By Samuel M. Crothers

THE PARDONER’S WALLET. 12mo, $1.25, net. Postage extra.

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THE PARDONER’S WALLET

The Pardoner’s
Wallet

BY SAMUEL McCHORD CROTHERS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

The Riverside Press, Cambridge

1905

COPYRIGHT 1905 BY SAMUEL McCHORD CROTHERS

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published November 1905

TO KATHARINE

WITH WHOM THESE THINGS HAVE

BEEN TALKED OVER

PREFACE

THERE is a well-grounded prejudice against a volume which exhibits no marks of design and which turns out to be only a fortuitous collection of essays. It is felt that the chapters brought together under the cover of a single book should have something in common. When one sees a number of subjects, each standing aloof from the others, he predicts infelicity. It suggests incompatibility of temper.

The essays brought together in “the Pardoner’s Wallet” have at least a certain community of interest. They treat of aspects of human nature which, while open to friendly criticism, are excusable. If the author sometimes touches upon the foibles of his betters, he at least has the grace to know that they are his betters.

CONTENTS

THE PARDONER

With him ther rood a gentil Pardoner

Of Rouncival, his freend and his compeer,

That streight was comen fro the Court of Rome.

· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·

A vernicle hadde he sowed on his cappe

His walet lay biforn him in his lappe

Bretful of pardoun.

I HAVE no plea to make for this fourteenth-century pardoner. He was an impudent vagabond, trafficking in damaged goods. One did not need to be a Lollard in order to see that he was a reprehensible character. Discerning persons in need of relics would go to responsible dealers where they could be assured of getting their money’s worth. This glib-tongued fellow peddling religious articles from door to door lived on the credulity of untraveled country people. He took advantage of their weaknesses. Many a good wife would purchase a pardon she had no need of, simply because he offered it as a bargain. This was all wrong. We all know how the business of indulgence-selling was overdone. There was a general loss of confidence on the part of the purchasing public; and at last in the days of the too enterprising Tetzel there came a disastrous slump. There was no market for pardons, even of the gilt-edged varieties. Since then very little has been doing in this line, at least among the northern nations.

The pardoner richly deserved his fate. And yet there are times when one would give something to see the merry knave coming down the road.

I suppose that the nature of each individual has its point of moral saturation. When this point is reached, it is of no use to continue exhortation or rebuke or any kind of didactic effort. Even the finest quality of righteous indignation will no longer soak in. With me the point of moral saturation comes when I attend successively more meetings of a reformatory and denunciatory character than nature intended me to profit by. If they are well distributed in point of time, I can take in a considerable number of good causes and earnestly reprobate an equal number of crying evils. But there is a certain monotony of rebuke which I am sure is not beneficial to persons of my disposition. That some things are wrong I admit, but when I am peremptorily ordered to believe that everything is wrong, it arouses in me a certain obstinacy of contradiction. I might be led to such a belief, but I will not be driven to it. I rebel against those censors of manners and morals who treat all human imperfectnesses with equal rigor. To relax even for an instant the righteous frown over the things that are going wrong, into an indulgent smile at the things that are not nearly so bad as they seem, is in their eyes nothing less than compounding a felony. If they would allow proper intervals between protests, so that the conscience could cool down, all would be well. But this is just what they will not allow. The wheels must go round without intermission until progress is stopped by the disagreeable accident of “a hot box.”

You remember after Mrs. Proudie had given her guests a severe lesson in social ethics, the Signora asked in her hearing,—

“‘Is she always like this?’

“‘Yes—always—madam,’ said Mrs. Proudie, returning; ‘always the same—always equally adverse to impropriety of conduct of every description.’”

Mrs. Proudie was an excellent woman according to her light, yet Barchester would have been a happier place to live in had her light been less constant. A little flicker now and then, a momentary relief from the glare, would have been appreciated.

It is when the note of personal responsibility has been forced beyond my ability that I feel beneath my inherited Puritanism the stirring of a vague Papistry. Instead of joining another protesting society beginning with that feverish particle “anti,” how delightful it would be to go out and dicker with a well-conditioned pardoner

Streight comen fro the Court of Rome!

Wearied with diatribes and resolutions, one falls back upon the guileless bargainings of Simple Simon.

“Let me taste your ware,” say I.

“Show me first your penny,” says the pardoner.

There is a renewal of one’s youth in this immortal repartee.

There is no greater relief than to go out and buy something, especially if one can buy it cheap. A great part of the attractiveness of the mediæval indulgences lay in the fact that you could buy them. They would not have seemed the same if they had been given away, or if you had to work them out like a road tax. To go out and buy a little heart’s ease was an enticement.

Then again, the natural man, when he has to do with an institution, is in a passive rather than in an active mood. If it is instituted for his betterment, he says, “Let it better me.” It seems too bad that in the end it should throw all the responsibility back upon himself.

A delightful old English traveler criticises the methods of transportation he found in vogue in parts of Germany. He says that on the Rhine it was customary to make the passengers do the rowing. “Their custome is that the passengers must exercise themselves with oares and rowing, alternis vicibus, a couple together. So that the master of the boate (who methinks in honestie ought either to do it himself or to procure some others to do it for him) never roweth but when his turne commeth. This exercise both for recreation and health sake is I confesse very convenient for man. But to be tied unto it by way of strict necessitie when one payeth well for his passage was a thing that did not a little distaste my humour.”

This is the trouble which many of us find in the modern methods of doing good. There are all sorts of organizations which promise well. But no sooner have we embarked on a worthy undertaking than we find that we are expected to work our passage. The officers of the boat disclaim all further responsibility, leaving that to private judgment. It is the true Protestant way and it works excellently well, when it works at all. It offers a fine challenge to disinterested virtue. But there are occasions when the natural man rebels. To have so much put upon him doth “not a little distaste his humour.” He longs for the good old times when there were thinkers who were not above their business, and who when he was at his wit’s end would do his thinking for him. It’s the same way with being excused for his shortcomings. Of course on a pinch he can excuse himself, but he generally makes a pretty poor job of it. It would be much more satisfactory to have a duly authorized person who, for a consideration, would assume the whole responsibility. Of course if he had done something that was really unpardonable, that would be another matter. The law would have to take its course. But there are a great many venial transgressions. What he wants is some one who can assure him that they are venial.

Let no good Protestant take offense at the finding of a Pardoner’s Wallet in this twentieth century. It is only a wallet containing tentative suggestions concerning things pardonable. Nothing is authoritatively signed and sealed.

Of one thing let the good Protestant take notice. I would have my pardoner know his place. He must not meddle with things too high for him. He has no right to deal with the graver sins or to speak for a higher power. He must not speak even in the name of the Church, which has worthier spokesmen than he. In a book on indulgences the author says, “On the subject of elongated, centenary, and millenary pardons, it would take too much space to enlarge.” I should rule out all such ambitious plans, not only from lack of space but on conscientious grounds.

My pardoner should confine himself to a more modest task. He should be the spokesman not of any ecclesiastical power, but only of ordinary and errant human nature. There are sins against eternal law that must at all times be taken seriously. The trouble with us poor mortals is that, even in our remorse, we do not take very long views. The judgment that seems most terrible to us is that of the people who live next door. The transgressions which loom largest are offenses against social conventions and against our own sensitive vanity. The pangs of remorse for an act of remembered awkwardness are likely to be more poignant than those which come as retribution for an acknowledged crime.

Here is ample room for a present-day pardoner. I should like to hear him make the cheery proclamation of his trade.

“Good friends: You are not what you would like to be. You are not what you think you are. You are not what your neighbors think you are,—or rather, you are not what you think your neighbors think you are. Your foibles, your peccadillos, your fallacies, and your prejudices are more numerous than you imagine. But take heart of grace, good people. These things are not unpardonable. We indulgencers have learned to make allowances for human nature. Let’s see what’s in my wallet! No crowding! Each will be served in his turn.”

******

If I were a duly licensed pardoner, I should have a number of nicely engraved indulgences for what are called sins of omission. Not that I should attempt to extenuate the graver sort. I should not hold out false hopes to thankless sons or indifferent husbands. To be followed by such riff-raff would spoil my trade with the better classes. I should not have anything in my wallet for the acrimonious critic, who brings a railing accusation against his neighbor, and omits to sign his name. Some omissions are unpardonable.

I should, at the beginning, confine my traffic to those sins which easily beset conscientious persons about half past two in the morning. We have warrant for thinking that the sleep of the just is refreshing. This is doubtless true of the completely just; but with the just man in the making it is frequently otherwise. There is a stage in his strenuous moral career which is conducive to insomnia.

Having gone to sleep because he was tired, he presently awakes for the same reason. He is, however, only half awake. Those kindly comforters, Common-sense, Humor, and Self-esteem, whose function it is to keep him on reasonably good terms with himself while he is doing his necessary work, are still dozing.

Then Conscience appears,—a terrible apparition. There is a vague menace in her glance. The poor wretch cowers beneath it. Then is unrolled the lengthening list of the things left undone which ought to have been done. Every unwritten letter and uncalled call and unattended committee meeting and unread report emerges from the vasty deep and adds its burden of unutterable guilt. The Thing That Was Not Worth Doing arises and demands with insatiate energy that it be done at once. The Thing Half-done, because there was no time to finish it, appears with wan face accusing him of its untimely taking off. The Stitch not Taken in Time appears with its pitiful ninefold progeny all doomed because of a moment’s inattention. It seems that his moral raiment, instead of being put together with an eye to permanency, has been stitched on a single-thread machine and the end of the seam never properly fastened. Now he is pulling at the thread, and he sees the whole fabric unraveling before his eyes.

His past existence looms before him as a battlefield with a perpetual conflict of duties,—each duty cruelly slain by its brother duty. While the wailing of these poor ghosts is in his ears he cannot rest. And yet he knows full well that at half past two in the morning the one inexorable duty is that he should go to sleep. Conscience points to this as another duty left undone. Then begins a new cycle of self-reproach.

At such times the sight of an indulgence neatly framed hanging upon the bedroom wall would be worth more than it would cost. It would save doctor’s bills.

Even in our waking hours there is a tendency for the sins of omission and the sorrows of omission to pile up in monstrous fashion. There is a curious ingenuity which some persons have in loading themselves with burdens which do not belong to them, and in extracting melancholy reflections out of their good fortune. They will not frankly accept a blessing in its own proper form,—it must come to them in a mournful disguise. Poets seem particularly subject to these inversions of feeling. Here are some lines entitled “Two Sorrows:”—

Before Love came my eyes were dim with tears

Because I had not known her gentle face.

Softly I said, “But when across the years

Her smile illumes the darkness of my place,

All grief from my poor heart she will efface.”

Now Love is mine—she walks with me for aye

Down paths of primrose and blue violet,

But on my heart at every close of day

A grief more keen than my old grief is set.

I weep for those who have not found Love yet.

There is a fine altruism about this sentiment that one cannot but respect; yet I should hate to live with a person who felt that way. One would not venture on any little kindness for fear of opening a new floodgate of tears.

I should feel like urging another point of view. It is true that you are happy, happier than you deserve. But don’t get morbid about it; take it cheerfully. It’s not your fault. It seems selfish, you say, to enjoy your blessings when there aren’t enough to go round among all your fellow beings. Why, my dear fellow, that’s the only way to make them go around. What if, theoretically, it is a little selfish? We will readily pardon that for the sake of the satisfaction we get out of seeing you have a good time. We much prefer that you should allow us to sympathize with you in your happiness, rather than that you should inflict upon us too much sympathy for our deprivations.

******

There is opportunity for a thriving trade in indulgences for necessarily slighted work. I emphasize the idea of necessity, for I am aware of the danger of gross abuse if poets and painters should get the notion that they may find easy absolution for the sin of offering to the public something less than their best. Their best is none too good. We must not, through misdirected charity, lower the standards of self-respecting artists.

But some of us are not artists. The ordinary man is compelled to spend most of his time on pot-boilers of one kind or another. When the pot is merrily boiling, and all the odds and ends are being mingled in a savory stew, I would allow the ordinary man some satisfaction. As fingers were made before forks, so mediocrity was made before genius. Has mediocrity no right to enjoy its own work, just because it is not the very best?

We of the commonalty who are fitted to live happily in the comparative degree, allow ourselves to be bullied by the superlative. There are uneasy spirits who trouble Israel. They continually quote the maxim that whatever is worth doing is worth doing well. It is a good maxim in its way, and causes no particular hardship until our eyes are opened and we see what it means to do anything superlatively well. When we are shown by example the technical excellence which is possible in the simplest forms of activity, and the extent to which we fall short, we are appalled. It is a wonder that we keep going at all when we consider the slovenly way we breathe. And yet breathing, though it well might engage all our attention, is only one of the things we have to do.

