Chapter XXII: The Colleges of Unreason, continued
Of genius they make no account, for they say that every one is a
genius, more or less. No one is so physically sound that no part
of him will be even a little unsound, and no one is so diseased but
that some part of him will be healthy--so no man is so mentally and
morally sound, but that he will be in part both mad and wicked; and
no man is so mad and wicked but he will be sensible and honourable
in part. In like manner there is no genius who is not also a fool,
and no fool who is not also a genius.
When I talked about originality and genius to some gentlemen whom I
met at a supper party given by Mr. Thims in my honour, and said
that original thought ought to be encouraged, I had to eat my words
at once. Their view evidently was that genius was like offences--
needs must that it come, but woe unto that man through whom it
comes. A man's business, they hold, is to think as his neighbours
do, for Heaven help him if he thinks good what they count bad. And
really it is hard to see how the Erewhonian theory differs from our
own, for the word "idiot" only means a person who forms his
opinions for himself.
The venerable Professor of Worldly Wisdom, a man verging on eighty
but still hale, spoke to me very seriously on this subject in
consequence of the few words that I had imprudently let fall in
defence of genius. He was one of those who carried most weight in
the university, and had the reputation of having done more perhaps
than any other living man to suppress any kind of originality.
"It is not our business," he said, "to help students to think for
themselves. Surely this is the very last thing which one who
wishes them well should encourage them to do. Our duty is to
ensure that they shall think as we do, or at any rate, as we hold
it expedient to say we do." In some respects, however, he was
thought to hold somewhat radical opinions, for he was President of
the Society for the Suppression of Useless Knowledge, and for the
Completer Obliteration of the Past.
As regards the tests that a youth must pass before he can get a
degree, I found that they have no class lists, and discourage
anything like competition among the students; this, indeed, they
regard as self-seeking and unneighbourly. The examinations are
conducted by way of papers written by the candidate on set
subjects, some of which are known to him beforehand, while others
are devised with a view of testing his general capacity and savoir
faire.
My friend the Professor of Worldly Wisdom was the terror of the
greater number of students; and, so far as I could judge, he very
well might be, for he had taken his Professorship more seriously
than any of the other Professors had done. I heard of his having
plucked one poor fellow for want of sufficient vagueness in his
saving clauses paper. Another was sent down for having written an
article on a scientific subject without having made free enough use
of the words "carefully," "patiently," and "earnestly." One man
was refused a degree for being too often and too seriously in the
right, while a few days before I came a whole batch had been
plucked for insufficient distrust of printed matter.
About this there was just then rather a ferment, for it seems that
the Professor had written an article in the leading university
magazine, which was well known to be by him, and which abounded in
all sorts of plausible blunders. He then set a paper which
afforded the examinees an opportunity of repeating these blunders--
which, believing the article to be by their own examiner, they of
course did. The Professor plucked every single one of them, but
his action was considered to have been not quite handsome.
I told them of Homer's noble line to the effect that a man should
strive ever to be foremost and in all things to outvie his peers;
but they said that no wonder the countries in which such a
detestable maxim was held in admiration were always flying at one
another's throats.
"Why," asked one Professor, "should a man want to be better than
his neighbours? Let him be thankful if he is no worse."
I ventured feebly to say that I did not see how progress could be
made in any art or science, or indeed in anything at all, without
more or less self-seeking, and hence unamiability.
"Of course it cannot," said the Professor, "and therefore we object
to progress."
After which there was no more to be said. Later on, however, a
young Professor took me aside and said he did not think I quite
understood their views about progress.
"We like progress," he said, "but it must commend itself to the
common sense of the people. If a man gets to know more than his
neighbours he should keep his knowledge to himself till he has
sounded them, and seen whether they agree, or are likely to agree
with him. He said it was as immoral to be too far in front of
one's own age, as to lag too far behind it. If a man can carry his
neighbours with him, he may say what he likes; but if not, what
insult can be more gratuitous than the telling them what they do
not want to know? A man should remember that intellectual over-
indulgence is one of the most insidious and disgraceful forms that
excess can take. Granted that every one should exceed more or
less, inasmuch as absolutely perfect sanity would drive any man mad
the moment he reached it, but . . . "
He was now warming to his subject and I was beginning to wonder how
I should get rid of him, when the party broke up, and though I
promised to call on him before I left, I was unfortunately
prevented from doing so.
I have now said enough to give English readers some idea of the
strange views which the Erewhonians hold concerning unreason,
hypothetics, and education generally. In many respects they were
sensible enough, but I could not get over the hypothetics,
especially the turning their own good poetry into the hypothetical
language. In the course of my stay I met one youth who told me
that for fourteen years the hypothetical language had been almost
the only thing that he had been taught, although he had never (to
his credit, as it seemed to me) shown the slightest proclivity
towards it, while he had been endowed with not inconsiderable
ability for several other branches of human learning. He assured
me that he would never open another hypothetical book after he had
taken his degree, but would follow out the bent of his own
inclinations. This was well enough, but who could give him his
fourteen years back again?
