It is the spirit that sums up and unifies knowledge. It is a fact to be reckoned with, in education, that knowledge can be summed up, and that the best summing up of it is a human face.
III
The Higher Cannibalism
It is not unnatural to claim, therefore, that the most immediate and important short-cut in knowledge that the comprehensive or educated man can take comes to him through his human and personal relations. There is no better way of getting at the spirits of facts, of tracing out valuable and practical laws or generalisations, than the habit of trying things on to people in one’s mind.
I have always thought that if I ever got discouraged and had to be an editor, I would do this more practically. As it is, I merely do it with books. I find no more satisfactory way of reading most books—the way one has to—through their backs, than reading the few books that one does read, through persons and for persons and with persons. It is a great waste of time to read a book alone. One needs room for rows of one’s friends in a book. One book read through the eyes of ten people has more reading matter in it than ten books read in a common, lazy, lonesome fashion. One likes to do it, not only because one finds one’s self enjoying a book ten times over, getting ten people’s worth out of it, but because it makes a kind of sitting-room of one’s mind, puts a fire-place in it, and one watches the ten people enjoying one another.
It may be for better and it may be for worse, but I have come to the point where, if I really care about a book, the last thing I want to do with it is to sit down in a chair and read it by myself. If I were ever to get so low in my mind as to try to give advice to a real live author (any author but a dead one), it would be, “Let there be room for all of us, O Author, in your book. If I am to read a live, happy, human book, give me a bench.”
I have noticed that getting at truth on most subjects is a dramatic process rather than an argumentative one. One gets at truth either in a book or in a conversation not so much by logic as by having different people speak. If what is wanted is a really comprehensive view of a subject, two or three rather different men placed in a row and talking about it, saying what they think about it in a perfectly plain way, without argument, will do more for it than two or three hundred syllogisms. A man seems to be the natural or wild form of the syllogism, which this world has tacitly agreed to adopt. Even when he is a very poor one he works better with most people than the other kind. If a man takes a few other men (very different ones), uses them as glasses to see a truth through, it will make him as wise in a few minutes, with that truth, as a whole human race.
Knowledge which comes to a man with any particular sweep or scope is, in the very nature of things, dramatic.
[I fear, Gentle Reader, I am nearing a conviction. I feel a certain constraint coming over me. I always do, when I am nearing a conviction. I never can be sure how my soul will take it upon itself to act when I am making the attempt I am making now, to state what is to me an intensely personal belief, in a general, convincing, or impersonal way. The embarrassing part of a conviction is that it is so. And when a man attempts to state a thing as it is, to speak for God or everybody,—well, it would not be respectable not to be embarrassed a little—speaking for God. I know perfectly well, sitting here at my desk, this minute, with this conviction up in my pen, that it is merely a little thing of my own, that I ought to go on from this point cool and straight with it. But it is a conviction, and if you find me, Gentle Reader, in the very next page, swivelling off and speaking for God, I can only beg that both He and you will forgive me. I solemnly assure you herewith, that, however it may look, I am merely speaking for myself. I have thought of having a rubber stamp for this book, a stamp with IT SEEMS TO ME on it. A good many of these pages need going over with it afterwards. I do not suppose there is a man living—either I or any other dogmatist—who would not enjoy more speaking for himself (if anybody would notice it) than speaking for God. I have a hope that if I can only hold myself to it on this subject I shall do much better in speaking for myself, and may speak accidentally for God besides. I leave it for others to say, but it is hard not to point a little—in a few places.]
But here is the conviction. As I was going to say, knowledge which comes to a man with any particular sweep or scope is in the very nature of things dramatic. If the minds of two men expressing opinions in the dark could be flashed on a canvas, if there could be such a thing as a composite photograph of an opinion—a biograph of it,—it would prove to be, with nine men out of ten, a dissolving view of faces. The unspoken sides of thought are all dramatic. The palest generalisation a man can express, if it could be first stretched out into its origins, and then in its origins could be crowded up and focused, would be found to be a long unconscious procession of human beings—a murmur of countless voices. All our knowledge is conceived at first, taken up and organised in actual men, flashed through the delights of souls and the music of voices upon our brains. If it is true even in the business of the street that the greatest efficiency is reached by dealers who mix with the knowledge of their subject a keen appreciation and mastery of men, it is still more true of the business of the mind that the greatest, most natural and comprehensive results are reached through the dramatic or human insights.