I attribute a good deal of the sense of stress in modern life to the new standards of excellence that are set in regard to the multifarious activities which make up our daily lives. We have to do a hundred different things. This is not particularly trying so long as it is merely touch and go. In our amateurish way we rather enjoy the variety. But when a hundred experts beset us, each one of whom has made a life study of a particular act, we are bowed in contrition. There is no good in us but good intentions, and they cannot save us. Our life story is summed up like that of the unfortunate sparrow in the tragical history of Cock Robin:

His aim then he took

But he took it not right.

Our capacity for imperfectness seems absolutely unlimited. The effort taken to achieve success in one direction is from another point of view a dissipation of energy. It is so much power withdrawn from another possible achievement. The most versatile men do not do all things equally well, and while the world calls them successful they are inwardly conscious of their manifold failures. Mr. Balfour as Prime Minister of the British Empire has had much to gratify his ambition, but he takes the public into his confidence and confesses that he is a bitterly disappointed man. For, in addition to other accomplishments, he plays golf, a game that develops a conscience of its own. He plays well, but his conscience tells him that he does not play as well as he might. “I belong,” he says, “to that unhappy class of beings forever pursued by remorse, who are conscious that they threw away in youth opportunities that were open to them of beginning golf at a time of life when alone the muscles can be attuned to the full perfection required by the most difficult game that perhaps exists.”

Surely there must be a way by which such vain regrets may be stilled. Life has its inevitable compromises. We cannot always be at our best. Take such a simple matter as that of masticating our food. Before I had given much thought to it, I should have said that it was something worth doing and worth doing well. When I learned that Mr. Gladstone was accustomed to chew each morsel of food thirty-two times, I thought it greatly to his credit. For a man who had so many other things to do, that seemed enough.

But when I read a book of some three hundred pages containing the whole duty of man in regard to chewing, I was disheartened. Mr. Gladstone appeared to be a mere tyro guilty of bolting his food. “The author has found that one fifth of the midway section of the garden young onion, sometimes called shallot, has required seven hundred and twenty-two mastications before disappearing through involuntary swallowing.”

The author evidently did his whole duty by that young onion, and yet I should have pardoned him if he had done something less. That doctrine of his about involuntary swallowing being the only kind that is morally justifiable, seems to me to be too austere. If we have to swallow in the end, why not show a cheerful willingness?

******

Not only do those need comfort who do less than is expected of them, those who do more are often in an equally sorry plight. Their excellences make them obnoxious to their neighbors, and are treated as unpardonable offenses. I would have a special line of indulgences for that class of people known as the “unco guid.” I know no persons more in need of charity, and who get so little of it. Every man’s hand is against them, especially every hand that wields the pen of a ready writer. They seem predestinated to literary reprobation, and that without regard to their genuinely good works or to their continuance in the same. And yet the whole extent of their crime is that, being in some respects better than their neighbors, they are painfully aware of the fact. It is because they have tasted of the forbidden knowledge of their own moral superiority that their fall is deemed irremediable.

I confess that, in spite of all that has been said against them, I have a tender feeling for them. They are persecuted for self-righteousness without the benefit of any beatitude. Why should we consider it unpardonable to be fully cognizant of one’s undoubted virtues? Of course unconscious virtue is the more paradisiacal, while conscious virtue often rubs one the wrong way. But while there are so many worse things in the world, why should we mind a little thing like that?

We listen to Dumas’ swashbuckling heroes recounting their transgressions. We know that they are not so bad as they would have us believe, but we think no worse of them for that. But let a thoroughly respectable man draw attention to his own fine qualities, and we treat every deviation from exact fact as a crime. When he indulges in some exaggeration and pictures himself as rather better than he is, we cry, “Hypocrite!” If he claims possession of some single virtue which does not, in our judgment, harmonize with some of his other characteristics, we treat him as if he had stolen it. And yet, poor fellow! he may have come honestly by this bit of finery, though he has not been able to get other things to match it. All this is unkind.

Whatever one may think of the “unco guid,” every right-minded person must agree with me that something ought to be done for the peace of mind of the quiet, respectable, good people who bear the heat and burden of the day. I have in mind the people who pay taxes, and build homes, and support churches and schools and hospitals, and now and then go to the theatre. They are as likely as not to be moderately well to do, and if they are not, nobody knows it. When times are hard with them, they keep their own counsels and go about with head erect and the best foot forward. You may see multitudes of these people every day.

As a class, these people are sadly put upon. They are criticised not only for their own shortcomings, but for those of all their irresponsible fellow citizens. If anything goes wrong they are sure to hear about it, for they listen to sermons, and read the newspapers, and attend meetings. No reformer can be truly eloquent who does not point his finger at his hearer, and say, “Thou art the man!” Now, unfortunately, the real delinquents are usually absent, and the right-minded, conscientious hearer of the word, who is doing all he can for social regeneration, even to the verge of nervous prostration, has to act as substitute. He has been so often assured that he is the guilty man that, by and by, he comes to believe it.

He walks to church with his family only to be told that it is his fault, and the fault of those like him, that other people have gone off in their automobiles. Perhaps, if he had walked differently, he might have made church-going more attractive to them. The evils of intemperance are laid at his door. It is not worth while to blame the drunkard or the saloon-keeper; they are not within ear-shot. As to pauperism and vice, every one knows that they arise from social conditions; and pray who is responsible for these conditions unless it be the meek man who sits in the pew,—at least, he is the only one who can readily be made to assume the responsibility.

There is something wholesome in all this if it be not overdone. I, myself, like to have my fling at the man who is trying to do his duty, and to twit him occasionally for not doing more. It keeps him from self-righteousness. But sometimes it is carried too far, and the poor man staggers under a load of vicarious guilt.

I especially hate to see the man who is trying to do his duty given over to the censures of those who do not try. There is something very harsh in the judgment of the ne’er-do-well upon his well-to-do brother. His attitude is the extreme of phariseeism, as he contrasts his own generous and care-free nature with the pickayunish prudence which he scorns. To be sure, his brother in the end pays his debts for him, but he does it with a narrow scrutiny which robs the act of its natural charm. His acts of helpfulness are marred by a tendency to didacticism. All these things are laid up against him.

But allowance should be made for the difference in condition. Ne’er-do-wellness is an expansive state. There are no natural limits to it. It develops broad views, and its peculiar virtues have a free field. It is different with well-to-doness, which is a precarious condition with a very narrow margin of safety. The ne’er-do-well can afford to be generous, seeing that his generosity costs him nothing. He is free from all belittling calculations necessary to those who are compelled to adjust means to ends,—he is indifferent to ends and he has no means.

When the morally responsible person finds himself too much put upon, I would grant him a generous indulgence. After all, I would tell him, the prudential virtues are not so bad. It is a good deal of an achievement to make both ends meet. I am not disposed to be too hard on those who accomplish this, even though I may think a little fullness in their moral garments might be more becoming.

I should also make provision for the pardon of those good people who are harshly judged because their virtues are unseasonable. But their case involves delicate considerations that can best be treated in another chapter.

UNSEASONABLE VIRTUES

THERE are certain philosophers who have fallen into the habit of speaking slightingly of Time and Space. Time, they say, is only a poor concept of ours corresponding to no ultimate reality, and Space is little better. They are merely mental receptacles into which we put our sensations. We are assured that could we get at the right point of view we should see that real existence is timeless. Of course we cannot get at the right point of view, but that does not matter.

It is easy to understand how philosophers can talk in that way, for familiarity with great subjects breeds contempt; but we of the laity cannot dismiss either Time or Space so cavalierly. Having once acquired the time-habit, it is difficult to see how we could live without it. We are accustomed to use the minutes and hours as stepping-stones, and we pick our way from one to another. If it were not for them, we should find ourselves at once beyond our depth. It is the succession of events which makes them interesting. There is a delightful transitoriness about everything, and yet the sense that there is more where it all comes from. To the unsophisticated mind Eternity is not the negation of Time; it is having all the time one wants. And why may not the unsophisticated mind be as nearly right in such matters as any other?

In a timeless existence there would be no distinction between now and then, before and after. Yesterdays and to-days would be merged in one featureless Forever. When we met one another it would be impertinent to ask, “How do you do?” The chilling answer would be: “I do not do; I am.” There would be nothing more to say to one who had reduced his being to such bare metaphysical first principles.

I much prefer living in Time, where there are circumstances and incidents to give variety to existence. There is a dramatic instinct in all of us that must be satisfied. We watch with keen interest for what is coming next. We would rather have long waits than to have no shifting of the scenes, and all the actors on the stage at once, doing nothing.

An open-minded editor prints the following question from an anxious reader in regard to a serial story appearing in his paper: “Does it make any difference in reading the serial whether I begin with Saturday’s chapter and read backward toward Monday, or should the tale be read as the chapters appear?”

The editor assures his subscriber that the story is of such uniform excellence that it would read well in either direction. In practical affairs our dramatic instinct will not allow us this latitude. We insist upon certain sequences. There is an expectancy that one thing will lead up to another. We do not take kindly to an anti-climax or to an anachronism. The Hebrew sage declares, “He hath made everything beautiful in his time.” That is in the right time, but alas for the beautiful thing that falls upon the wrong time! It is bewitched beyond all recognition by the old necromancer who has power to make “ancient good uncouth.”

It is just here that charity requires that we should discriminate. There is a situation that demands the services of a kind-hearted indulgencer. Ethics has to do with two kinds of offenses: one is against the eternal and unchanging standards of right and wrong, and the other against the perpetually varying conditions of the passing day. We are continually confusing the two. We visit upon the ancient uncouth good which comes honestly stumbling on its belated journey toward the perfect, all the condemnation that properly belongs to willful evil. It is lucky if it gets off so easily as that, for we are likely to add the pains and penalties which belong to hypocritical pretense. As for a premature kind of goodness coming before there is time properly to classify it, that must expect martyrdom. Something of the old feeling about strangers still survives in us. We think it safer to treat the stranger as an enemy. If he survives our attacks we may make friends with him.

Those good people who, in their devotion to their own ideals, have ignored all considerations of timeliness, have usually passed through sore tribulations. They have been the victims of cruel misunderstandings. Such, for example, was Saint Cerbonius. Cerbonius is one of the October saints. October is a good month for saints. The ecclesiastical calendar gives us a sense of spiritual mellowness and fruitfulness. The virtues celebrated are without the acidity which belongs to some other seasons: witness Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Teresa, Saint Luke, the beloved physician, Saint John Capistran, of whom it is written, “he had a singular talent for reconciling inveterate enemies and inducing them to love one another.” Cerbonius has a modest place in this autumnal brotherhood; indeed, in some Lives of the Saints, he is not even mentioned, and yet he had the true October spirit. Nevertheless, his good was evil spoken of, and he came near to excommunication, and all because of his divergence from popular custom in the matter of time.

It seems that he lived towards the end of the sixth century, and that he was bishop of Piombino. Very soon a great scandal arose, for it was declared that the bishop was neglecting his duties. At the accustomed hour the citizens came to the cathedral for their devotions, only to find the chancel devoid of clergy. Cerbonius and his priests were at that moment comfortably seated at breakfast. Each succeeding morning witnessed the same scene. The bishop was evidently an infidel scoffing at the rites of religion. Appeal was made to Rome, and legates were appointed who confirmed the astounding rumors. At last Cerbonius went to Rome to plead his cause; but only by a special miracle was his character cleared. The miracle induced the authorities to look into the matter more carefully, and it was found that Cerbonius, instead of neglecting his duties, had been carried away by holy zeal. While the people of Piombino were still in their beds, Cerbonius and his clergy would be celebrating mass. As for breakfast, that was quite late in the day.

It is easy to be wise after the event, and now that the matter has been cleared up it is evident that all the religion was not on one side. Taking a large view of the subject, we see that in the course of the twenty-four hours the bishop spent as much time in the church as the most scrupulous parishioner could ask. But it was just this large view that they were unwilling to take. With them it was now or never. They judged his character by the cross-section which they took at one particular hour.

