There are some statements, the very simplicity and truth of which create a shock—for some people. For instance, there are certain seekers after health who ignore and are shocked by the very obvious truth that “brain is flesh.” A brain poisoned by impure blood is no fit instrument for the spirit to manifest through, and “mental suggestion” must inevitably prove of no avail as a cure if the origin of the impure blood be purely material.
It is just as futile, on the other hand, to treat the chronic indigestion that arises from persistent worry, or indulgence in passion, by one change after another in the dietary. The founder of homœopathy insisted that there was no such thing as a physical “symptom” without corresponding mental and moral symptoms. “Not soul helps flesh more than flesh helps soul.” Thus the Scientist and the Poet come to the same truth, albeit by different ways.—[Eds.]
PLAIN WORDS AND COLOURED PICTURES.
While most of us would at first sight find fault with Mr G.K. Chesterton's sweeping advice—
“And don't believe in anything
That can't be told in coloured pictures,”
many would probably end by endorsing it. But we should do so only because we were able to give a very wide and varied meaning to “coloured pictures.”
No one ever made a coloured picture of the “wild west wind”; but there are plenty of coloured pictures in which there is no mistaking its presence. We all believe in wireless telegraphy (now that it is an accomplished fact) which is, in itself, untranslatable into colour or line; but its mechanism can be photographed, and its results in the world of men and ships are in all the illustrated papers. Music, which is pure sound, is to some the surest path to the Reality behind this outward show things; yet to some at least of such music is indeed form and colour, even though the colours be beyond the rainbow. For in truth, everything worth believing in, all those things, those ideas, which renew the springs of our life, have form and they have colour. Even to the colour-blind one word differeth from another in glory.
This is no idle fancy, no mere subject for academic debate: it is the most practical subject in the world. For even as the body is fed not by food alone but by the living air, so is the spirit nourished not alone by right action but by inspiring ideas. Ideas are pictures; and the best ideas are coloured pictures.
Hence the great value of words. It is idle to speak of “words, idle words,” as though they were the transient froth on the permanent ocean of thought. They are the vehicle, the body of thought. If the thought be shallow or silly, the words will indeed be “idle.” But if the idea be inspiring the words will be the channel of that inspiration.
The greater part of this power in words is lost to us to-day. Everything tempts us to hurry over words. We talk too quickly to be able to pay that respect to words which they deserve; and we read the newspaper, the magazine, the novel, the play, the poem, with the same disastrous haste. We devour the words but lose their essence. Hence there is a grave danger that through this neglect we shut out one of the main streams by which our life must be fed if it is not to shrink into mere fretful existence.