I sometimes wondered how it was that the mischief done was not more
clearly perceptible, and that the young men and women grew up as
sensible and goodly as they did, in spite of the attempts almost
deliberately made to warp and stunt their growth. Some doubtless
received damage, from which they suffered to their life's end; but
many seemed little or none the worse, and some, almost the better.
The reason would seem to be that the natural instinct of the lads
in most cases so absolutely rebelled against their training, that
do what the teachers might they could never get them to pay serious
heed to it. The consequence was that the boys only lost their
time, and not so much of this as might have been expected, for in
their hours of leisure they were actively engaged in exercises and
sports which developed their physical nature, and made them at any
rate strong and healthy.
Moreover those who had any special tastes could not be restrained
from developing them: they would learn what they wanted to learn
and liked, in spite of obstacles which seemed rather to urge them
on than to discourage them, while for those who had no special
capacity, the loss of time was of comparatively little moment; but
in spite of these alleviations of the mischief, I am sure that much
harm was done to the children of the sub-wealthy classes, by the
system which passes current among the Erewhonians as education.
The poorest children suffered least--if destruction and death have
heard the sound of wisdom, to a certain extent poverty has done so
also.
And yet perhaps, after all, it is better for a country that its
seats of learning should do more to suppress mental growth than to
encourage it. Were it not for a certain priggishness which these
places infuse into so great a number of their alumni, genuine work
would become dangerously common. It is essential that by far the
greater part of what is said or done in the world should be so
ephemeral as to take itself away quickly; it should keep good for
twenty-four hours, or even twice as long, but it should not be good
enough a week hence to prevent people from going on to something
else. No doubt the marvellous development of journalism in
England, as also the fact that our seats of learning aim rather at
fostering mediocrity than anything higher, is due to our
subconscious recognition of the fact that it is even more necessary
to check exuberance of mental development than to encourage it.
There can be no doubt that this is what our academic bodies do, and
they do it the more effectually because they do it only
subconsciously. They think they are advancing healthy mental
assimilation and digestion, whereas in reality they are little
better than cancer in the stomach.
Let me return, however, to the Erewhonians. Nothing surprised me
more than to see the occasional flashes of common sense with which
one branch of study or another was lit up, while not a single ray
fell upon so many others. I was particularly struck with this on
strolling into the Art School of the University. Here I found that
the course of study was divided into two branches--the practical
and the commercial--no student being permitted to continue his
studies in the actual practice of the art he had taken up, unless
he made equal progress in its commercial history.
Thus those who were studying painting were examined at frequent
intervals in the prices which all the leading pictures of the last
fifty or a hundred years had realised, and in the fluctuations in
their values when (as often happened) they had been sold and resold
three or four times. The artist, they contend, is a dealer in
pictures, and it is as important for him to learn how to adapt his
wares to the market, and to know approximately what kind of a
picture will fetch how much, as it is for him to be able to paint
the picture. This, I suppose, is what the French mean by laying so
much stress upon "values."
As regards the city itself, the more I saw the more enchanted I
became. I dare not trust myself with any description of the
exquisite beauty of the different colleges, and their walks and
gardens. Truly in these things alone there must be a hallowing and
refining influence which is in itself half an education, and which
no amount of error can wholly spoil. I was introduced to many of
the Professors, who showed me every hospitality and kindness;
nevertheless I could hardly avoid a sort of suspicion that some of
those whom I was taken to see had been so long engrossed in their
own study of hypothetics that they had become the exact antitheses
of the Athenians in the days of St. Paul; for whereas the Athenians
spent their lives in nothing save to see and to hear some new
thing, there were some here who seemed to devote themselves to the
avoidance of every opinion with which they were not perfectly
familiar, and regarded their own brains as a sort of sanctuary, to
which if an opinion had once resorted, none other was to attack it.
I should warn the reader, however, that I was rarely sure what the
men whom I met while staying with Mr. Thims really meant; for there
was no getting anything out of them if they scented even a
suspicion that they might be what they call "giving themselves
away." As there is hardly any subject on which this suspicion
cannot arise, I found it difficult to get definite opinions from
any of them, except on such subjects as the weather, eating and
drinking, holiday excursions, or games of skill.