I suppose that, had I lived in Piombino, I should have been a moderate anti-Cerbonian. Cerbonius was in error, but not in mortal sin. He was guilty of a heresy that disturbed the peace of the church,—that of early rising. So long as early rising is held only as a creed for substance of doctrine and set forth as a counsel of perfection, it may be tolerated, but when the creed becomes a deed it awakens fanatical opposition. This breeds schism. A person cannot be popular who gets the reputation of being a human alarm clock. The primitive instinct in regard to an alarm clock is to stop it. If Cerbonius had possessed the tact necessary to a man in his position, he would not only have done his duty, but he would have done it at the time most convenient to the greatest number. His virtue was unseasonable; but between a man of unseasonable virtue and an abandoned character who has no virtue at all, there is a great difference. It is just this difference which the majority of people will not see. They make no distinction between one who deliberately offends against the eternal verities and one who accidentally tramples upon a temporary verity that he didn’t know was there.

Most of our quarrels do not concern absolute right and wrong; they arise from disputes about the time of day. Two persons may have the same qualities and convictions and yet never agree. An ironical fate sets them at cross purposes and they never meet without irritating contradictions. It is all because their moods do not synchronize. One is always a little too slow, the other a little too fast. When one is in fine fettle the other is just beginning to get tired. They are equally serious, but never on the same occasion, and so each accuses the other of heartless frivolity. They have an equal appreciation of a pleasantry, but they never see it at the same instant. One gives it an uproarious welcome when the other is speeding the parting guest.

Two quick-tempered people may live together very comfortably so long as they lose their tempers simultaneously; they are then ready to make up at the same time. They get on like an automobile, by a series of small explosions accurately timed. But when a quick-tempered person is unequally yoked with one who is slow to wrath, the case is difficult. The slowness causes continual apprehension. The fuse burns so deliberately that it seems to have gone out and then the explosion comes. In such cases there can be no adequate explanation. The offender would apologize if he could remember what the offense was, and he doesn’t dare to ask.

Said one theologian to another: “The difference between us is that your God is my Devil.” This involved more than the mere matter of nomenclature. It upset the spiritual time-table and caused disastrous collisions. When one good man set forth valiantly to fight the Devil, the other would charge him with disturbing his worship.

The fact that one man’s work is another man’s play is equally fruitful in misunderstandings. The proverbial irritability of the literary and artistic tribes arises in part from this cause. They feel that they are never taken seriously. When we go to a good play we find it so easy to be amused that we do not realize what hard work it is for those whose business it is to be amusing. The better the work, the more effortless it seems to us. On a summer afternoon we take up a novel in a mood which to the conscientious novelist seems sacrilege. He has thrown all the earnestness of his nature into it, and he wants his message to be received in the same spirit. We have earnestness of nature too, but we have expended it in other directions. Having finished our work, we take our rest by reading his. It is a pleasant way to pass the time. This enrages the novelist, and he writes essays to rebuke us. He calls us Philistines and other hard names, and says that we are incapable of appreciating literary art.

But what is our offense? We have used his work for our own purpose, which was to rest our minds. We got out of it what at the time we needed. Does he not act in very much the same way? Did we not see him at the town-meeting when a very serious question concerning the management of the town poor-house was to be settled? It was a time when every good citizen should have shown his interest by speaking an earnest word. Unmindful of all this, he sat through the meeting with the air of an amused outsider. He paid little attention to the weighty arguments of the selectmen, but noted down all their slips in grammar. He confessed unblushingly that he attended the meeting simply to get a little local color. What is to become of the country when a tax-payer will take the duties of citizenship so lightly?

These recriminations go on endlessly. Because we do not see certain qualities in action, we deny their existence. The owl has a reputation for sedentary habits and unpractical wisdom, simply because he keeps different business hours from those to which we are accustomed. Could we look in on him during the rush time, we would find him a hustling fellow. He has no time to waste on unremunerative meditation. This is his busy night. How ridiculous is the sleepiness of the greater part of the animal world! There is the lark nodding for hours on his perch. They say he never really wakes up—at least, nobody has seen him awake.

******

There is a pedagogical theory according to which each individual in his early life repeats quite accurately the history of mankind up to date. He passes through all the successive stages in the history of the race, with a few extra flourishes now and then to indicate the surprises which the future may have in store for us. The history of civilization becomes, for the initiated, the rehearsal of the intensely interesting drama of the nursery and the schoolroom. It lacks the delicacy of the finished performance, but it presents the argument clearly enough and suggests the necessary stage business. The young lady who attempts to guide a group of reluctant young cave-dwellers from one period in human culture to another is not surprised at any of their tantrums. Her only anxiety is lest some form of barbarism appropriate to their condition may have been skipped. Her chief function is like that of the chorus in the Greek tragedy, to explain to the audience each dramatic situation as it unfolds.

I should not like to take the responsibility of running such an excellent theory into the ground, yet it does seem to me that it might be carried further. Granted that childhood is innocent savagery and that adolescence is gloriously barbaric, what is the matter with mature life? Does it not have any remnants of primitiveness? Does not Tennyson write of “the gray barbarian”?

The transitions from primitive savagery to civilization which took the race centuries to accomplish are repeated by the individual, not once but many times. After we get the knack of it, we can run over the alphabet of human progress backwards as well as forwards.

Exit Troglodyte. Enter Philosopher discoursing on disinterested virtue. Reënter Troglodyte. Such dramatic transformations may be expected by merely changing the subject of the conversation.

I remember sitting, one Sunday afternoon, on a vine-covered piazza reading to a thoughtful and irascible friend. The book was Martineau’s “Endeavors after the Christian Life.” In the middle of the second discourse my friend’s dog rushed into the street to attack the dog of a passer-by. It was one of those sudden and unpredictable antipathies to which the members of the canine race are subject. My friend, instead of preserving a dignified neutrality, rushed into the fray in the spirit of offensive partisanship, and instantly became involved in an altercation with the gentleman on the sidewalk. Canes were brandished, fierce threats were exchanged, and only by the greatest efforts were the Homeric heroes separated. Returning to his chair, my friend handed me the book, saying, “Now let us go on with our religion.” The religion went on as placidly as aforetime. There was no sense of confusion. The wrath of Achilles did not disturb the calm spirituality of Martineau. Each held the centre of the stage for his own moment, and there was no troublesome attempt to harmonize them. Why should there be? Martineau was not talking about dogs.

I know no greater luxury than that of thinking well of my fellow-men. It is a luxury which a person in narrow circumstances, who is compelled to live within the limits of strict veracity, sometimes feels to be beyond his means. Yet I think it no harm to indulge in a little extravagance in this direction. The best device for seeing all sorts and conditions of men to advantage is to arrange them in their proper chronological order.

For years it was the custom to speak disparagingly of the “poor whites” of our Southern mountains. Shut off from the main currents of modern life, they seemed unpardonably unprogressive. They were treated as mere degenerates. At last, however, a keener and kindlier observer hit upon a happy phrase. These isolated mountaineers, he said, have retained the characteristic habits of a former generation. They are our “contemporary ancestors.” Instantly everything was put in a more favorable light; for we all are disposed to see the good points in our ancestors. After all, the whole offense with which these mountain people are charged is that they are behind the times. In our bona-fide contemporaries this is a grave fault, but in our ancestors it is pardonable. We do not expect them to live up to our standards, and so we give them credit for living up to their own.

In this case we agree to consider fifty miles of mountain roads, if they be sufficiently bad, as the equivalent of rather more than a hundred years of time. Behind the barrier the twentieth century does not yet exist. Many things may still be winked at for which the later generation may be sternly called to repentance. Then, too, the end of the eighteenth century has some good points of its own. These contemporary ancestors of ours are of good old English stock, and we begin to look upon them with a good deal of family pride.

But when we once accept poor roads as the equivalent of the passage of time, putting people at the other end into another generation, there is no knowing what we may come to in our charitable interpretations. For there are other equally effective non-conductors of thought. By the simple device of not knowing how to read, a man cuts off some thousands of culture years and saves himself from no end of intellectual distractions. He becomes the contemporary of “earth’s vigorous, primitive sons.” If to his illiteracy he adds native talent and imagination, there is a chance for him to make for himself some of those fine old discoveries which we lose because we got the answer from some blabbing book before we had come to the point of asking the question. Of course the danger is that if he has native talent and imagination he will learn to read, and it must be confessed that for this reason we do not get such a high order of illiterates as formerly.

I once made the acquaintance of an ancient Philosopher. His talents were for cosmogony, and his equipment would have been deemed ample in the days when cosmogony was the fashion. He had meditated much on the genesis of things and had read nothing, so that his speculations were uncontaminated by the investigations of others. He was just the man to construct a perfectly simple and logical theory of the universe, and he did it. His universe was not like that of which our sciences give us imperfect glimpses, but it was very satisfactory to him. He was very fair in dealing with facts; he explained all that could be explained by his system. As the only criterion of a fact which he recognized was that it agreed with his system, there was none left over to trouble him. His manner of thought was so foreign to that of our time that his intellectual ability was not widely appreciated; yet had his birth not been so long delayed, he might have been the founder of a school and have had books written about him. For so far as I could learn, his views of the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water, were very much like those of the early Greek physicists. Had I taken him as a fellow American, I should have dismissed him as not up to date; but considering him in the light of an ancient sage, I found much in him to admire.

Once upon the coast of Maine I came upon a huge wooden cylinder. Within it was a smaller one, and in the centre, seated upon a swinging platform, was the owner of the curious contrivance. He was a mild-eyed, pleasant-spoken man, whom it was a pleasure to meet. He explained that this was “The Amphibious Vehicle,” and that it would move equally well on land or sea.

“You know,” said he, “what the prophet Ezekiel said about the ‘wheel in the middle of a wheel’?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“Well, this is it.”

There was something convincing in this matter-of-fact statement. The “wheel within a wheel” had been to me little more than a figure of speech, but here it was made out of good pine lumber, with a plank in the middle for the living creature to sit on. It was as if I had fallen through a trap door into another age. Here was a literal-minded contemporary of Ezekiel, who, having heard of the wheel within a wheel, had proceeded at once to make one. I ascended into the precarious seat, and we conversed upon the spiritual and temporal possibilities of the vehicle. I found that on the scriptural argument he was clearly ahead of me, being able to quote chapter and verse with precision, while my references were rather vague. In the field of mechanics he was also my superior. I could not have made the vehicle, having not yet emerged beyond the stone age. As we talked I forgot that we were at the mouth of the Penobscot. We were on the “river of Chebar,” and there was no knowing what might happen.

******

The belated philosophers and inventors, who think the thoughts of the ancient worthies after them, live peaceful lives. What matters it that they are separated by a millennium or two from the society in which they were fitted to shine? They are self-sufficing, and there are few who care to contradict them. It is not so with one who is morally belated. There is something pathetic in the condition of one who cherishes the ambition of being a good man, but who has not informed himself of the present “state of the art.”

Now and then an ethical revolution takes place. New ideals are proclaimed, and in their light all things are judged. The public conscience becomes sensitive in regard to courses of conduct which heretofore had been unchallenged. Every such advance involves a waste in established reputations. There are always excellent men who are not aware of what has been going on. They keep on conforming scrupulously to the old standards, being good in the familiar ways that were commended in their youth. After a time they find themselves in an alien world, and in that world they are no longer counted among the best people. The tides of moral enthusiasm are all against them. The good man feels his solid ground of goodness slipping away from under him. Time has played false with his moral conventionalities. He is like a polar bear on a fast-diminishing iceberg, growling at the Gulf Stream.

When a great evil has been recognized by the world, there is a revision of all our judgments. A new principle of classification is introduced, by which we differentiate the goats from the sheep. It is hard after that to revive the old admirations. The temperance agitation of the last century has not abolished drunkenness, but it has made the conception of a pious, respectable drunkard seem grotesque. It has also reduced the business of liquor-selling to a decidedly lower place in the esteem of the community. When we read to-day of the horrors of the slave trade, we reconstruct in our imagination the character of the slave trader,—and a brutal wretch he is. But in his day the Guinea captain held his own with the best. He was a good husband and father, a kind neighbor, a generous benefactor. President Ezra Stiles of Yale College, in his “Literary Diary,” describes such a beautiful character. It was when Dr. Stiles was yet a parish minister in Newport that one of his parishioners died, of whom he wrote: “God had blessed him with a good Estate and he and his Family have been eminent for Hospitality to all and Charity to the poor and afflicted. At his death he recommended Religion to his Children and told them that the world was nothing. The only external blemish on his Character was that he was a little addicted to the marvelous in stories of what he had seen in his Voyages and Travels. But in his Dealings he was punctual, upright, and honest, and (except as to the Flie in the Oynment, the disposition to tell marvelous Stories of Dangers, Travels, &c.), in all other Things he was of a sober and good moral character, respected and beloved of all, so as to be almost without enemies. He was forward in all the concerns of the Church and Congregation, consulting its Benefit and peaceably falling in with the general sense without exciting quarrels, parties, &c., and even when he differed from his Brethren he so differed from them that they loved him amidst the differences. He was a peaceable man and promoted Peace.”

