Logic Taught by Love/Chapter 14

by Mary Everest Boole

CHAPTER XIV
THE SCIENCE OF PROPHECY

"Truth for ever on the scaffold,
Wrong for ever on the throne.
But that scaffold sways the nations;
And behind the dim Unknown
Sitteth God within the shadow,
Keeping watch over his own."

A great deal has been said and sung about the beauty of Truth, and its perpetual conflict with error. To the popular imagination Truth and Goodness represent themselves as a couple of knights-errant incessantly in the act of slaying certain dragons called errors and vices. It is supposed that whenever any one of these is, anyhow, destroyed, that is always so much gained towards the final triumph of Truth and Goodness over the whole noxious brood. But, alas! Truth and Morality, so far as man has to do with them, are conditions of brain, of a most exquisitely delicate organization. And just as it is possible to cure a comparatively harmless physical ailment by the use of remedies which lower vitality and tend to set up a more painful and more obstinate disease than they cure, so it is often possible to combat (and successfully combat) a bad condition of the mind by the use of means which leave it an easy prey to some worse condition. Those who would practice the art of curing physical disease are not allowed to content themselves with studying only the immediate action of remedies, so as to know what drug will neutralize what symptom; they are required to make themselves acquainted also with the structure of the human frame, and the nature of its reactions after certain modes of action, and even of hereditary reactions after stimulation. Those who take upon themselves to cure symptoms without knowledge of reactions are empirics or quacks. They are often wonderfully successful; but the result of trusting to them is a general depression of vital and recuperative power. He only is a true physician who so combats disease as to store up vitality; and he only is a true teacher who so combats evil as to store up brain-vitality. Therefore the Far-Seer, i. e. the student of the longer and slower mental reactions, often seems to be opposing something which others think good. The practical result of his peculiar study is that he can rarely throw himself thoroughly into any violent "movement" for the salvation, education, enlightenment, or amusement of mankind. Prophets labour for Humanity in their own way; but their way is seldom one that contemporaries understand. If we wish to realize why such men as H. Spencer, Renan, Maudsley, Hinton, are not noted for what is called Philanthropic Zeal, we must ask ourselves why men of that stamp would not have joined in the popular movements of the past. There was a time when wine was a new discovery. It allayed certain forms of suffering; it ministered to the heightening of certain faculties; clearly, then, wine was the gift of a God; men should drink it in reverent homage to the Divine Giver, and show their gratitude by doing all in their power to induce others to accept the gift. Alas! the Herbert Spencer of that day was only too sure that there must come a reaction; he could not become a Bacchus-worshipper. By and by the bad side of the alcoholism revealed itself; Bacchus-worship was discovered to be vice fostered by pious emotion. The new philanthropists preached a crusade against wine; for what could be more clear than that wine was bad? The Renan of that day could not become an advocate of total abstinence; he told his hearers that Bacchus-worship must have had its good side, or it could not have enlisted so many followers. So it is now. The Prophet knows that much which is called Education means forcing the young brain to give off, in wasteful and useless display, the latent force stored up by our ancestors; that much which is called progress in civilization consists in abandoning those processes of recuperation by which scientific men of old taught the masses to store up latent energy for future use. Thus he who sees ahead is a sceptic always; always a wet blanket on the enthusiasms of those who only see to-morrow or next year.

This gives a tone of sadness to the utterances of Prophets. But the sadness is accidental, and due to the fact of the subject not having been understood. For in reality Prophecy is the most joyous and least pessimistic of all Sciences. The Logos visits the follies of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation; but preserves what is good, for thousands of generations; and all who know Him learn to realise that such is the Law of His working.

Even this perception adds to the loneliness of the Prophet; for as he irritates others by not being able to share in their sanguine expectations of immediate success, so he seems to them hard-hearted because when they are most gloomy he cannot despair. He sees in any misfortune that may occur, only the temporary penalty (long foreseen by him) of man's over-confidence. Through all depression the Prophet knows that the Logos punishes for a small moment, but His mercies endure for ever.

Another cause that adds to the loneliness of the Far-Seer is that, sooner or later, he is almost sure to discover a law which the young people about him desire not to believe, viz. the wastefulness of original work published before the complete maturity of the author. The best work is that which combines Genius with Experience; therefore the way to do the best work is to live to be old. Original work is healthful exercise for the young; but the work of preparing one's own work for a public wears out the immature brain. Juvenile Genius is impatient, and clothes its own impatience in a disguise of devotion to Truth; but it would be better if that devotion took the healthy and unexhausting form of studying how to complete and preserve the work of predecessors. The consequence of impatience to be original is that the work of genius is done without experience; and that those who have genius comparatively seldom live to gain experience. There are, however, always a few who, though aware of their own original power, are willing to bide their time; and, few though they may be, natural selection always puts the balance of influence into their hands at last. But the feverish and impatient who rush forward to early success despise them for wasting time. And, unfortunately, many of the so-called reforms of modern education are taking the direction of encouraging young persons to expend their mental energy on original investigation, and discouraging reverent attention to the imperfect work of predecessors and teachers, the completing of which would be excellent preparation for more entirely original investigations. " Honour thy predecessors, that thy days may be long in the land," is the true secret of intellectual vigour. It would seem that, in the Eastern Schools of Prophecy, the younger Prophets were employed as messengers and interpreters between their elders and the outside world. This is excellent preparation for becoming, later on, Interpreters of the Unknown Truth to Mankind. The true pulsation of the intellectual life of an individual would appear to be, to utilize the age of passion for the purpose of gaining experience by helping older teachers; then, in fully ripe age, to fertilize the new generation with the best essence of one's own thought. And when a Prophet denounces a "curse" on young men whom impatient ambition makes neglectful of their elders, he is only speaking from the same scientific stand- point as a doctor who predicts future debility as the consequence of any physical sort of premature indulgence.

