These examples will have justified, I trust, my contention that Intelligence is specially fitted to deal with Change. Not to praise or blame it after mature deliberation, like solemn and sedentary Reason; still less to filter concrete realities into immutable, because purely abstract, entities, which is the business of scientific thought; but just to perceive change on its passage and in so far help us to make the best of its coming.
Need one add that Intelligence is far more liable to mistakes than either “Reason” or “Logic”? But its mistakes, though so much more numerous, are, methinks, less massively enthroned and less likely to block the way than theirs, for there is something self-satisfied and without appeal about “Reason” and “Logic”: does not the one issue “dictates” and the other enunciate “laws”? Whereas the mistakes which Intelligence commits to-day, it will, in its light-hearted way, correct to-morrow, being as little ashamed of revokes as its disconcerting friend Proteus is of transformations. Of course, Intelligence is rather irresponsible and, one might add, cannot help being so because it is essentially responsive. Like the human eye (to which I have compared it) Intelligence turns to whichever side the light comes from, adjusting itself, in discursive, often desultory fashion, to all manner of directions and distances, comparing and measuring with unabashed slovenliness, extracting the qualities which strike it and hastening on to connect them with something it was struck by before. Being thus rapidly responsive, Intelligence may often, I admit, seem on the pounce, and more so than politeness warrants. But it can also take its time, poise circling round and round, and reverse its movement, because it is never motionless and always able to readjust its balance.
Such do I see Intelligence in those who possess it; such do I feel it, on some delightful occasions, in myself. Such also I frequently notice it failing to make itself agreeable to some kinds of persons. Those who take a just pride in Reason or Logic are often a little ruffled; or else, as Wagner said of Mozart, they find Intelligence just a little frivol. But in the long run they recognize an ally; and their conscious superiority makes them indulgent. Not so with people—I might have said Peoples—who happen to be indulging in the glorious unimpeded violence of collective passions, specially those which are magnanimous and cruel, as, for instance, in war time, when a conscientious objector may come off better than an intelligent one.
In like fashion Intelligence’s passionate pleasure in dealing with Otherness and in looking out for Proteus, Intelligence’s frequent indifference to here and now, disrespect to self and refusal to regard means as ends—all this renders it unpopular with those practical-minded men who are bent on personal advantage and on outstripping competitors in the great race to Nowhere. These acute persons are quite aware that Intelligence might make an invaluable slave, only you cannot keep its nose, with any regularity, to the grindstone. In default of such practical usefulness it may be worth hiring, as one buys a yacht or an old master, for a mark of wealth and being in the know. But let us have none of your whys and wherefores! Besides, the Rulers of Men have by this time mostly recognized that Intelligence is harder to deal with than any number of High Principles, for you cannot hope to bamboozle it into serving you unawares.
But Intelligence, though thus in some quarters deservedly unpopular is adored by all who have it; and that is the reason why, once it has got a footing in the world, it is bound to increase and multiply and eventually conquer its promised land.
II
PROTEUS AND ETHICS
I have just come across a passage from Huxley’s famous Romanes Lecture, read thirty years ago and long since forgotten; and which has brought home to me all our elusive Proteus has been doing in the domain of ethics; moreover the share of Intelligence in confirming those changes. Huxley is pointing out a fact which he finds disconcerting, namely, “that ethical nature, while born of cosmic nature, is necessarily at enmity with its parent.” The allusion to the harmony reigning in Victorian families may make one smile, like some well-bred Du Maurier illustration. But how those words bring back what some of us are old enough to have suffered in days when Free Thought drew a terrifying line between religious dogmas and moral ones, clinging to these to steady itself after jettisoning the others! One’s youthful deistic anguish (as cruel, perhaps, as any believer’s sense of God’s forsaking him) at discarding God for insufficient morality, was merely transferred to one’s terms with Huxley’s ogre Cosmos, devouring the moral instincts itself had begotten. Occupied as my studies then were with art-history, I can remember wrestling with the horrid inconsistency of the art of Michael Angelo and Rafael having arisen in a civilization described by Taine as partaking of the brothel and the cut-throat’s den. And I remember the heavenly relief of hitting on the notion that, since such art is not born in a day, it must have been begotten and incubated during the Franciscan Age, immune from all Borgian infections. Of course, the generation immediately younger than mine was taught by Nietzsche that Michael Angelo’s greatness was, on the contrary, due to presiding Renaissance villainy; but that pseudo-Nietzschian generation is, in its turn, superannuated, and the cult of immoralism along with it. Not only because paradoxes do not bear repetition, but for another reason which that quotation from Huxley has made me realize. Namely, that we have left off thinking of art as either moral or immoral, simply because morality no longer holds the same place in our thoughts as, say, in those of Ruskin, George Eliot, or, as that quotation shows, even in those of Huxley. Not the same (if one may say so, ubiquitous) place; a place more clearly defined, but only the more important, ever since Intelligence, ferreting about among Golden Boughs, Religion of the Semites, and similar books, has quietly stripped from our moral valuations that half-supernatural, half-æsthetic halo which is but the shrunken religious involucrum wherein they came into the world. The “problem of evil” has already become the problem not of its toleration by God, but of its diminution by Man. That is the great change we are still witnessing; a change, I cannot but think, greater than any brought about by the material applications of science, and implying a deliverance from individual suffering not less than that we owe to Pasteur and to Lister.
Whether we notice it or not, Morality is already taking a new status, independent alike of an absentee (or absent) Deity, and of an indifferent Cosmos. But its new domain, narrow and self-governing, essentially sui generis, has sanctions and imperatives only the stronger for being man-made and man-regarding. And, one may add, only the more austerely binding on the present that we shall recognize them as different from those of the Past and different, no doubt, from those into which the Future will transform them.
Thus we are already conceiving of punishment only as a mechanism, successful or not, for social defence. And we scarcely ever hear more than the last echo of those incentives to virtue and deterrents from vice of the Sandford and Merton type of my own childhood’s copybooks. Still less of the Stoical, and (alas!) Platonic mendacities about remorse torturing evil-doers, and the unhappy life of Browning’s Instans Tyrannus with his “Then I was afraid.” Neither do we talk any longer of the virtuous glows which (failing the increase of flocks and herds!) used to reward the virtuous acts of the generation adorned by Butler’s Mr. Pontifex. We are getting to think of our own virtues, supposing we have any, as conducive not to our own advantage but to that of other folk.