It was in 1773 that this good man died in the odor of sanctity. It is quite incidentally that we learn that “he was for many years a Guinea captain, and had no doubt of the slave trade.” His pastor suggests that he might have chosen another business than that of “buying and selling the human species.” Still, in 1773, this did not constitute an offense serious enough to be termed a fly in the ointment. In 1785, Dr. Stiles speaks of the slave trade as “a most iniquitous trade in the souls of men.” Much may happen in a dozen years in changing one’s ideas of moral values. In another generation the civilized world was agreed that the slave trade was piracy. After that there were no fine Christian characters among the slave traders.

There is evidence that at the present time there is an awakening of the social conscience that threatens as great a revolution as that which came with the abolition of the slave trade. Business methods which have been looked upon as consistent with high moral character are being condemned as “the sum of all villainies.” The condemnation is not yet universal, and there are still those who are not conscious that anything has happened. The Christian monopolist, ruthlessly crushing out his competitors and using every trick known to the trade, has no more doubts as to the rightfulness of his proceedings than had the good Newport captain in regard to the slave trade.

It is a good time to have his obituary written. His contemporaries appreciate his excellent private virtues, and have been long accustomed to look leniently on his public wrong-doing. The new generation, having agreed to call his methods robbery, may find the obituary eulogies amusing.

AN HOUR WITH OUR PREJUDICES

WE may compare the human mind to a city. It has its streets, its places of business and amusement, its citizens of every degree. When one person is introduced to another it is as if the warder drew back the bolts, and the gates were thrown open. If he comes well recommended he is given the freedom of the city. In the exercise of this freedom, however, the stranger should show due caution.

There is usually a new quarter. Here the streets are well lighted and policed, the crowds are cosmopolitan, and the tourist who wanders about looking at the shop windows is sure of a civil reply to his questions. There is no danger of highway robbers, though of course one may be taken in by confidence men. But if he be of an inquiring mind and a lover of the picturesque, he is not satisfied with this. After all, the new quarters are very much alike, and one tires after a while of shop windows. The visitor longs to explore the old town, with its winding ways, with its overhanging houses, and its mild suggestions of decay.

But in the mental city the lover of the picturesque must remember that he carries his life in his hands. It is not safe to say to a casual acquaintance, “Now I have a fair idea of that part of your mind which is like that of any other decently educated person. I have seen all the spick and span show places, and admired all the modern improvements. Where are your ruins? I should like to poke around a while in the more dilapidated section of your intellect.”

Ah, but that is the Forbidden City. It is inhabited, not by orderly citizens, under the rule of Right Reason, but by a lawless crowd known as the Prejudices. They are of all sorts and conditions. Some are of aristocratic lineage. They come from a long line of hereditary chiefs, who, as their henchmen have deserted them, have recreated into their crumbling strongholds. Some are bold, roistering blades who will not stand a question; dangerous fellows, these, to meet in the dark! The majority, perhaps, are harmless folk, against whom the worst that can be said is that they have a knack of living without visible means of support.

A knowledge of human nature, as distinguished from a knowledge of moral philosophy, is a perception of the important part played by instinctive likes and dislikes, by perverse antipathies, by odd ends of thought, by conclusions which have got hopelessly detached from their premises—if they ever had any. The formal philosopher, judging others by himself, works on the assumption that man is naturally a reasoning animal, whereas experience teaches that the craving for the reasonable is an acquired taste.

Of course we all have reasons for our opinions,—plenty of them! But in the majority of cases they stand not as antecedents, but as consequents. There is a reversal of the rational order like that involved in Dr. Hale’s pleasant conceit of the young people who adopted a grandmother. In spite of what intellectual persons say, I do not see how we can get along without prejudices. A prejudice is defined as “an opinion or decision formed without due examination of the facts or arguments which are necessary to a just and impartial determination.” Now, it takes a good deal of time to make a due examination of facts and arguments, even in regard to a small matter. In the meantime our minds would be sadly unfurnished. If we are to make a fair show in the world, we must get our mental furniture when we set up housekeeping, and pay for it on the installment plan.

Instead of taking a pharisaic attitude toward our neighbor’s prejudices, it is better to cultivate a wise tolerance, knowing that human intercourse is dependent on the art of making allowances. This is consistent with perfect honesty. There is always something to admire if the critic is sufficiently discriminating. When you are shown a bit of picturesque dilapidation, it is quite possible to enjoy it. Said the Hebrew sage, “I went by the field of the slothful, and by the vineyard of the man void of understanding; and, lo, it was all grown over with thorns, and nettles had covered the face thereof, and the stone wall thereof was broken down. Then I saw, and considered it well: I looked upon it, and received instruction.”

His point of view was that of a moralist. Had he also been a bit of an artist, the sight of the old wall with its tangle of flowering briers would have had still further interest.

When one’s intellectually slothful neighbor points with pride to portions of his untilled fields, we must not be too hard upon him. We also have patches of our own that are more picturesque than useful. Even if we ourselves are diligent husbandmen, making ceaseless war on weeds and vermin, there are times of relenting. Have you never felt a tenderness when the ploughshare of criticism turned up a prejudice of your own? You had no heart to harm the

Wee sleekit, cow’rin’, tim’rous beastie.

It could not give a good account of itself. It had been so long snugly ensconced that it blinked helplessly in the garish light. Its

wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!

Its silly wa’s the win’s are strewin’!

And naething now to big a new ane.

You would have been very angry if any one had trampled upon it.

This is the peculiarity about a prejudice. It is very appealing to the person who holds it. A man is seldom offended by an attack on his reasoned judgments. They are supported by evidence and can shift for themselves. Not so with a prejudice. It belongs not to the universal order; it is his very own. All the chivalry of his nature is enlisted in its behalf. He is, perhaps, its only defense against the facts of an unfriendly world.

We cannot get along without making allowances for these idiosyncrasies of judgment. Conversation is impossible where each person insists on going back, all the time, to first principles, and testing everything by an absolute standard. With a person who is incapable of changing his point of view we cannot converse; we can only listen and protest. We are in the position of one who, conscious of the justice of his cause, attempts to carry on a discussion over the telephone with “Central.” He only hears an inhuman buzzing sound indicating that the line is busy. There is nothing to do but to “hang up the ’phone.”

When a disputed question is introduced, one may determine the true conversationalist by applying the method of Solomon. Let it be proposed to divide the subject so that each may have his own. Your eager disputant will be satisfied, your genial talker is aghast at the proposition, for he realizes that it would kill the conversation. Instead of holding his own, he awaits developments. He is in a mood which can be satisfied with something less than a final judgment. It is not necessary that his friend’s opinions should be just; it is sufficient that they are characteristic. Whatever turn the talk may take, he preserves an easy temper. He is a heresy-hunter,—not of the grim kind that goes hunting with a gun; he carries only a camera. If he stirs up a strange doctrine he does not care to destroy it. When he gets a snap-shot at human nature he says,—

Those things do best please me

That befall preposterously.

An English gentleman relates a conversation he had with Prince Bismarck. The prince was inclined to take a pessimistic view of the English people. He thought that there was a degeneration in the race, which he attributed to the growing habit of drinking water. “Not that he believed that there was any particular virtue per se inherent in alcoholic drink; but he was sorry to hear that the old ‘three bottle men’ were dying out and leaving no successors. He had a suspicion that it meant shrinkage in those qualities of the English which had made them what they were in the past, and for which he had always felt a sincere admiration.”

It would have been very easy to drift into debate over this proposition. The English gentleman, however, defended his countrymen more diplomatically. “I replied that with regard to the water-drinking proclivities of my countrymen there was a good deal of calumny connected with the story. It is true that a certain section of English society has indeed taken to water as a beverage. But to argue therefrom that the English people have become addicted to water would be to draw premature conclusions from insufficient data. In this way I was able to calm Prince Bismarck’s fears in regard to what the future might bring forth, and our conversation reverted to Royalty.”

Each nation has its own set of preconceptions. We must take them altogether, or not at all. They are as compact and as natural a growth as the concentric layers of an onion. Here is a sentence from Max Müller’s “Autobiography,” thrown out quite incidentally. He has been telling how strange it seemed, when first coming to Oxford, to find that the students got along without dueling. Fighting with swords seemed to him the normal method of developing manliness, though he adds that in the German universities “pistol duels are generally preferred by theological students, because they cannot easily get a living if the face is scarred all over.”

This remark must be taken as one would take a slice of the national onion. One assumption fits into another. To an Englishman or an American there is an incongruity that approaches the grotesque,—because our prejudices are different. It all becomes a matter-of-fact statement when we make the proper assumptions in regard to dueling in general and theological duels in particular. Assuming that it is necessary for theological students to fight duels, and that the congregations are prejudiced against ministers whose faces have been slashed by swords, what is left for the poor theologues but pistols? Their method may seem more dangerous than that adopted by laymen, but Max Müller explains that the danger is chiefly to the seconds.

Individual peculiarities must be taken into account in the same way. Prince Bismarck, in dining with the Emperor, inquired the name of the brand of champagne, which proved to be a cheap German article. “The Emperor explained, ‘I drink it from motives of economy, as I have a large family; then again I drink it from patriotic motives.’ Thereupon I said to the Emperor, ‘With me, your Majesty, patriotism stops short in the region of my stomach.’”

It is evident that here was a difference not to be arbitrated by reason. If the Emperor could not understand the gastronomic limitations to the Chancellor’s patriotism, neither could the Chancellor enter into the Emperor’s anxieties, as he economized for the sake of his large family.

One cannot but wonder at the temerity of a person who plunges into conversation with a stranger without any preliminary scouting or making sure of a line of retreat. Ordinary prudence would suggest that the first advances should be only in the nature of a reconnoissance in force. You may have very decided prejudices of your own, but it is not certain that they will fraternize with those of your new acquaintance. There is danger of falling into an ambush. There are painful occasions when we remember the wisdom of the Son of Sirach: “Many have fallen by the edge of the sword, but not so many as have fallen by the tongue.” The mischief of it is that the most kindly intent will not save us. The path of the lover of mankind is beset by difficulties for which he is not prepared. There are so many antagonisms that are unpredictable.

When Nehemiah came to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem he remarked grimly, “When Sanballat the Horonite, and Tobiah the servant, the Ammonite, heard of it, it grieved them exceedingly that there was come a man to seek the welfare of the children of Israel;” and the trouble was that a large number of the children of Israel themselves seem to have resented the interference with their habitual misfortunes. The experience of Nehemiah is that of most reformers. One would suppose that the person who aims at the greatest good for the greatest number would be greeted with instant applause. The difficulty is that the greatest good is just what the greatest number will not tolerate. One does not need to believe in human depravity to recognize the prejudice which most persons have against anything which is proposed as good for them. The most successful philanthropists are those who most skillfully conceal their benevolent intent.

In Coleman’s “Life of Charles Reade” there is a paragraph which gives us a glimpse of a prejudice that has resisted the efforts of the most learned men to eradicate it. An incident is there recorded that took place when Reade was a fellow in Magdalen College. “Just as I was about to terminate my term of office (I hope with credit to myself and the ’Varsity), an untoward incident occurred which embittered my relations for life with two very distinguished men. Professor Goldwin Smith and his friend John Conington, who belonged to us, had attempted to inaugurate a debating society. A handful of unmannerly young cubs, resenting the attempt to teach them political economy, ducked poor Conington under the college pump.”

“Resenting the attempt to teach them political economy!”—What is the source of that resentment? What psychologist has fathomed the abyss of the dark prejudice which the natural man has against those who would improve his mind? It is a feud which reaches back into hoar antiquity. Doubtless the accumulated grievances of generations of schoolboys have intensified the feud, but no amelioration of educational methods has put an end to it. In the most successful teacher you may detect a nervous strain like that which the trainer of wild beasts in the arena undergoes. His is a perilous position, and every faculty must be on the alert to hold the momentary ascendency. A single false motion, and the unmannerly young cubs would be upon their victim.

