“It is the collective pressure of life; an unseen movement. But if you feel this what now becomes of your individualism? Eh?” He chuckled his delight … passing so easily and leisurely to personal things.
“Oh the shape doesn’t affect the individual, in himself. There’s something behind all those outside things that goes on independently of them, something much more wonderful.”
“You are wrong. What you call the shape, affects most profoundly every individual in spite of himself.”
“But he must be an individual to be affected at all, and no two people are affected in the same way … after this evening I’m more of an individualist than before. It is relief to know that science is a smaller kind of truth than philosophy. The real difficulty is not between science and religion at all, but between religion and philosophy. Philosophy seems to think science assumes too much to begin with and can never get any further than usefulness.”
“Science can afford to smile at this.”
“And that religion is philosophically unsound, though modern religious controversy is metaphysical.”
“All controversy depends from differences in estimation of term significations.”
“That’s why arguments are so maddening; even small discussions; people go rushing on, getting angrier and angrier, talking about quite different things, especially men, because they never want to get at the truth, only to score a point.”
“You are unjust; many men put truth before any other consideration whatsoever. It is not only unjust, it is most bad for you to hold this cynical estimation.”
“Well, men arguing always look like that to women. That’s why women always go off at a tangent; because they reply not to what men say but to what they mean, which is to score a point, which anybody can do, with practice, and while they hold on to the point they mean to score, they are revealed, under all sorts of circumstances, all sorts of things about them are as plain as a pikestaff, to a woman, and the results of these things; so that she suddenly finds herself saying something that sounds quite irrelevant, but isn’t.”
“Nevertheless there is honourable controversy, and most fruitful.”
“There are people here and there with open minds. Very few.”
“The point is not the few, but that they are.”
“The few just men, who save the city.”
“Exactly.”
“But even existence is not quite certain.”
“What is this?”
“Descartes said, my existence is certain; that is a fallacy.”
“If this is a fallacy for metaphysic, so much the worse for metaphysic.”
“That is argumentum ad hominem.”
“I am not afraid of it.”
“But what can you put in place of metaphysic?”
“Life is larger.”
“I know. I know. I know. Something exists. Metaphysic admits that. I nearly shouted when Dr. McHibbert said that. It’s enough. It answers everything. Even to have seen it for a moment is enough. The first time I thought of it I nearly died of joy. Descartes should have said ‘I am aware that there is something, therefore I am.’ If I am, other people are; but that does not seem to matter. That is their own affair.”
“Beware of solipsism.”
“I don’t care what it is called. It is certainty. You must begin with the individual. There we are again.” There was an end to the conversation that could not be shared. The words of it already formed, intangibly, waited, ready to disappear, until she should be alone and could read them on a clear background. If she stayed they would disappear irrevocably. She rose, bidding him a hurried good night, suddenly aware of the busily sleeping household, friendly guardian of this wide leisurely nightlife. He too was aware and grateful, picking his way cautiously through the shadows of the large room, sheltered from his loneliness, invisibly enclosed by the waiting incommunicable statement that yet left him, accusing him of wilful blindness, so cruelly outside.
“Materialism,” scribbled Miriam eagerly, “has the recommendation of being a Monism, and therefore a more perfect explanation of the universe than a Dualism can be. … And Matter forms one great whole, persisting through many ages. Mind appears in the form of separate individuals, isolated from each other by Matter, and each ceasing, so far as observation goes, after a very few years. Also the changes which we can observe Mind to make in Matter are comparatively insignificant, while a very slight change in Matter will either destroy mind, or, at least, remove it from the only circumstances in which we can observe its existence. All these characteristics make matter appear much more powerful and important than mind.”
“I consider this a very strong reasoning,” muttered Mr. Shatov.
“Ssh. Wait.” He was sitting intent, with an awakened youthful student’s face, meeting, through her agency, in England, a first-class intelligence. He would hear the beautiful building up, strophe and antistrophe, of the apparently unassailable argument, the pause, and then, in the same shapely cadences, its complete destruction, forever, the pleasant face smiling at the audience above the ruins, like a child who has just shattered a castle of bricks.
“Idealism was weakened by being supposed to be bound up with certain theological doctrines which became discredited. All these things account for the great strength of materialism some years ago. There has been a reaction against this, but the extent of the reaction has been exaggerated.”
“Quite so.”
“Wait, wait.”
“It still remains the belief to which most people tend on first leaving an unreflecting position. And many remain there. Science is a large element in our lives now, and if we try to make science serve as metaphysic, we get materialism. Nor is it to be wished—even by idealists—that materialism should become too weak. For idealism is seldom really vigorous except in those who have had a serious struggle with materialism. … It would be very difficult to disprove materialism, if we once accepted the reality of matter as a thing in itself. But, as we saw when considering dualism, such a reality of matter is untenable. And this conclusion is obviously more fatal to materialism than it was to dualism. And again, if materialism is
