The Hampdenshire Wonder

by J. D. Beresford

One thing did strike me as curious. The idiot, the one person who had never feared him living, had feared him horribly when he was dead....

EPILOGUE

THE USES OF MYSTERY

Something Challis has told me; something I have learned for myself; and there is something which has come to me from an unknown source.

But here again we are confronted with the original difficulty—the difficulty that for some conceptions there is no verbal figure.

It is comprehensible, it is, indeed, obvious that the deeper abstract speculation of the Wonder’s thought cannot be set out by any metaphor that would be understood by a lesser intelligence.

We see that many philosophers, whose utterances have been recorded in human history—that record which floats like a drop of oil on the limitless ocean of eternity—have been confronted with this same difficulty, and have woven an intricate and tedious design of words in their attempt to convey some single conception—some conception which themselves could see but dimly when disguised in the masquerade of language; some figure that as it was limned grew ever more confused beneath the wrappings of metaphor, so that we who read can glimpse scarce a hint of its original shape and likeness. We see, also, that the very philosophers who caricatured their own eidolon, became intrigued with the logical abstraction of words and were led away into a wilderness of barren deduction—their one inspired vision of a stable premiss distorted and at last forgotten.

How then shall we hope to find words to adumbrate a philosophy which starts by the assumption that we can have no impression of reality until we have rid ourselves of the interposing and utterly false concepts of space and time, which delimit the whole world of human thought.

I admit that one cannot even begin to do this thing; within our present limitations our whole machinery of thought is built of these two original concepts. They are the only gauges wherewith we may measure every reality, every abstraction; wherewith we may give outline to any image or process of the mind. Only when we endeavour to grapple with that indeterminable mystery of consciousness can we conceive, however dimly, some idea of a pure abstraction uninfluenced by and independent of, those twin bases of our means of thought.

Here it is that Challis has paused. Here he says that we must wait, that no revelation can reveal what we are incapable of understanding, that only by the slow process of evolution can we attain to any understanding of the mystery we have sought to solve by our futile and primitive hypotheses.