“I find this too easily stated.”
Then God is proved. …
“You weren’t here before. Philosophy is not difficult. It is common sense systematised and clarified.” … wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein. It is not what people think but what they know. Thought is words. Philosophy will never find words to express life; the philosopher is the same as the criminal?
“He seems to say spirit when he means life.”
“What is life?”
“Moreover presentationism is incompatible with the truth of general propositions—and therefore with itself, since it can only be expressed by a general proposition. And closer analysis shows that it is incompatible even with particular propositions, since these involve both the union of two terms and the use of general ideas.” People know this faintly when they say things; not why; but faintly everyone knows that nothing can be said. Then why listen any more? Because if you know, exactly, that nothing can be said and the expert reasons for it, you know for certain in times of weakness, how much there is that might be expressed if there were any way of expressing it. … But there was no need to listen any more since God was proved by the impossibility of his absence, like an invisible star. No one seemed at all disturbed; the lecturer least of all. Perhaps he felt that the effects of real realisation would be so tremendous that he could not face them. The thought of no God made life simply silly. The thought of God made it embarrassing. If a hand suddenly appeared writing on the wall, what would he do? He would blush; standing there as a competitor, fighting for his theories, amongst the theories of other men. Yet if there were no philosophers, if the world were imagined without philosophy, there would be nothing but theology, getting more and more superstitious.
Everybody was so calm. The calmness of insanity. Nobody quite all there. Yet intelligent. What were they all thinking about, wreathed in films of intelligent insanity; watching the performance in the intervals of lives filled with words that meant nothing … breath was more than words; the fact of breathing … but everyone was in such a hurry.
“I would ask” … one horrified glance revealed his profile quivering as he hesitated. A louder, confident, dictatorial English voice had rung out simultaneously from the other side of the hall. He would have to sit down, shaken by his brave attempt. But to the whole evening, the deep gentle tones had been added, welling through and beyond the Englishman’s strident, neat proclamation, and containing, surely everyone must hear it, so much of the answer to the essential question. The chairman hesitated, turned decisively and the other man sat down.
“What the lecturer makes of the psycho-physical parallelism?”
He drove home his question on a note of reproachful expostulation and sat down drawn together, with bent head and eye downcast, but listening intently with his serenely singing child’s brow. Miriam was instantly sorry that his words had got through, their naked definiteness changing the eloquent tone, sharpening it to a weapon, a borrowed weapon.
“That’s it,” she breathed, hoping the lecturer’s answer would throw some light on the meaning of the fascinating phrase, floating before her, fresh from far-off philosophical battlefields, bright from centuries of contemplation, flashing out now, today, in Europe triumphantly, in desperate encounters. The lecturer was on his feet, gleaming towards their centre of the audience his recognition of the clean thrust.
“The correlation between physical and mental gives an empirical support to materialism.” That couldn’t be spirited away. The scientists swore there was no break; so convincingly; perhaps they would yet win and prove it. “But it is necessary to distinguish between metaphysic and psychology. Psychology, like physical science, is to be put to the score of our knowledge of matter.”
“In which he doesn’t believe,” scoffed Miriam, distractedly poised between Mr. Shatov’s drama and the prospect opening within her mind.
“I find this a most arbitrary statement.”
“Yes, rather” murmured Miriam emphatically, and waited for a moment as if travelling with him along his line of thought. But he was recovering, had recovered, did not seem to be dwelling or moving in any relation to what he had said, appeared to be disinterestedly listening to the next question.
“Besides,” she said, “the empirical method is a most important method, and jolly.” …
“Poor chap; what a stupidity is this question.” Miriam smiled solicitously, but she had travelled back enraptured across nine years to the day, now only yesterday, of her first meeting with her newly recovered word. Jevons. From the first the sienna brown volume had been wonderful, the only one of the English books that had any connection with life; and that day, Sunday afternoon prep in the dining-room, with the laburnum and pink may outside the window changing as she read from a tantalising reproach to a vivid encirclement of her being by all the spring scenes she had lived through, coming and going, the sight and scent and shimmering movement of them, as if she moved, bodiless and expanded, about in their midst. Something about the singing, lifting word appearing suddenly on the page, even before she had grasped its meaning, intensified the relation to life of the little hard motionless book, leaving it, when she had read on, centred round the one statement; the rest remaining in shadow, interesting but in some strange way ill-gotten.
The recovery of the forgotten word at the centre of “the philosophical problems of the present day” cast a fresh glow of reality across her schooldays. The efforts she had so blindly made, so indolently and prodigally sacrificing her chances of success in the last examination, to the few things that had made the world shine about her, had been in some way