Must we not confess that this irrational resentment against our intellectual benefactors survives, in spite of all discipline, into mature life? We may enlarge the area of our teachableness, but there are certain subjects in regard to which we do not care to be set right. The polite conventionality according to which a person is supposed to know his own business is an evidence of this sensitiveness. Of course the assumption is not justified by facts. A man’s own business is just the thing he is conscious of not knowing, and he would give anything in a quiet way to find out. Yet when a candid friend ventures to instruct him, the old irrational resentment flashes out. What we call tact is the ability to find before it is too late what it is that our friends do not desire to learn from us. It is the art of withholding, on proper occasions, information which we are quite sure would be good for them.

The prejudice against our intellectual superiors, which leads us to take their well-meant endeavors in our behalf as of the nature of personal insults, is matched by the equally irrational repulsion which many superior people have for their inferiors. Nothing can be more illogical than the attitude of these gifted ones who use their gifts as bludgeons with which to belabor the rest of us. When we read the writings of men who have a stimulating sense of their own genius, we are struck by their nervous irritability whenever they mention “mediocrity.” The greater number of the quarrels of the authors, which the elder Disraeli chronicled, arose from the fact that the authors had the habit of accusing one another of this vice. One would suppose mediocrity to be the sum of all villainies, and that the mediocre man was continually plotting in the night watches against the innocent man of genius; and yet what has the mediocre man done to deserve this detestation? Poor fellow, he has no malice in him! His mediocrity is only an afterthought. He has done his level best; his misfortune is that several million of his fellowmen have done as well.

The superior man, especially if his eminence be accidental, is likely to get a false notion of those who stand on the level below him. The biographer of an English dignitary says that the subject of his memoir was not really haughty, but “he was apt to be prejudiced against any one who seemed to be afraid of him.” This is a not uncommon kind of prejudice; and in nine cases out of ten it is unfounded. The great man should remember that most of those whose manners seem unduly respectful mean nothing personal.

As great Pompey passes through the streets of Rome, he may be pardoned for thinking meanly of the people. They appear to be a subservient lot, with no proper interests of their own, their happiness dependent on his passing smile,—and he knows how little that is worth. He sees them at a disadvantage. Let him leave his triumphal chariot, and, in the guise of Third Citizen, fall into friendly chat with First Citizen and Second Citizen, and his prejudices will be corrected. He will find that these worthy men have a much more independent and self-respecting point of view than he had thought possible. They are out for a holiday; they are critics of a spectacle, easily pleased, they will admit; but if no one except Pompey is to be seen to-day, why not make the most of him? Pompey or Cæsar, it matters not; “the play’s the thing.”

******

The origin of some of our prejudices must be sought in the childhood of the race. There are certain opinions which have come down from the cave-dwellers without revision. They probably at one time had reasons to justify them, though we have no idea what they were. There are others, which seem equally ancient, which originated in the forgotten experiences of our own childhood. The prehistoric age of myth and fable does not lie far behind any one of us. It is as if Gulliver had been educated in Lilliput, and, while he had grown in stature, had never quite emancipated himself from the Lilliputian point of view. The great hulking fellow is always awkwardly trying to look up at things which he has actually outgrown. He tries to make himself believe that his early world was as big as it seemed. Sometimes he succeeds in his endeavors, and the result is a curious inversion of values.

Mr. Morley, in speaking of Lord Palmerston’s foreign policy, says: “The Sultan’s ability to speak French was one of the odd reasons why Lord Palmerston was sanguine of Turkish civilization.” This association of ideas in the mind of the Prime Minister does seem odd till we remember that before Lord Palmerston was in the cabinet he was in the nursery. The fugitive impressions of early childhood reappear in many curious shapes. Who would be so hard-hearted as to exorcise these guiltless ghosts?

Sometimes, in reopening an old book over which long ago we had dreamed, we come upon the innocent source of some of our long-cherished opinions. Such discovery I made in the old Family Bible when opening at the pages inserted by the publisher between the Old Testament and the Apocrypha. On many a Sunday afternoon my stated hour of Bible reading was diversified by excursions into these uncanonical pages. There was a sense of stolen pleasure in the heap of miscellaneous secularities. It was like finding under the church roof a garret in which one might rummage at will. Here were tables of weights and measures, explanations about shekels, suggestions in regard to the probable length of a cubit, curious calculations as to the number of times the word “and” occurred in the Bible. Here, also, was a mysterious “Table of Offices and Conditions of Men.”

I am sure that my scheme of admirations, my conception of the different varieties of human grandeur, has been colored by that “Table of Offices and Conditions of Men.” It was my “Social Register” and Burke’s “Peerage” and “Who’s Who?” all in one. It was a formidable list, beginning with the patriarchs, and ending with the deacons. The dignity of the deacon I already knew, for my uncle was one, but his function was vastly exalted when I thought of him in connection with the mysterious personages who went before. There was the “Tirshatha, a governor appointed by the kings of Assyria,”—evidently a very great man. Then there were the “Nethinims, whose duty it was to draw water and to cleave wood.” When I was called upon to perform similar services I ventured to think that I myself, had I lived in better days, might have been recognized as a sort of Nethinim.

Here, also, I learned the exact age of the world, not announced arbitrarily, but with the several items all set down, so that I might have verified them for myself, had I been mathematically gifted. “The whole sum and number of years from the beginning of the world unto the present year of our Lord 1815 is 5789 years, six months, and the said odd ten days.” I have no prejudice in favor of retaining that chronology as far as the thousands are concerned. Five thousand years is one way of saying it was a very long time. If the geologists prefer to convey the same idea by calling it millions, I am content; but I should hate to give up the “said odd ten days.”

From the same Table of Offices and Conditions I imbibed my earliest philosophical prejudices; for there I learned the difference between the Stoics and the Epicureans.

The Stoics were described succinctly as “those who denied the liberty of the will.” Just what this might mean was not clear, but it had an ugly sound. The Stoics were evidently contentious persons. On the other hand, all that was revealed concerning the Epicureans was that they “placed all happiness in pleasure.” This seemed an eminently sensible idea. I could not but be favorably disposed toward people who managed to get happiness out of their pleasures.

To the excessive brevity of these definitions I doubtless owe an erroneous impression concerning that ancient, and now almost extinct people, the Samaritans. The name has had to me a suggestion of a sinister kind of scholarship, as if the Samaritans had been connected with some of the black arts. Yet I know nothing in their history to justify this impression. The source of the error was revealed when I turned again to the “Table of Offices and Conditions of Men” and read once more, “Samaritans, mongrel professors, half heathen and half Jew.” How was I to know that the reference was to professors of religion, and not to professors of the arts and sciences?

As there are prejudices which begin in verbal misunderstandings, so there are those which are nourished by the accidental collocation of words. A noun is known by the adjectives it keeps. When we hear of dull conservatism, rabid radicalism, selfish culture, timid piety, smug respectability, we receive unfavorable impressions. We do not always stop to consider that all that is objectionable really inheres in the qualifying words. In a well-regulated mind, after every such verbal turn there should be a call to change partners. Let every noun take a new adjective, and every verb a new adverb.

Clever Bohemians, having heard so much of “smug respectability,” take a dislike to respectability. But some of the smuggest persons are not respectable at all,—far from it! Serenely satisfied with their own irresponsibility, they look patronizingly upon the struggling world that owes them a living. I remember a visit from one of these gentry. He called to indicate his willingness to gratify my charitable impulses by accepting from me a small loan. If I did not believe the story of his frequent incarcerations I might consult the chaplain of the House of Correction. He evidently considered that he had a mission. He went about offering his hard and impenitent heart as a stone on which the philanthropists might whet their zeal. Smug respectability, forsooth!

From force of habit we speak of the “earnest” reformer, and we are apt to be intolerant of his lighter moods. Wilberforce encountered this prejudice when he enlivened one of his speeches with a little mirth. His opponent seized the opportunity to speak scornfully of the honorable gentleman’s “religious facetiousness.” Wilberforce replied very justly that “a religious man might sometimes be facetious, seeing that the irreligious did not always escape being dull.”

An instance of the growth of a verbal prejudice is that which in certain circles resulted in the preaching against what was called “mere morality.” What the preachers had in mind was true enough. They objected to mere morality, as one might say, “Mere life is not enough to satisfy us, we must have something to live on.” They would have more than a bare morality. It should be clothed with befitting spiritual raiment. But the parson’s zeal tended to outrun his discretion, and forgetting that the true object of his attack was the mereness and not the morality, he gave the impression that the Moral Man was the great enemy of the faith. At last the parishioner would turn upon his accuser. “You need not point the finger of scorn at me. What if I have done my duty to the best of my ability! You should not twit on facts. If it comes to that, you are not in a position to throw stones. If I am a moral man, you’re another.”

There are prejudices which are the result of excessive fluency of speech. The flood of words sweeps away all the natural distinctions of thought. All things are conceived of under two categories,—the Good and the Bad. If one ill is admitted, it is assumed that all the rest follow in its train. There are persons who cannot mention “the poor” without adding, “the weak, the wretched, the oppressed, the downtrodden, the suffering, the sick, the sinful, the erring,” and so on to the end of the catalogue. This is very disconcerting to a young fellow who, while in the best of health and spirits, is conscious that he is rather poor. He would willingly admit his poverty were it not for the fear of being smothered under the wet blanket of universal commiseration.

When the category of the Good is adopted with the same undiscriminating ardor the results are equally unfortunate. We are prejudiced against certain persons whom we have never met. We have heard nothing but good of them, and we have heard altogether too much of that. Their characters have been painted in glaring virtues that swear at one another. We are sure that we should not like such a combination of unmitigated excellencies, for human nature abhors a paragon. And yet the too highly commended person may, in reality, not be a paragon at all, but a very decent fellow. He would quickly rise in our regard were it not for the eulogies which hang like millstones around his neck.

It is no easy thing to praise another in such a way as to leave a good impression on the mind of the hearer. A virtue is not for all times. When a writer is too highly commended for being laborious and conscientious we are not inclined to buy his book. His conscience doth make cowards of us all. It may be proper to recommend a candidate for a vacant pulpit as indefatigable in his pastoral labors; but were you to add, in the goodness of your heart, that he was equally indefatigable as a preacher, he would say, “An enemy hath done this.” For the congregation would suspect that his freedom from fatigue in the pulpit was likely to be gained at their expense.

The prejudices which arise from verbal association are potent in preventing any impartial judgment of men whose names have become household words. The man whose name has become the designation of a party or a theory is the helpless victim of his own reputation. Who takes the trouble to pry into the personal opinions of John Calvin? Of course they were Calvinistic. When we hear of the Malthusian doctrine about population, we picture its author as a cold-blooded, economical Herod, who would gladly have ordered a massacre of the innocents. Let no one tell us that the Reverend Richard Malthus was an amiable clergyman, who was greatly beloved by the small parish to which he ministered. In spite of all his church wardens might say, we would not trust our children in the hands of a man who had suggested that there might be too many people in the world. But in such cases we should remember that a man’s theories do not always throw light upon his character. When a distinguished physician has a disease named after him, it is understood that the disease is the one he discovered, and not the one he died of.

When the Darwinian hypothesis startled the world, many pious imaginations conceived definite pictures of the author of it. These pictures had but one thing in common,—their striking unlikeness to the quiet gentleman who had made all this stir. By the way, Darwin was the innocent victim of two totally disconnected lines of prejudice. After he had outlived the disfavor of the theologians, he incurred the contempt of the apostles of Culture; all because of his modest confession that he did not enjoy poetry as much as he once did. Unfortunately, his scientific habit of mind led him to say that he suspected that he might be suffering from atrophy of the imaginative faculty. Instantly every literal-minded reader and reviewer exclaimed, “How dreadful! What a judgment on him!” Yet, when we stop to think about it, the affliction is not so uncommon as to call for astonishment. Many persons suffer from it who are not addicted to science.

******

After all, these are harmless prejudices. They are content with their own little spheres; they ask only to live and let live. There are others, however, that are militantly imperialistic. They are ambitious to become world powers. Such are those which grow out of differences in politics, in religion, and in race.

Political animosities have doubtless been mitigated by freer social intercourse, which gives more opportunities for meeting on neutral ground. It is only during a heated campaign that we think of all of the opposing party as rascals. There is time between elections to make the necessary exceptions. It is customary to make allowance for a certain amount of partisan bias, just as the college faculty allows a student a certain number of “cuts.” It is a just recognition of human weakness.

