it, where he can have all the benefit of it without having to live with it. It’s quite another matter when a man gives his mind up, his own everyday mind—the one he lives with—lets it be coldly, deliberately philosophised through and through. It’s a kind of disease.
When Meakins visits me now, the morning after he is gone I take a piece of paper and sum his visit up in a row of propositions. When he came before five years ago—his visit was summed up in a great desire in me, a lift, a vow to the universe. He had the same ideas, but they all glowed out into a man. They came to me as a man and for a man—a free, emancipated, emancipating, world-loving, world-making man—a man out in the open, making all the world his comrade. His appeal was personal.
Visiting with him now is like sitting down with a stick or pointer over you and being compelled to study a map. He doesn’t care anything about me except as one more piece of paper to stamp his map on. And he doesn’t care anything about the world he has the map of, except that it is the world that goes with his map. When a man gets into the habit of always reading for principles back of things—back of real, live, particular things—he becomes inhuman. He forgets the things. Meakins bores people, because he is becoming inhuman. He treats human beings over and over again unconsciously, when he meets them, as mere generalisations on legs. His mind seems a great sea of abstractions—just a few real things floating palely around in it for illustrations. When I try to rebuke him for being a mere philosopher or man without hands, he is “setting his universe in order,” he says—making his surveys. He may be living in his philosophic mind now, breaking out his intellectual roads but he is going to travel on them later, he explains.