Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers Part 11

Once Kant was looking at the flowers in a beautiful garden. But instead of looking through the iron pickets, he stooped over and was squinting through the key-hole of the lock. A student coming along asked him why he didn't look through the pickets and thus get a perfect view.

"Go on, you fool," was the stern reply; "I am studying the law of optics--the un.o.bstructed vision reveals too much--the vivid view is only gotten through a small aperture."

All of which was believed to be a sudden inspiration in way of reply that came to the great professor when caught doing an absent-minded thing. That Kant was not above a little pious prevarication is shown by a story he himself tells. He was never inside of a church once during the last fifty years of his life. But when he became Chancellor of the University, one of his duties was to lead a procession to the Cathedral, where certain formal religious services were held. Kant tried to have the exercises in a hall, but failing in this, he did his duty, and marched like a pigmy drum-major at the head of the cavalcade.

"Now he will have to go in," the scoffers said.

But he didn't. Arriving at the church-door, he excused himself, pleading an urgent necessity, walked around to the back of the church, sacrificed, like Diogenes, to all the G.o.ds at once, and made off for home, quietly chuckling to himself at the thought of how he had circ.u.mvented the enemy.

Every actor has just so many make-ups and no more. Usually the characters he a.s.sumes are variations of a single one. Steele Mackaye used to say, "There are only five distinct dramatic situations." The artist, too, has his properties. And the recognition of this truth caused Ma.s.sillon to say, "The great preacher has but one sermon, yet out of this he makes many--by giving portions of it backwards, or beginning in the middle and working both ways, or presenting patchwork pieces, tinted and colored by his mood." All public speakers have canned goods they fall back upon when the fresh fruit of thought grows scarce.

The literary man also has his puppets, pet phrases, and situations to his liking. Victor Hugo always catches the attention by a blind girl, a hunchback, a hunted convict or some mutilated and maimed unfortunate.

In his lectures, Kant used to please the boys by such phrases as this, "I dearly love the muse, although I must admit that I have never been the recipient of any of her favors." This took so well that later he was encouraged to say, "The Old Metaphysics is positively unattractive, but the New Metaphysics is to me most lovely, although I can not boast that I have ever been honored by any of her favors."

A large audience caused Kant to lose his poise--he became self-conscious--but in his own little lecture-room, with a dozen, or fifty at the most (because this was the capacity of the room), he was charming. He would fix his eye on a single boy, and often upon a single b.u.t.ton on this boy's coat, and forgetting the immediate theme in hand, would ramble into an amusing and most instructive monolog of criticism concerning politics, pedagogy or current events. In his writing he was exact, heavy and complex, but in these heart-to-heart talks, Herder, who attended Kant's lectures for five years, says, "The man had a deal of nimble wit, and here Kant was at his best."

So we have two different men--the man who wrote the "Critique" and the man who gave the lectures and clarified his thought by explaining things to others. It was in the lectures that he threw off this: "Men are creatures that can not do without their kind, yet are sure to quarrel when together." This took fairly well, and later he said, "Men can not do without men, yet they hate each other when together." And in a year after, comes this: "A man is miserable without a wife, and is seldom happy after he gets one." No doubt this caused a shout of applause from the students, college boys being always on the lookout for just such things; and coming from a very confirmed old bachelor it was peculiarly fetching.

To say that Kant was devoid of wit, as many writers do, is not to know the man. About a year after the "Critique of Pure Reason" appeared, he wrote this: "I am obliged to the learned public for the silence with which it has honored my book, as this silence means a suspension of judgment and a wise determination not to voice a premature opinion." He knew perfectly well that the "learned public" had not read his book, and moreover, could not, intelligently, and the silence betokened simply a stupid lack of interest. Moreover, he knew there was no such thing as a learned public. Kant's remark reveals a keen wit, and it also reveals something more--the pique of the unappreciated author who declares he doesn't care what the public thinks of him, and thereby reveals the fact that he does.

Here are a couple of remarks that could only have been made in the reign of Frederick the Great, and under the spell of a college lecture: "The statement that man is the n.o.blest work of G.o.d was never made by anybody but man, and must therefore be taken 'c.u.m grano salis.'" "We are told that G.o.d said He made man in His own image, but the remark was probably ironical."

Schopenhauer says: "The chief jewel in the crown of Frederick the Great is Immanuel Kant. Such a man as Kant could not have held a salaried position under any other monarch on the globe at that time and have expressed the things that Kant did. A little earlier or a little later, and there would have been no such person as Immanuel Kant. Rulers are seldom big men, but if they are big enough to recognize and encourage big men, they deserve the grat.i.tude of mankind!"