Our British cousins go farther, and provide means for the harmless gratification of natural prejudices. There are certain questions on which persons are expected to express themselves with considerable fervor, and without troubling themselves as to the reasonableness of their contention. In a volume of published letters I was pleased to read one from a member of the aristocracy. He had been indulging in trivial personalities, when suddenly he broke off with “Now I must go to work on the Wife’s Sister’s Question; I intend to make a good stout protest against that rascally bill!” There is no such exercise for the moral nature as a good stout protest. We Americans take our exercise spasmodically. Instead of going about it regularly, we wait for some extraordinary occasion. We make it a point of sportsmanship to shoot our grievance on the wing, and we are nervously anxious lest it get out of range before we have time to take aim.

Not so the protesting Briton. He approves of the answer of Jonah when he was asked, “Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd?” Jonah, without any waste of words, replied, “I do well to be angry.” When the Englishman feels that it is well for him to be angry, he finds constitutional means provided. Parliament furnishes a number of permanent objects for his disapproval. Whenever he feels disposed he can make a good stout protest, feeling assured that his indignation is well bestowed. He has such satisfaction as that which came to Mr. Micawber in reading his protest against the villainies of Uriah Heep: “Much afflicted but still intensely enjoying himself, Mr. Micawber folded up the letter and handed it with a bow to my aunt, as something she might like to keep.”

These stout-hearted people have learned not only how to take their pleasures sadly, but, what is more to the purpose, how to take their sadnesses pleasantly. We Americans have, here, something to learn. We should get along better if we had a number of argument-proof questions like that in regard to marriage with the deceased wife’s sister which could be warranted to recur at regular intervals. They could be set apart as a sort of public playground for the prejudices. It would at least keep the prejudices out of mischief.

Religious prejudice has an air of singularity. The singular thing is that there should be such a variety. If we identify religion with the wisdom that is from above, and which is “first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated, without partiality,” it is hard to see where the prejudice comes in. Religious prejudice is a compound of religion and several decidedly earthly passions. The combination produces a peculiarly dangerous explosive. The religious element has the same part in it that the innocent glycerine has in nitro-glycerine. This latter, we are told, is “a compound produced by the action of a mixture of strong nitric and sulphuric acids on glycerine at low temperatures.” It is observable that in the making of religious prejudice the religion is kept at a very low temperature, indeed.

We are at present in an era of good feeling. Not only is there an interchange of kindly offices between members of different churches, but one may detect a tendency to extend the same tolerance to the opposing party in the same church. This is a real advance, for it is always more difficult to do justice to those who differ from us slightly than to those whose divergence is fundamental. To love our friends is a work of nature, to love our enemies is a work of grace; the troublesome thing is to get on with those who are “betwixt and between.” In such a case we are likely to fall between nature and grace as between two stools. Almost any one can be magnanimous in great affairs, but to be magnanimous in trifles is like trying to use a large screw-driver to turn a small screw.

In a recently published correspondence between dignitaries of the Church of England I find many encouraging symptoms. The writers exhibit a desire to do justice not only to the moral, but also to the intellectual, gifts of those who differ from them even slightly. There is, of course, enough of the old Adam remaining to make their judgments on one another interesting reading. It is pleasant to see brethren dwelling together in unity,—a pleasure seldom prolonged to the point of satiety. Thus the Dean of Norwich writes to the Dean of Durham in regard to Dean Stanley. Alluding to an opinion, in a previous letter, in regard to Archbishop Tait, the writer says: “I confess I shouldn’t have ranked him among the great men of the day. Of our contemporaries I should have assigned that rank, without hesitation, to little Stan, though I quite think he did more mischief in our church and to religion than most men have it in them to do. Still I should say that little Stan was a great man in his way.” There you may see a mind that has, with considerable difficulty, uprooted a prejudice, though you may still perceive the place where the prejudice used to be.

While the methods of the exact sciences have had a discouraging effect on partisan and sectarian prejudices, they seem, for the moment, to have given new strength to those which are the result of differences in race. Time was when Anti-Semitism derived its power from religious rancor. The cradle hymn which the Puritan mother sang began sweetly,—

Hush, my dear, lie still and slumber!

Holy angels guard thy bed!

But after a while the mother thinks of the wickedness of the Jews:—

Yet to read the shameful story

How the Jews abused their King,

How they served the Lord of Glory,

Makes me angry while I sing.

In these days, the Anti-Semites are not so likely to be angry while they sing, as while they cast up their accounts.

******

The natural sciences discriminate between classes rather than between individuals. Sociology deals with groups, and not with persons. Anthropology acquaints us with the aboriginal and unmoralized man. It emphasizes the solidarity of the clan and the persistence of the cult. Experimental psychology is at present interested in the sub-conscious and instinctive life. For its purpose it treats a man as a series of nervous reactions. Human history is being rewritten as a branch of Natural History. Eliminating the part played by personal will, it exhibits an age-long warfare between nations and races.

This is all very well so long as we remember what it is that we are studying. Races, cults, and social groups exist and have their history. There is no harm in defining the salient characteristics of a race, and saying that, on the whole, one race is inferior to another. The difficulty comes when this rough average is made the dead line beyond which an individual is not allowed to pass.

In our Comedy of Errors, which is always slipping into tragedy, there are two Dromios on the stage,—the Race and the Individual. The Race is an abstraction which can bear any amount of punishment without flinching. You may say anything you please about it and not go far wrong. It is like criticising a composite photograph. There is nothing personal about it. Who is offended at the caricatures of Brother Jonathan or of John Bull? We recognize certain persistent national traits, but we also recognize the element of good-humored exaggeration. The Jew, the Slav, the Celt, the Anglo-Saxon have existed for ages. Each has admired himself, and been correspondingly disliked by others. Even the Negro as a racial abstraction is not sensitive. You may, if you will, take up the text, so much quoted a generation ago, “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be.... God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.” Dromio Africanus listens unmoved to the exegesis of Petroleum V. Nasby and his compeers at the Crossroads: “God cust Canaan, and sed he shood be a servant forever. Did he mean us to pay him wages? Not eny: for ef he hed he wood hev ordered our tastes and habits so es we shood hev hed the wherewithal to do it.”

The impassive Genius of Africa answers the Anglo-Saxon: “If it pleases you to think that your prejudice against me came out of the Ark, so be it. If you find it agreeable to identify yourself with Japheth who shall providentially be enlarged, I may as well be Canaan.”

So long as the doctrinaires of the Crossroads are dealing only with highly generalized conceptions no harm is done. But now another Dromio appears. He is not a race; he is a person. He has never come that way before, and he is bewildered by what he sees and hears. Immediately he is beset by those who accuse him of crimes which some one who looks like him has committed. He is beaten because he does not know his place; how can he know it, stumbling as he does upon a situation for which he is altogether unprepared? It is an awkward predicament, this of being born into the world as a living soul. Under the most favorable conditions it is hard for the new arrival to find himself, and adjust himself to his environment. But this victim of mistaken identity finds that he has been judged and condemned already. When he innocently tries to make the most of himself a great uproar is created. What right has he to interfere with the preconceived opinions of his betters? They understand him, for have they not known him for many generations?

Poor man Dromio! Whether he have a black skin or a yellow, and whatever be the racial type which his features suggest, the trouble is the same. He is sacrificed on the altar of our stupidity. He suffers because of our mental color-blindness, which prevents our distinguishing persons. We see only groups, and pride ourselves on our defective vision. By and by we may learn to be a little ashamed of our crudely ambitious generalizations. A finer gift is the ability to know a man when we see him. It may be that Nature is “careful of the type,” and “careless of the single life.” If that be so, it may be the part of wisdom for us to give up some of our anxieties about the type, knowing that Nature will take care of that. Such relief from excessive cosmic responsibility will give us much more time for our proper work, which is to deal justly with each single life.

HOW TO KNOW THE FALLACIES

MY friend Scholasticus was in a bad way. He had been educated before the elective system came in, and he had a pathetic veneration for the old curriculum. It was to him the sacred ark, now, alas, carried away into the land of the Philistines. He cherished it as a sort of creed containing the things surely to be learned by a gentleman, and whoso hath not learned these things, let him be anathema. In meeting the present-day undergraduates, it was hard to say which amazed him most, the things they knew or the things they did not know. Perhaps the new knowledge seemed to him the more uncouth.

“The intellectual world,” he would say, “is topsy-turvy. What is to be expected of a generation that learns to write before it learns to read, and learns to read before it learns to spell,—or rather which never does learn to spell. Everything begins wrong end foremost. In my day small children were supposed to be ‘pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw,’ until such time as they were old enough to be put to stiff work on the First Reader. Nowadays, the babes begin with the esoteric doctrine of their playthings. Even the classics of infancy are rationalized. I was about to buy a copy of ‘Mother Hubbard and her Dog’ for a dear young friend, when I discovered that it was a revised version. The most stirring incident was given thus,—

She went to the baker’s to buy some bread,

And when she came back the dog looked dead.

That wasn’t the way the tale was told to me. I was told that the poor dog was dead, and I believed it. That didn’t prevent my believing a little while after that the doggie was dancing a jig. I took it for granted that that was the way dogs did in Mother Hubbard’s day. Nowadays, the critics in bib and tucker insist that the story must conform to what they have prematurely learned about the invariable laws of nature.

“I shouldn’t mind this if they kept on reasoning. But it’s a false start. After the wide generalizations of infancy have been forgotten, the youth begins to specialize. He takes a small slice of a subject, ignoring its more obvious features and its broader outlines. He has a contempt for general ideas. What we studied, he takes for granted. He’s very observing, but he doesn’t put two and two together. There they stand in his mind, two separate ideas, politely ignoring one another, because they have not been properly introduced. The result of all this is evident enough. How many people do you come across with whom it is a pleasure to hold an argument? Not many! They don’t know the rules of the game. You can’t enter a drawing-room without hearing questions discussed in a way possible only to those whose early education in the art of reasoning had been neglected. The chances are that every one of the fallacies we learned about in Whately could appear in good society without anybody being able to call them by their Latin names.

“‘Doesn’t this follow from that?’ the facile talker asks, as if that were all that is necessary to constitute a valid argument. Of course it follows; his assertions follow one another like a flock of sheep. But what short work our old Professor would have made with these plausible sequences!

“What a keen scent the old man had for fallacies! Even when the conclusion was obviously sound, he insisted that we should come by it honestly. He would never admit that in such matters the end justifies the means. I remember his merciless exposure of the means by which some unscrupulous metaphysicians accumulated their intellectual property. His feeling about the ‘Undistributed Middle’ was much the same as that of Henry George about the ‘Unearned Increment.’ How he used to get after the moonshiners who were distilling arguments by the illicit process of the major term! In these days the illicit process goes on openly. The growth of the real sciences does not in the least discourage the pseudo-sciences. It rather seems to stimulate them.

“For many persons, a newly discovered fact is simply a spring-board from which they dive into a bottomless sea of speculation. They pride themselves on their ability to jump at conclusions, forgetting that jumping is an exercise in which the lower orders excel their betters. If an elephant could jump as far, in proportion to his weight, as a flea, there would be no holding him on the planet. Every new discovery is followed by a dozen extravagances, engineered by the Get-wise-quick people. There is always some Young Napoleon of Philosophy who undertakes to corner the truth-market. It’s like what happened at the opening of Oklahoma Territory. Before the day set by the government when they all were to start fair in their race for farms, a band of adventurers called ‘Sooners’ smuggled themselves across the line. When the bona fide settler arrived on his quarter-section, he found an impudent Sooner in possession. You can’t find any fresh field of investigation that isn’t claimed by these Sooners. It all comes because people are no longer educated logically.”

******

When Scholasticus was in this mood, it was difficult to do anything with him. It was in vain to tell him that he was narrow, for, like all narrow men, he took that as a compliment. It is the broad way, he reminded me, that leads to intellectual destruction. Still, I attempted to bring him to a better frame of mind.

“Scholasticus,” said I, “the old order changes. You are a survivor of another period. You were educated according to a logical order. You learned to spell out of a Spelling Book, and to read out of a Reader, and to write not by following the dictates of your own conscience, but by following the copy in a Copy Book; and you learned to speak correctly by committing to memory the rules of grammar and afterwards the exceptions.”

