“I know. But what’s the good of any number of possible explanations when no single explanation is probable? I never can understand the kind of madness that imagines it has solved a difficulty when it has found a whole number of possible explanations that aren’t probable. What difference does the number of them make? As a matter of fact, in this case there’s only one—that Brotherhood really was an atheist, but posed as a Catholic when he was Davenant merely to put people off the scent. But can’t you see how monstrous that is? Instead of taking the trouble to go over to Paston bridge every Sunday, he might have gained a far bigger local reputation for piety by sitting under Marryatt once in three weeks.”
“Well, what other human probabilities are there?”
“Next to changing one’s religion every Saturday to Monday, the most impossible thing in the world would be to change one’s game of golf every Saturday to Monday. Theoretically it sounds all right; in practice I don’t believe in it. I can’t think how you did either, Carmichael, because golf is a thing of which you have some experience.”
“Well, why didn’t you communicate these doubts to us before?”
“You were talking too hard. But I can produce my diary to show you what I did think about your suggestion.” And Gordon disappeared, to return after a few minutes with a formidable volume over which he spent an unvarying twenty minutes every evening. “Here you are. ‘Thursday—Carmichael has had an inspiration—he thinks Davenant and Brotherhood were the same person, a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde pair. He overlooks, it seems to me, the obvious phenomena of religion and golf. But of course it is very typical’ ”—he broke off. “I don’t expect that part would interest you.”
“Go on,” said Reeves. “I shouldn’t have thought Carmichael was typical of anything. What’s it all about?”
“Well, the truth is that in this diary I don’t merely record what’s happened; I’ve got into the way of philosophizing over it a bit. As you know, Reeves, I’ve got a bad habit of writing for the papers, and I find writing down my impressions every day often helps me to find subjects.”
“It would be a privilege to hear what you made of all this,” said Carmichael dryly.
“ ‘But of course it is very typical,’ ” Gordon read on, “ ‘of all these modern philosophies. They are always for explaining something in terms of something else, just as Carmichael wants to explain Davenant in terms of Brotherhood. In plain English it means mixing up two things that are entirely different. The moderns, for example, will have it that punishment is only another name for correction. And once you have said that, the whole idea of punishment drops out of sight altogether. Or they will tell you that a concept is the same as a mental picture, or that Truth is the same as beauty, or as intellectual convenience, or that matter is a form of motion. The root of error is always one of those false identifications, saying that A is B when it isn’t.
“ ‘The cause of them is a rage for the simplification of experience, the result is a paralysis of thought. There is a sense of neatness and efficiency about identifying Davenant with Brotherhood; it explains such a lot—you always can explain a lot by overlooking the facts. But the result is that poor Reeves, who up till now at least had Davenant to hunt for, now regards Davenant as an imaginary being, and is reduced to hunting for an imaginary murderer. Just so it looks very neat and efficient to say that punishment is the same thing as correction; it explains a puzzling idea, simplifies your thought. But what you have done is to banish the whole idea of punishment from your mind, and turn a real thing into a mental figment.