On the Vice of Novel Reading. / Being a brief in appeal, pointing out errors of the lower tribunal.

by Young Ewing Allison

The most profound philosophers and most patient students know as little of this silent, gloomy human force as geographers know of the archipelagoes of the Antarctic. The philosopher begins with pure reason and expands it; the student delves into the records of other students; in unfathomable depths below both are the myriads who eat, drink, sleep and seek their prey as their primitive parents once did when they disputed carcasses with the beasts of the forests.

It is this gloomy, savage force that has made the contemplative soul of spiritual inquiry writhe under the startling contradictions of history. When this force has been aroused with fear it has snarled and roared defiance; when it has been enraged by opposition or the lash of mastership it has cooled its ferocity in the blood of countless wars, pillages and sacrifices; when satiated or pleased it has grunted with pleasure or relaxed itself in orgies so gross and unspeakable that modern history, with instinctive decency, has kept the story of them veiled behind dead languages. This gloomy, savage force has always been the same whether mastered or mastering. When some daring and cunning genius of its own nature has cowed it, as the Alexanders, Cæsars and Napoleons have done, it has marched out to slaughter and be slaughtered with a sullen pride in the daring that this mightier ferocity has put upon it. When it has mastered its Drusus, its Domitian, its Nero, its Vespasian and its Louis XVI, it has indulged in wanton excesses of rage and destruction until, spent with exhaustion, a new master has arisen to tie it up like a whipped dog. It was this gloomy and savage force that crowded into the greatest tribunal of all history, and yelled with discordant and frenzied rage into the very face of the noblest and gentlest incarnation of spiritual light that ever spent its brief moment on earth: "Crucify Him! Release unto us Barabbas, the Thief." It was this savage force, serving all masters with equal ferocious zeal, that Theodosius turned against the Serapion at Alexandria, in the name of Christianity, to blot out of existence the inestimable treasures of knowledge and literature that had been accumulated by centuries of labor.

At all times this gloomy force has been more wantonly cruel than wild beasts. Man has been epigrammatically described as a reasoning animal, a laughing animal, a constructive animal and even as "an animal that gets drunk;" but the truest description is that he is the cruel and rapacious animal. The greatest student of the jungle, who has written of the beasts of the forest with the intuition of genius, has given us this formula:

"Now this is the Law of the Jungle—as old and as true as the sky,
And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die:
* * * * *
"Ye may kill for yourselves and your mates and your cubs, as they need and ye can,
But kill not for pleasure of killing, and seven times never kill man."

You may spend the remainder of your life attacking that formula of animal nature if you please, but you will find it at last still truth. Man kills not only the beasts, but his own species for pleasure, or in sheer wantonness of cruelty. He loves killing as an exercise; he loves it as a spectacle; he loves it as the origin of his greatest emotion. When that there is merely a brutish criminal to be hanged, human beings crowd the converging roads to the spectacle as centuries ago they crowded to the Colosseum. And it is to be recorded to the credit of wild beasts that no traveler ever yet came upon a battlefield that they had strewn with the dead bodies of their own kind.

Lest it be contended that this is a psychological portrait of the mass of mankind caricatured by bitter cynicism, let us examine the aspect of its physiology. The whole brain of an average Caucasian makes up fifty ounces of the 140 pounds weight of his body. There are thus 137 pounds of fleshly necessity to three pounds of intellectual possibility—forty-six parts of heavy dough to one part of leaven. The difference in the brain weight of races, and which decides the question of intellectual superiority, is about two ounces. The difference in the brain weight of individuals of the same race, indicating mental superiority is about two ounces. Now as the brains of individuals of all races must in proportion be equally occupied with the execution of those functions which we call instinct and those acts that may be called merely automobile (since they are the results of training and constant imitation, and have utterly no relation to intellectuality or mental initiative), it may be fairly assumed that the spiritual essence of races and individuals exists in a little grayish pulp-like lump of brain weighing two ounces out of an average bodily weight of 140 pounds. In the mass of humanity, then, there is one part possible to flower into the noble perceptions of spiritual and intellectual life, to 1,120 parts of dull, uniform, automatic animalism.

What chance has this solitary microbe of spiritual and intellectual light against the swarming bacteria of animalism? That single microbe is merely a possibility. It may be mutilated, it may be dwarfed, it may fail from weakness, it may be corrupted. It is discouraging to think how few have grown into strong life through all the perils of existence.

Under these circumstances it is but natural that even the small proportion of mankind endowed with the divine possibilities conferred by two ounces of brain, should be contaminated with many of the corruptions from below. Of those who seem to be concerned with spiritual perceptions there is a vast number mere charlatans and pretenders who, like the ingenious Japanese, are content to make cunning imitations of the real things adapted to sell to the best advantage. They patter the formulas of religion, of science, of art and morals, and ostentatiously display themselves in the costume of intellectuality to flatter, cajole and mystify the gloomy ignorance of their fellows.

This is the select officialism of the secret human nature, its recognized and authorized police—the constituted authorities of Public Opinion. It is among these that we should find the possibilities of development much increased. What do we find? That the solitary microbe merely begins its struggle here. It dare not destroy its swarming enemies since upon their continued existence its own life depends. It must regulate, control and direct them if it would live and develop, or with cowardly cunning compromise the struggle at the outset and become a servant where it seems to command. This is the first terrace-step of superiority peopled by those who can understand others above them and interpret to the mass below.

The microbe that might have become glorious ounces of brain has been content to become merely a little wart of pulp which finds expression in skill and quickness and more of coveted leisure. There is the next higher terrace and another and another, until finally it becomes a pyramid, ever more fragile and symmetrical, the apex of which is a delicate spire, where the purest intellects are elevated to an ever increasing height in ever decreasing numbers, until in the dizzy altitude above the groveling base below they are wrapped little by little in the cold solitude of incarnate genius burning like suns with their own essence. It is so far up that the eyes deceive and men dispute who it is that stands at the top, but, whoever he may be, he has carried by the force of strength, determination and patient will the whole swarm of his evil bacteria with him. They swarm through every terrace below, increasing in force as the pyramid enlarges downward. It is the pyramidal bulk of human nature with its finest brain, true to anatomic principles, at the top. That radiance at the summit is the delight and the aspiration of all below. As it rises as slowly as growth of a coral reef it increases the courage of those below in proportion as they are near.