“And it was a good way, too,” interrupted Scholasticus. “It gave us a respect for law and order, to learn the rules and to abide by them. Now, I understand, they don’t have grammar, but ‘language work.’ The idea is, I suppose, that if the pupils practice the exceptions they needn’t bother about the rules. When I studied geography, we began with a definition of the word geography, after which we were told that the earth is a planet, and that three fourths of its surface is water, a fact which I have never forgotten. Nowadays they hold that geography, like charity, should begin at home, so the first thing is to make a geodetic survey of the back yard. By the time they work up to the fact that the earth is a planet, the pupils have learned so many other things that it makes very little impression on their minds.”

“Scholasticus,” said I, “I was saying the old order changes lest one good custom should corrupt the educational world. They were great people for rules in your day. It was an inheritance from the past. You remember the anecdote of Ezekiel Cheever, head master of the Boston Latin School, who taught Cotton Mather Latin. A pupil writes, ‘My master found fault with the syntax of one word, which was not so used heedlessly, but designedly, and therefore I told him there was a plain grammar rule for it. He angrily replied that there was no such rule. I took the grammar and showed the rule to him. Then he said, “Thou art a brave boy. I had forgot the rule.”’ That takes us back to a time when there was a superstitious reverence for rules. We don’t reason so rigidly from rules now, we develop the mind according to a chronological rather than a logical order. We let the ideas come according to the order of nature.”

At this, the wrath of Scholasticus bubbled over. “‘The order of nature’! The nature of what? A cabbage head grows according to an order natural to cabbages. But a rational intelligence is developed according to the laws of reason. The first thing is to formulate the laws, and then to obey them. Logic has to do with the laws of rational thought, just as grammar has to do with the laws of correct speech. Nowadays, the teacher seems to be afraid of laying down the law. I visited a model school the other day. It wasn’t a school at all, according to the definition in the old-fashioned book I used to read: ‘A school is a place where children go to study books. The good children when they have learned their lessons go out to play, the idle remain and are punished.’ According to the modern method, it is the teacher who must remain to be punished for the idleness of her pupils. It’s her business to make the lessons interesting. If their attention wanders, she is held responsible. The teacher must stay after hours and plan new strategic moves. She must ‘by indirections find directions out,’—while the pupil is resisting one form of instruction, she suddenly teaches him something else. In this way the pupil’s wits are kept on the run. No matter how they scatter, there is the teacher before him.”

“Why is not that a good way?” I said. “It certainly brings results. The pupil gets on rapidly. He learns a lesson before he knows it.”

“He never does know it,” growled Scholasticus. “And what’s worse, he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know it. By this painless method he has never been compelled to charge his mind with it and to reason it out. And besides, it’s death on the teacher. Ezekiel Cheever taught that Boston Latin School till he was over ninety years old, and never had a touch of nervous prostration. He didn’t have to lie awake planning how to hold the rapt attention of his pupils. If there was any chance of the grammar rules not being learned, he let them do the worrying. It was good for them. There was a race of sturdy thinkers in those days. They knew how to deal with knotty problems. If they survived the school, they could not be downed in the town meeting.”

“Scholasticus,” I said, “I don’t like the way you talk. The trouble with you is that you took your education too hard. I fancy that I see every lesson you ever learned sticking out of your consciousness like the piles of stones in a New Hampshire pasture. They are monuments of industry, but they lack a certain suavity. You are doing what most Americans do,—whenever they find anything wrong they lay the blame on the public schools. Just because some of the younger men at your club argue somewhat erratically, you blame the whole modern system of education. It’s a way you clever people have,—you are not content with one good and sufficient reason for your statement of fact. You must reinforce it by another of a more general character. It makes me feel as I do when, a faucet needing a new washer, I send for a plumber,—and behold twain! One would be enough, if he would attend strictly to business. Every system has its failures. If that of the present day seems to have more than its share, it is because its failures are still in evidence, while those of your generation are mostly forgotten. Oblivion is a deft housemaid, who tidies up the chambers of the Past, by sweeping all the dust into the dark corners. On the other hand, you drop into the Present amid the disorder of the spring cleaning, when everything is out on the line. If you could recall the shining lights in your Logic class, you might admit that some of them had the form of reasoning without the power thereof. It was in your day, wasn’t it, that the criticism was made on the undergraduate thesis:—

Although he wrote it all by rote,

He did not write it right.

I couldn’t help thinking of those lines when I was listening just now to your reasoning. The real point, Scholasticus, is this, which seems to have escaped you. You talk of the laws of the mind. When you were in college it seemed a very simple thing to formulate these laws. There was no Child Psychology, giving way before you knew it to Adolescence, where everything was quite different. There was no talk about subliminal consciousness, where you couldn’t tell which was consciousness and which was something else. The mind in your day came in one standard size.”

“Yes,” said Scholasticus, “when we were in the Academy, we had Watts on the Mind. Watts treated his subject in a straightforward way; he had nothing about nervous reactions; he gave us plain Mind. When we got into college we had Locke on the Understanding. When it was time to take account of conscience, we had Paley’s ‘Moral Science.’ This, with the ‘Evidences,’ made a pretty good preparation for life.”

“So it did,” I said, “and you have done credit to your training. But since that time Psychologists have made a number of discoveries which render it necessary to revise the old methods.”

Seeing that he, for the first time, was giving me his attention, I thought that it might be possible to win him away from that futile and acrid criticism of the present course of events, which is the besetting sin of men of his age, to the more fruitful criticism by creation.

“Scholasticus,” I said, “here is your opportunity. You complain that Logic is going out. The trouble is that it has been taught in an antiquated way. The logicians followed the analogy of mathematics. They invented all sorts of formal figures and diagrams, and were painfully abstract. When you were learning to reason, you had to commit to memory a formula like this: ‘Every y is x; every z is y; therefore every z is x. E.g., let the major term (which is represented by x) be “One who possesses all virtue,” the minor term (z) “Every man who possesses one virtue,” and the middle term (y) “Every man who possesses prudence,” and you have the celebrated argument of Aristotle that “the virtues are inseparable.”’

“Now you can’t make the youth of this generation submit to that kind of argumentation. They are willing to admit the virtues are inseparable, if you say so, but they are not going to take time to figure it out. You can’t arouse their interest by demonstrating that ‘If A is B, C is D, C is not D, therefore A is not B.’ They say, ‘What of it?’ They refuse to concern themselves about the fate of letters of the alphabet. Such methods prejudice them against Logic. They prefer not to reason at all, rather than do it in such an old-fashioned way. Besides, they have peeped into the Psychology for Teachers, and they know their rights. Such teaching is not good pedagogics. The youthful mind must be shielded from abstractions; if it is not, there’s no knowing what might happen. It will not do to go at your subject in such a brutal way. This is the age of the concrete and the vital. Things are observed in the state of nature. The birds must be in the bush, and the fishes in the water, and the flowers must be caught in the very act of growing. That’s what makes them interesting. If the youthful mind is to be induced to love Nature, Nature must do her prettiest for the youthful mind. Otherwise it will be found that the mental vacuum abhors Nature.

“If there is to be a revival of Logic, it must be attached to something in which people are already interested. People are interested in biological processes. They like to see things grow, and to help in the process as far as they can without disturbing Nature. Why don’t you, Scholasticus, try your hand at a text-book which shall insinuate a sufficient knowledge of the principles of sound reasoning, under the guise of Botany or Hygiene or Physical Culture, or some of the branches that are more popular? I believe that you could make a syllogism as interesting as anything else. All you have to do is to make people think that it is something else.”

At the time Scholasticus only sniffed scornfully at my suggestion; but not many days had passed before I began to notice a change in his demeanor. Instead of his usual self-sufficiency, there came into his eyes a wistful plea for appreciation. He had the chastened air of one who no longer sits in the chair of the critic, but is awaiting the moment when he shall endure criticism.

From such signs as these I inferred that Scholasticus was writing a book. There is nothing that so takes the starch out of a man’s intellect and reduces him to a state of abject dependence on the judgment of his fellow beings as writing a book. For the first question about a book is not, “Is it good?” but, “Will anybody read it?” When this question is asked, the most commonplace individual assumes a new importance. He represents the Public. The Author wonders as to what manner of man he is. Will he like the Book?

I was not therefore surprised when one day Scholasticus, in a shamefaced way, handed me the manuscript of a work entitled, “How to Know the Fallacies; or Nature-Study in Logic.”

In these pages Scholasticus shows a sincere desire to adapt himself to a new order of things. He no longer stands proudly on the quarter-deck of the good ship Logic, with a sense of fathomless depths of rationality under the keel. Logic is a poor old stranded wreck. His work is like that of the Swiss Family Robinson: to carry off the necessities of life and the more portable luxuries, and to use them in setting up housekeeping on the new island of Nature-Study.

I cannot say that he has been entirely successful in making the art of reasoning a pleasant out-of-door recreation. He has not altogether overcome the stiffness which is the result of his early education. In treating thought as if it were a vegetable, he does not always conceal the fact that it is not a vegetable. There are, therefore, occasional jolts as he suddenly changes from one aspect of his subject to another.

I was, however, much pleased to see that, instead of ambitiously attempting to treat of the processes of valid reasoning, he has been content to begin with those forms of argumentation which are more familiar.

His preface does what every good preface should do: it presents the Author not at his worst nor at his best, but in a salvable condition, so that the reader will say, “He is not such a bad fellow, after all, and doubtless when he gets warmed up to his work he will do better.” It may be as well to quote the Preface in full.

“Careless Reader, in the intervals between those wholesome recreations which make up the more important portion of life, you may have sometimes come upon a thought. It may have been only a tiny thoughtlet. Slight as it was in itself, it was worthy of your attention, for it was a living thing. Pushing its way out of the fertile soil of your subconscious being, it had come timidly into the light of day. If it seemed to you unusual, it was only because you have not cultivated the habit of noticing such things. They are really very common.

“If you can spare the time, let us sit down together and pluck up the thoughtlet by the roots and examine its structure. You may find some pleasure, and perhaps a little profit, in these native growths of your mind.

“When you take up a thought and pull it to pieces, you will see that it is not so simple as it seems. It is in reality made up of several thoughts joined together. When you try to separate them, you find it difficult. The connective tissue which binds them together is called inference. When several thoughts growing out of the same soil are connected by inference, they form what is called an argument. Arguments, as they are found in the state of Nature, are of two kinds; those that hang together, and those that only seem to hang together; these latter are called Fallacies.

“In former times they were treated as mere weeds and were mercilessly uprooted. In these days we have learned to look upon them with a kindlier eye. They have their uses, and serve to beautify many a spot that otherwise would remain barren. They are the wild flowers of the intellectual world. I do not intend to intrude my own taste or to pass judgment on the different varieties; but only to show my readers how to know the fallacies when they see them. It may be said that mere nomenclature is of little value. So it is in itself; yet there is a pleasure in knowing the names of the common things we meet every day. The search for fallacies need never take one far afield. The collector may find almost all the known varieties growing within his own enclosure.

“Let us then go out in the sunshine into the pleasant field of thought. There we see the arguments—valid and otherwise—as they are growing. You will notice that every argument has three essential parts. First is the root, called by the old logicians in their crabbed language the Major Premise. Growing quite naturally out of this is the stem, called the Minor Premise; and crowning that is the flower, with its seed vessels which contain the potentialities of future arguments,—this is called the Conclusion.

“Let the reader observe this argument: ‘Every horse is an animal;’ that is the root thought. ‘Sheep are not horses;’ that is the stem shooting into the air. ‘Therefore, sheep are not animals;’ that is the conclusion, the full corn in the ear.

“There is a pleasing impression of naturalness about the way in which one thought grows out of that which immediately preceded it. There is a sudden thrill when we come to the ‘therefore,’ the blossoming time of the argument. We feel that we are entering into one of Nature’s secret processes. Unless our senses are deceiving us, we are actually reasoning.

“After a while, when curiosity and the pride of possession lead us to look more carefully at our treasure, we are somewhat surprised. It is not as it seemed. A little observation convinces us that, in spite of our argumentation, sheep are animals, and always have been. Thus, quite by accident, and through the unaided exercise of our own faculties, we have come upon one of the most ancient forms of reasoning, one that has engaged the attention of wise men since Aristotle,—a fallacy.”

In the opening chapters, Scholasticus gives a description of the more common fallacies, with an account of their habits of growth and of the soils in which they most flourish. “Petitio Principii, or begging the question. This is a very pretty little fallacy of vine-like habit. It is found growing beside old walls, and wherever it is not likely to be disturbed. It is easily propagated from slips, each slip being capable of indefinite multiplication, the terminal buds sending down new roots, and the process of growth going on continuously. So tenacious is it that it is practically impossible to eradicate the petitio, when once it has fairly established itself. It recommends itself on the ground of economy. In most arguments the attempt is made to prove one thing by means of another thing. This, of course, involves a considerable waste of good material. In begging the question, by means of one proposition we are enabled to prove a proposition that is identical with it. In this way an idea may be made to go a long way.