Several portions of this work were suggested by the conversations of Dr. Alfred Wiltshire, who had spent many years in the study of periodicity and of occasional reversal of attitude, as agents in the development of the human faculties, physical and mental. The foregoing paragraph is the substance of much which he said to me before his disease was apparent to others, but after he knew himself to be a doomed man. He told me that he had made his discovery of the danger of original work done young, too late to save himself; he hoped that his sorrowful experience might be of use in warning others.

The nature of my work precludes the possibility of specifying in detail the precise extent of my obligations to my various teachers. But one motive which spurs me on to complete it is the desire to keep the promise I made when Dr. Wiltshire was dying; that his children should know all I could tell them of the value of their father's life-work.

The most beautiful and powerful of all logical formulae is also the simplest. It is the great Master Key of Prophecy; used, as such, by the mathematician Boulanger; and handed down, (for those who have eyes to see) from our pious forefathers in the position of the Mistletoe-berry. No one who has ever used, or understood, this solemn formula would willingly translate it into common words. But so much misapprehension is caused by the reticence which has been observed about this and other formulae of Grammarye that I, unwillingly, state it here:—

We find the Germ of the Future when we look back to where, in the Past, a branch separated and began to grow into twin-twigs.

The difference between the Far-Seer and ordinary educated men may be summed up thus:—Ordinary man thinks of some condition or other as in itself good, and desires to make that condition permanent. If he be so far educated that he consents to severe temperance in such pleasures as those of food, it is because experience has taught us that to make the enjoyment of such pleasures short, periodic, and not too frequent, is the best way to keep the system capable of enjoying what are called "the higher pleasures," such as those afforded by learning, religion, and the social emotions. The ordinary man thinks of physical temperance as a process of sacrificing the lower pleasures to the higher; he does not understand that the rhythm of temperance should be kept especially in what he calls the highest. The true Prophet, on the contrary, knows that nothing is good except rhythmic alternation. He is no more a glutton intellectually than physically; he no more desires the constant enjoyment of what is called realizing the Presence of God than he craves for unlimited brandy; he no more aspires to a Heaven of constant rapture in the intercourse of Jesus and the Saints, than to a Valhalla of everlasting mead-drinking in the company of ever-lovely Valkyries. He desires, for every fibre of his body, and every convolution of his brain, and for all the faculties which he may hereafter acquire, that each may be the medium of an occasional revelation. And for every revelation he is willing to abide the time fixed beforehand by the Divine Revealer, from Whose Hands we never escape, even if we make our bed in Hell; and to know Whom is the only Heaven that we need, here or hereafter. And what he knows to be best for himself, that he believes to be best for his friends. He no more desires for his children incessant health or prosperity than he desires for his vines a uniform temperature. Therefore he seems to most people an unfeeling monster. Yet he is not unfeeling. His wife may perhaps desert him,^[1] preferring the society of some man who is less advanced in the Science of Prophecy, and therefore more amusing and more outwardly cheerful (perhaps even, as seen from her point of view, more human and lovable). When this happens his heart breaks. But even when a heart is broken, his own or any one else's, the Prophet never forgets to take an awful joy in the fact that such experience is a Revelation.

Most men confess that they can know "God" only by faith; that all experience and actual personal knowledge would lead them no further than to know the "Devil," the Destroyer, the Avenger, the Tempter, the Accuser. The Prophet, too, knows this Destroyer; he differs from other men in this—that instead of inventing by faith a God who does not destroy, he knows the Eternal Destroyer as Eternal Love. Siva the destroyer, he protests, is co-equal and co-eternal with Brahma the Creator and Vishnu the Preserver; and yet they are not three Eternals but One Eternal; not conflicting mysteries but one Ineffable palpitation; not rival powers but One Loving Lord.

There is always about the true Prophet more or less of the feeling expressed by the daughter of the Asa-race in Tegner's immortal poem: " The King's daughter will not condescend to snatch at joy; for she can fling away her whole life's happiness, even as a Queen can cast away her mantle, and still remain just what she was,—a Queen." The masses are jealous of a man to whom personal happiness is but a non-essential, and whose very indifference to his own fate confers on him the power of ruling those hampered with personal desires, by simply waiting till they have exhausted themselves in fruitless struggles after the fleeting joys of earth or the unattainable bliss of an imaginary Millennium. Their instinct tells them that his very existence is a danger to their prosperity. They crucify or burn him; or they lock him up, at one time in a gaol, at another time in a mad-house, under the pretence that he "lacks the normal instincts," and on the assumption that they can know which instincts are "normal" and which are not so.

The Prophet's great danger is the tendency to fall into a mystic acceptance of evil. His faith and patience become exhausted in the struggle against other men's impatience to realize good; he forgets that the true Good is not suffering, nor even the knowledge which suffering brings; but the revelation of orderly Pulsation; and that suffering where there should be joy is as much disorder as enjoyment where abstinence should be.

But underlying all that can be said about the difficulties of Seers in their intercourse with those around them, there is a latent fact of which the best physical expression is perhaps the irritable spring in the plant called Impatiens Noli me tangere. By means of this spring, the seed is scattered, to germinate at a distance from the parent plant. The Prophet's knowledge is the outcome of all the most spiritual thought of his own country and age; he can have no resting-place among his own people, because God means him to take a message to distant countries and to future generations. Those who devote themselves to a study of the Pulsation doctrine naturally aspire to apply their knowledge to investigate the Laws of the throbbing backwards and forwards of that mighty engine, a mass of men animated by a common emotion.

1. Hosea.