If they cannot wriggle out of expressing an opinion of some sort,
they will commonly retail those of some one who has already written
upon the subject, and conclude by saying that though they quite
admit that there is an element of truth in what the writer has
said, there are many points on which they are unable to agree with
him. Which these points were, I invariably found myself unable to
determine; indeed, it seemed to be counted the perfection of
scholarship and good breeding among them not to have--much less to
express--an opinion on any subject on which it might prove later
that they had been mistaken. The art of sitting gracefully on a
fence has never, I should think, been brought to greater perfection
than at the Erewhonian Colleges of Unreason.
Even when, wriggle as they may, they find themselves pinned down to
some expression of definite opinion, as often as not they will
argue in support of what they perfectly well know to be untrue. I
repeatedly met with reviews and articles even in their best
journals, between the lines of which I had little difficulty in
detecting a sense exactly contrary to the one ostensibly put
forward. So well is this understood, that a man must be a mere
tyro in the arts of Erewhonian polite society, unless he
instinctively suspects a hidden "yea" in every "nay" that meets
him. Granted that it comes to much the same in the end, for it
does not matter whether "yea" is called "yea" or "nay," so long as
it is understood which it is to be; but our own more direct way of
calling a spade a spade, rather than a rake, with the intention
that every one should understand it as a spade, seems more
satisfactory. On the other hand, the Erewhonian system lends
itself better to the suppression of that downrightness which it
seems the express aim of Erewhonian philosophy to discountenance.
However this may be, the fear-of-giving-themselves-away disease was
fatal to the intelligence of those infected by it, and almost every
one at the Colleges of Unreason had caught it to a greater or less
degree. After a few years atrophy of the opinions invariably
supervened, and the sufferer became stone dead to everything except
the more superficial aspects of those material objects with which
he came most in contact. The expression on the faces of these
people was repellent; they did not, however, seem particularly
unhappy, for they none of them had the faintest idea that they were
in reality more dead than alive. No cure for this disgusting fear-
of-giving-themselves-away disease has yet been discovered.
* * *
It was during my stay in City of the Colleges of Unreason--a city
whose Erewhonian name is so cacophonous that I refrain from giving
it--that I learned the particulars of the revolution which had
ended in the destruction of so many of the mechanical inventions
which were formerly in common use.
Mr. Thims took me to the rooms of a gentleman who had a great
reputation for learning, but who was also, so Mr. Thims told me,
rather a dangerous person, inasmuch as he had attempted to
introduce an adverb into the hypothetical language. He had heard
of my watch and been exceedingly anxious to see me, for he was
accounted the most learned antiquary in Erewhon on the subject of
mechanical lore. We fell to talking upon the subject, and when I
left he gave me a reprinted copy of the work which brought the
revolution about.
It had taken place some five hundred years before my arrival:
people had long become thoroughly used to the change, although at
the time that it was made the country was plunged into the deepest
misery, and a reaction which followed had very nearly proved
successful. Civil war raged for many years, and is said to have
reduced the number of the inhabitants by one-half. The parties
were styled the machinists and the anti-machinists, and in the end,
as I have said already, the latter got the victory, treating their
opponents with such unparalleled severity that they extirpated
every trace of opposition.
The wonder was that they allowed any mechanical appliances to
remain in the kingdom, neither do I believe that they would have
done so, had not the Professors of Inconsistency and Evasion made a
stand against the carrying of the new principles to their
legitimate conclusions. These Professors, moreover, insisted that
during the struggle the anti-machinists should use every known
improvement in the art of war, and several new weapons, offensive
and defensive, were invented, while it was in progress. I was
surprised at there remaining so many mechanical specimens as are
seen in the museums, and at students having rediscovered their past
uses so completely; for at the time of the revolution the victors
wrecked all the more complicated machines, and burned all treatises
on mechanics, and all engineers' workshops--thus, so they thought,
cutting the mischief out root and branch, at an incalculable cost
of blood and treasure.
Certainly they had not spared their labour, but work of this
description can never be perfectly achieved, and when, some two
hundred years before my arrival, all passion upon the subject had
cooled down, and no one save a lunatic would have dreamed of
reintroducing forbidden inventions, the subject came to be regarded
as a curious antiquarian study, like that of some long-forgotten
religious practices among ourselves. Then came the careful search
for whatever fragments could be found, and for any machines that
might have been hidden away, and also numberless treatises were
written, showing what the functions of each rediscovered machine
had been; all being done with no idea of using such machinery
again, but with the feelings of an English antiquarian concerning
Druidical monuments or flint arrow heads.
On my return to the metropolis, during the remaining weeks or
rather days of my sojourn in Erewhon I made a resume in English of
the work which brought about the already mentioned revolution. My
ignorance of technical terms has led me doubtless into many errors,
and I have occasionally, where I found translation impossible,
substituted purely English names and ideas for the original
Erewhonian ones, but the reader may rely on my general accuracy. I
have thought it best to insert my translation here.
Erewhon : Chapter XXIII - The Book of the Machines
Erewhon