SWEDENBORG

When a man's deeds are discovered after death, his angels, who are inquisitors, look into his face, and extend their examination over his whole body, beginning with the fingers of each hand. I was surprised at this, and the reason was thus explained to me:

Every volition and thought of man is inscribed on his brain; for volition and thought have their beginnings in the brain, thence they are conveyed to the bodily members, wherein they terminate.

Whatever, therefore, is in the mind is in the brain, and from the brain in the body, according to the order of its parts. So a man writes his life in his physique, and thus the angels discover his autobiography in his structure.

--_Swedenborg's "Spirit World"_

[Ill.u.s.tration: SWEDENBORG]

A bucolic citizen of East Aurora, on being questioned by a visitor as to his opinion of a certain literary man, exclaimed: "Smart? Is he smart?

Why, Missus, he writes things n.o.body can understand!"

This sounds like a paraphrase (but it isn't) of the old lady's remark on hearing Henry Ward Beecher preach. She went home and said, "I don't think he is so very great--I understood everything he said!"

Paganini wrote musical scores for the violin, which no violinist has ever been able to play. Victor Herbert has recently a.n.a.lyzed some of these compositions and shown that Paganini himself could never have played them without using four hands and handling two bows at once. So far, no one can play a duet on the piano; the hand can span only so many keys, and the attempt of Robert Schumann to improve on Nature by building an artificial extension to his fingers was vetoed by paralysis of the members. Two bodies can not occupy the same s.p.a.ce at the same time; mathematics has its limit, for you can not look out of a window four and a half times. The dictum of Ingersoll that all sticks and strings have two ends has not yet been disproved; and Herbert Spencer discovered, for his own satisfaction, fixed limits beyond which the mind can not travel. His expression, the Unknowable, reminds one of those old maps wherein vast sections were labeled, Terra Incognita.

If we read Emanuel Swedenborg, we find that these vast stretches in the domain of thought which Herbert Spencer disposed of as the Unknowable have been traversed and minutely described. Swedenborg's books are so learned that even Herbert Spencer could not read them: his scores are so intricate, his compositions so involved, that no man can play them.

The mystic who sees more than he can explain is universally regarded as an unsafe and unreliable person. The people who consult him go away and do as they please, and faith in his prophecies weaken as his opinions and hopes vary from theirs. We stand by the clairvoyant just as long as he gives us palatable things, and no longer, and n.o.body knows this better than your genus clairvoyant. When his advice is contrary to our desires, we p.r.o.nounce him a fraud and go our way. When enterprises of great pith and moment are to be carried through, we give the power into the hands of the worldling infidel, rather than the spiritual seer.

The person on intimate terms with another world seldom knows much about this, and when Robert Browning tells of Sludge, the Medium, he symbols his opinion of all mediums. A medium, if sincere, is one who has abandoned his intellect and turned the bark of reason rudderless, adrift. This is entirely apart from the very common reinforcement of usual psychic powers with fraud, which, beginning in self-deception, puts out from port without papers and sails the sea with forged letters of marque and reprisal.

There are mediums in every city who tell us they are guided by Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Luther, Tennyson or Henry Ward Beecher. So we are led to believe that the chief business of great men in the spiritual realm is to guide commonplace men in this, and cause them to take pen in hand.

All publishers are perfectly familiar with these productions written by people who think they are psychic when they are only sick. And I have never yet seen a publisher's reader who had found anything in inspirational writing but words, words, words. High-sounding paraphrases and rolling sentences do not make literature; and so far as we know, only the fallible, live and loving man or woman can breathe into the nostrils of a literary production the breath of life. All the rest is only lifeless clay.

That mystery enshrouds the workings of the mind, and that some people have remarkable mental experiences, none will deny. People who can not write at all in a normal mood will, under a psychic spell, produce high-sounding literary reverberations, or play the piano or paint a picture. Yet the literature is worthless, the music indifferent, and the picture bad; but, like Doctor Johnson's simile of the dog that walked on its hind legs, while the walking is never done well, we are amazed that it can be done at all.

The astounding a.s.sumption comes in when we leap the gulf and attribute these peculiar rappings and all this ability of seeing around a corner to disembodied spirits. The people with credulity plus, however, always close our mouths with this, "If it isn't spirits, what in the world is it?" And we, crestfallen and abashed, are forced to say, "We do not know."

The absolute worthlessness of spiritual communication comes in when we are told by the medium, caught in a contradiction, that spirits are awful liars. On this point all mediums agree: many disembodied spirits are much given to untruth, and the man who is a liar here will be a liar there.

Swedenborg was so annoyed with this disposition on the part of spirits to prevaricate that he says, "I usually conduct my affairs regardless of their advice." When a spirit came to him and said, "I am the shade of Aristotle," Swedenborg challenged him, and the spirit acknowledged he was only Jimmy Smith. This is delightfully naive and surely reveals the man's sanity: he was deceived by neither living nor dead: he accepted or rejected communications as they appealed to his reason: he kept his literature and his hallucinations separate from his business, and never did a thing which did not gibe with his reason. In this way he lived to be eighty, earnest, yet composed, serene, steering safely clear from Bedlam, by making his commonsense the court of last appeal.

