He took refuge in letters.
This galling humiliation had set him soul-searching.... Rudderless, aimless, floating on the sea of pleasant tides, he now gazed in tribulation at gulfs that yawned before him and about him and beyond—the Whence and the Why and the Whither of this Present Seeming. And as the learning of old spent itself in the search for the Philosopher’s Stone, so the virile imagination of youth, steeping itself in written wisdom, went a-questing for the secret of life.
Everywhere, where men thought at all and were not content with hereditary thinking, the whole concept of life was being shaken to its base. The barbaric Eastern statement of an all-powerful, all-seeing, all-creating, all-wise God as a huge blundering image of man, taken up with the essaying of experiments, was a fatuous contradiction that mocked at the majesty of the secret of life. Inspiration that cannot face the truth is not saved thereby, but wholly inadequate; indeed, the first aim of a lie is to evade the truth.
Rejecting the crude and garish guesses, the untenable dogma, the juggling conventions of theology, the young fellow had, with the confidence of youth, relied on the intellect for the solution of the problem of life. Indeed, it is abundantly clear that out of the base metal of untruth, at any rate, the key to the great mysteries of life shall not be forged. So, rightly looking to knowledge as an essential element in the search for the key to the secret of life, the youth had gone further and looked to the intellect to be that key—only to find himself in a blind alley with museums at end. The intellect but labelled and pigeon-holed the facts of life in this museum of consciousness. But he had stumbled in solemn company enough—a goodly bevy of the world’s philosophers stood bewildered in the same chill marble place—the labels were all strictly accurate, but the specimens were dead.
Whatever the answer to the riddle of the world, man’s only key is through the doors of the intellect and of the senses. Suspicious of the senses, the youth had relied implicitly on the intellect. It came to him now that the uttermost truth, the secret of life, was beyond man’s reason.
Indeed, the priest who thunders the loudest against agnosticism is the greatest agnostic of them all—who, asked for the absolute details that lie beyond the grave, must give for answer, robbed of all vague talk of God and devil and heavens and hells, “I know not.” Nay, when reason outsteps his theologic acceptances, is he not first to stab at reason? The theologian clamours for the law; but his statements of the law are the veriest guesses. The solemn law of one generation may be the laughing-stock of the next—the crimes of the further next. The idols of one church are the derision of another. Men have been burnt for cast-iron gods by others whose sole claim to godliness was in the lacking humour to laugh at cast-iron gods.
If there be a God, His majesty shall not be sought in a noisy and blundering travesty of Man. Good Master Paley touched the sublime humour when he made the world designed for man—wholly forgetting even the fleas.
Indeed, the veriest savage can show the titles to his most brutal savageries in guesses, when all’s said.
And this very solid world that wounds the stumbling foot, is it not but an idea to each? the solid reality dying for us in our dying—to the flab jelly-fish this splendid wayfaring being even in the living not wholly of the same seeming as to you and me and the other.
Yet wholly and absolutely sure are we that all is. Whatever madness possess us, we know the Achievement. For he who splits hairs with his reason, and affirms that nothing exists, except in our imagination, is like to him who thrusts his head against a stone wall; and will find that the wall and his thinking-machinery are, but do not matter. There is no gain in juggling with facts. Matter is matter, and life is life, and denial but denial.