Emerson says that the critic who will render the greatest gift to modern civilization is the one who will show us how to fuse the characters of Shakespeare and Swedenborg. One stands for intellect, the other for spirituality. We need both, but we tire of too much goodness, virtue palls on us, and if we hear only psalms sung, we will long for the clink of gla.s.ses and the brave choruses of unrestrained good-fellows.h.i.+p. A slap on the back may give you a thrill of delight that the touch of holy water on your forehead can not lend.

Shakespeare hasn't much regard for concrete truth; Swedenborg is devoted to nothing else. Shakespeare moves jauntily, airily, easily, with careless indifference; Swedenborg lives earnestly, seriously, awfully.

Shakespeare thinks that truth is only a point of view, a local issue, a matter of geography; Swedenborg considers it an exact science, with boundaries fixed and cornerstones immovable, and the business of his life was to map the domain.

If you would know the man Shakespeare, you will find him usually in cap and bells. Jaques, Costard, Trinculo, Mercutio, are confessions, for into the mouths of these he puts his wisest maxims. Shakespeare dearly loved a fool, because he was one. He plays with truth as a kitten gambols with a ball of yarn.

So Emerson would have us reconcile the holy zeal for truth and the swish of this bright blade of the intellect. He himself confesses that after reading Swedenborg he turns to Shakespeare and reads "As You Like It"

with positive delight, because Shakespeare isn't trying to prove anything. The monks of the olden time read Rabelais and Saint Augustine with equal relish.

Possibly we take these great men too seriously--literature is only incidental, and what any man says about anything matters little, except to himself. No book is of much importance; the vital thing is: What do you yourself think?

When we read Shakespeare in a parlor cla.s.s there are many things we read over rapidly--the teacher does not stop to discuss them. The remarks of Ophelia or the shepherd talk of Corin are indecent only when you stop and linger over them; it will not do to sculpture such things--let them forever remain in gaseous form. When George Francis Train picked out certain parts of the Bible and printed them, and was arrested for publis.h.i.+ng obscene literature, the charge was proper and right. There are things that need not to be emphasized--they may all be a part of life, but in books they should be slurred over as representing simply a pa.s.sing glimpse of nature.

And so the earnest and minute arguments of Swedenborg need not give us headache in efforts to comprehend them. They were written for himself, as a scaffolding for his imagination. Don't take Jonathan Edwards too seriously--he means well, but we know more. We know we do not know anything, and he never got that far.

The bracketing of the names of Shakespeare and Swedenborg is eminently well. They are t.i.tans both. In the presence of such giants, small men seem to wither and blow away. Swedenborg was cast in heroic mold, and no other man since history began ever compa.s.sed in himself so much physical science, and with it all on his back, made such daring voyages into the clouds.

The men who soar highest and know most about another world usually know little about this. No man of his time was so competent a scientist as Swedenborg, and no man before or since has mapped so minutely the Heavenly Kingdom.

Shakespeare's feet were really never off the ground. His excursion in "The Tempest" was only in a captured balloon. Ariel and Caliban he secured out of an old book of fables.

Shakespeare knew little about physics; economics and sociology never troubled him; he had small Latin and less Greek; he never traveled, and the history of the rocks was to him a blank.

Swedenborg antic.i.p.ated Darwin in a dozen ways; he knew the cla.s.sic languages and most of the modern; he traveled everywhere; he was a practical economist, and the best civil engineer of his day.

Shakespeare knew the human heart--where the wild storms arise and where the pa.s.sions die--the Delectable Isles where Allah counts not the days, and the swamps where love turns to hate and h.e.l.l knocks on the gates of Heaven. Shakespeare knew humanity, but little else; Swedenborg knew everything else, but here he balked, for woman's love never unlocked for him the secrets of the human heart.

Emanuel Swedenborg was born at Stockholm, Sweden, in Sixteen Hundred Eighty-eight. His father was a bishop in the Lutheran Church, a professor in the theological seminary, a writer on various things, and withal a man of marked power and worth. He was a spiritualist, heard voices and received messages from the spirit world. It will be remembered that Martin Luther, in his monkish days, heard voices, and was in communication with both angels and devils. Many of his followers, knowing of his strange experiences, gave themselves up to fasts and vigils, and they, too, saw things. Abstain from food for two days and this sense of lightness and soaring is the usual result. So strong is example, and so p.r.o.ne are we to follow in the footsteps of those we love, that one "psychic" is sure to develop more. Little Emanuel Swedenborg, aged seven, saw angels, too, and when his father had a vision, he straightway matched it with a bigger one.