“The most familiar variety of this fallacy is that known as the Argument in a Circle. To those who are fond of arguments, but who can afford very little mind space for their cultivation, this is an almost ideal fallacy. It requires only the slightest soil, deriving its nutriment almost wholly from the air, and reproducing itself without the slightest variation in type.

“Its hardiness and exuberant efflorescence make it desirable for many purposes. It is useful as a screen to hide the more unsightly parts of one’s intellectual grounds. Often, too, there may be an argumentative structure that has fallen into decay. Its real reason for existence is no longer obvious, yet it may have associations which make us reluctant to tear it down. In such a case, nothing is easier than to plant a slip of the circular argument. In a short time the old ruin becomes a bower, covered with an exuberant efflorescence of rationality. This argument is to be recommended for a Woman’s Hardy Garden of Fallacies.

“It is one which gives great pleasure to a home-loving person who finds satisfaction in that which is his own. Often have I seen a householder sitting under its sweet shade, well content. He was conscious of having an argument which answered to all his needs, and which protected him alike from the contradiction of sinners and from the intrusive questioning of the more critical sort of saints. He had such satisfaction as came to Jonah, when the booth he had constructed, with such slight skill as belonged to an itinerant preacher, was covered by the luxuriant gourd vine. Things were not going as he had expected in Nineveh, and current events were discrediting his prophecies, but Jonah ‘rejoiced with great joy over the gourd.’

“I may be pardoned, in treating the circular argument, for deviating, for a moment, from the field of botany into the neighboring field of zoölogy. For after all, the same principles hold good there also, and as we are forming the habit of looking at thought as a kind of plant, we may also consider it as a kind of animal,—let us say, if you please, a goldfish. You have often paused to watch the wonders of marine life as epitomized in a glass globe upon your centre-table. Those who go down to the sea in ships have doubtless seen more of the surface of waters, but they have not the same facilities for looking into its interior life that you have in your aquarium. A school of goldfishes represent for you the finny monsters of the deep. You see the whole world they move in. The encircling glass is the firmament in the midst of the waters. The goldfishes go round and round, and have a very good time, and have many adventures, but they never get out of their crystal firmament. You may leave them for half a day, but when you come back you know just where to find them. An aquarium is a much safer place for goldfishes to swim in than the ocean; to be sure, they do not get on far, but on the other hand they do not get lost, and there are no whales or even herrings, to make them afraid. There is the same advantage in doing our reasoning in a circle. We can keep up an argument much longer when we are operating in friendly waters and are always near our base of supplies. The trouble with thinking straight is, that it is likely to take us too far from home. The first we know we are facing a new issue. From this peril we are saved by the habit of going round and round. He who argues and runs away from the real difficulty lives to argue another day, and the best of it is the argument will be just the same.

“Argumentum ad Hominem. This is a large family, containing many interesting varieties. The ad hominem is of parasitic growth, a sort of logical mistletoe. It grows not out of the nature of things, but of the nature of the particular mind to which it is addressed. In the cultivation of this fallacy it is only necessary to remember that each mind has its weak point. Find out what this weak point is, and drop into it the seed of the appropriate fallacy, and the result will exceed your fondest anticipation.

“Again with the reader’s kind permission, I will stray from the field of botany; this time into that of personal experience. At the risk of falling into obsolete and discredited methods of instruction, I will ask you for the moment to look in and not out.

“Dear Reader, often, when reasoning with yourself, especially about your own conduct, you have found comfort in a syllogism like this:—

I like to do right.
I do what I like.
Therefore, I do what is right.

The conclusion is so satisfactory that you have no heart to look too narrowly at the process by which it is attained. When you do what you like, it is pleasant to think that righteousness is a by-product of your activity. Moreover, there is a native generosity about you which makes you willing to share with others the more lasting benefits which may ensue. You are ready to believe that what is profitable to you must also be profitable to them in the long run,—if not in a material, then in a spiritual way. All the advantage that comes to you is merely temporary and personal. When you have reaped this scanty harvest, you do not begrudge to humanity in general its plentiful gleanings. In your altruistic mood you do not consider too carefully the particular blessing which your action has bestowed on the world; you are content with the thought that it is a good diffused.

“When out of what is in the beginning only a personal gratification there grows a cosmic law, we have the Argumentum ad Hominem. There are few greater pleasures in life than that of having all our preferences justified by our reason. There are some persons who are so susceptible to arguments of this kind that they never suffer from the sensation of having done something wrong,—a sensation which I can assure you is quite disagreeable. They might suspect they had done wrong, were it not that as soon as they begin to reason about it they perceive that all that happened was highly to their credit. The more they think about it, the more pleased they are with themselves. They perceive that their action was much more disinterested than, at the time, they intended. They are like a person who tumbles into the Dead Sea. He can’t go under even if he tries. It is, of course, a matter of specific gravity. When a conscience is of less specific gravity than the moral element into which it is cast, it cannot remain submerged. The fortunate owner of such a conscience watches it with satisfaction when it serenely bobs to the surface; he advertises its superlative excellence,—‘Perfectly Pure! It floats.’

“The great use of the ad hominem argument is like that of certain leguminous plants which enrich the soil by giving to it elements in which it had been previously lacking. After a crop of ad hominem arguments has grown and been turned under, we may expect a rich harvest of more commercially valuable fallacies in the next season. To thus enrich the soil is an evidence of the skill of the culturist.

“Suppose, for example, you were to attempt to implant this proposition in the unprepared mind of an acquaintance, ‘All geese are swans.’ The proposition is not well received. All your friend’s ornithological prejudices are against it. There is no foodstuff to support your theory.

“But suppose you prepare the soil by a crop of the ad hominem argument. You say to your friend, after looking admiringly at his possessions, ‘It seems to me that all your geese are swans.’ He answers cordially, ‘That’s just what I was thinking myself.’ Now you have nicely prepared the ground for further operations.

“While controversial theologians have always had a fondness for arguments in a circle, the ad hominem arguments have been largely cultivated by politicians. More than a generation ago Jeremy Bentham published a work called ‘Political Fallacies.’ He described those that are indigenous to the British Isles. Almost all on his list were of the ad hominem variety. He described particularly those which could be grown to advantage in the Houses of Parliament. Since Bentham’s day, much has been done in America in the way of propagating new varieties. Many of these, though widely advertised, have not yet been scientifically described. I have thought that if my present book is well received, I might publish another covering this ground. It will probably be entitled, ‘Reasoning for Profit; or Success with Small Fallacies.’

“The great essential in arguments of this kind is to have a thorough knowledge of the soil. Given the right soil, and the most feeble argument will flourish. Take, for example, the arguments for the divine right of kings to rule, once much esteemed by court preachers. Of course the first necessity was to catch your kings. The arguments in themselves were singularly feeble, but they flourished mightily in the hotbeds of royalty. The trouble was that they did not bear transplanting.

“Half a century ago there were a dozen thrifty arguments for human slavery. They are, abstractly speaking, as good now as they ever were, but they have altogether passed out of cultivation.

“In landscape gardening groups of the ad hominem arguments skillfully arranged are always charming. Much discrimination is needed for the adornment of any particular spot. Suppose you were called upon to furnish fallacies for an Amalgamated Society of Esoteric Astrologers. You might safely, in such fertile soil and tropical climate, plant the most luxuriant exotics. Such airy growths, however, would be obviously inappropriate for a commercial club composed of solid business men. You would for them choose rather a sturdy perennial, for example, the argumentum ad Pennsylvaniam, or tariff-bearing argument.

“It grows thus:—

The tariff is that which conduces to our prosperity.
A tax does not conduce to our prosperity.
Therefore, a tariff is not a tax.

“Persons who have confined their logical exercises to the task of convincing impartial minds have no idea of the exhilaration which comes when one has only to convince a person of the wisdom of a course of action he has already taken. There is really no comparison between the two. There is all the difference that there is between climbing an icy hill and sliding down the same hill on a toboggan. There is no intellectual sport equal to that of tobogganing from a lofty moral premise to a congenial practical conclusion. We go so fast that we hardly know how we got to the bottom, but there we are, safe and sound. We have only to choose our company and hold on; gravitation does the rest. It is astonishing what conclusions we can come to when we do our reasoning in this pleasantly gregarious fashion.

“Ignoratio Elenchi, or the fallacy of irrelevant conclusion. This is not a natural species, but the result of artifice. It is a familiar kind of argument. It begins well, and it ends well, but you have a feeling that something has happened to it in the middle. You have noticed in the orchard an apple tree that starts out to be a Pippin, but when the time comes for it to bear fruit it has apparently changed its mind, and has concluded to be a Rhode Island Greening. Of course you are aware that it has not really changed its mind, for the laws of Nature are quite invariable. The whimsicality of its conduct is to be laid not upon Nature, but upon Art. The gardener has skillfully grafted one stock upon another. The same thing can be done with an argument. You have often observed the way in which a person will start out to prove one proposition and after a little while end up with the triumphant demonstration of something that is quite different. He shows such an ability at ratiocination that you cannot help admiring his reasoning powers, though it is hard to follow him. Your bewilderment comes from the fact that you had expected the original seedling to bring forth after its kind, and had not noticed the point where the scion of a new proposition had been grafted on.

“Many persons are not troubled at all when the conclusions are irrelevant. They rather like them that way. If an argument will not prove one thing, then let it prove another. It is all in the day’s work. To persons with this tolerant taste the variety afforded by the use of the ignoratio elenchi is very pleasing.”

A chapter is given to the Cross-fertilization of Fallacies. The author shows how two half-truths brought together from two widely separated fields of thought will produce a new and magnificently variegated form of opinion. The hybrid will surpass specimens of either of the parent stocks both in size and showiness. Thus a half-truth of popular religion cross-fertilized by a half-truth of popular science will produce a hybrid which astonishes both the religious and the scientific world. If we were following the analogy of mathematics we might assume that two half-truths would make a whole truth. But when we are dealing with the marvelous reproductive powers of nature we find that they make much more than that.

Scholasticus gives a page or two to the Dwarfing of Arguments. “The complaint is sometimes heard that an argument which is otherwise satisfactory proves too much. This may seem a good fault to those whose chief difficulty is in making their arguments prove anything at all. But I assure you that it is really very troublesome to find that you have proved more than you intended. You may have no facilities for dealing with the surplus conclusions, and you may find all your plans disarranged. For this reason many persons, instead of cultivating arguments of the standard sizes which take a good deal of room, prefer the dwarf varieties. These are very convenient where one does not wish one principle to crowd out another that may be opposed to it. Persons inclined to moderation prefer to cultivate a number of good ideas without crowding. The dwarf varieties are pleasing to the cultivated taste, as they are generally exceedingly symmetrical, while full-grown ideas, especially in exposed places, are apt to impress one as being scraggly.

“Dean Swift, who had no taste for miniature excellencies, spoke scornfully of those who plant oaks in flower-pots. I have, however, frequently seen very pleasing oaks grown in this way, and they were not in very big flower-pots, either.

“In moral reasoning, it is especially difficult to keep our conclusions moderate enough for our convenience. An ordinary argument always tends to prove too much. This is disconcerting to those who are endeavoring to live up to their favorite text, ‘Be not overmuch righteous.’ The danger of overmuchness is obviated by cultivating the fashionable dwarf varieties of righteousness.

“Various methods of dwarfing are practiced with success. Training will do much; you have seen trees dwarfed by tying them to a trellis or against a wall or to stakes, and preventing their growth beyond the prescribed limits. Incessant pruning is necessary, and each new growth must be vigorously headed back. By using the same means we may cultivate a number of fine ideas, and at the same time keep them fairly small.”

The least satisfactory chapter is that on Pests. “It is easy enough,” says Scholasticus, “to describe a pest, but it is another matter to get rid of it. The most painstaking fallacy culturist must expect to awake some morning and behold his choicest arguments laid low by some new kind of critic. There seems to be no limit to the pestiferous activity of these creatures. They are of two kinds: those that bite, cutting off the roots of the argument, and those that suck out the juices. These latter destroy the vital tissue of inference on which everything depends. I never met any one who cultivated arguments on a large scale who did not have his tale of woe.

“I had at one time a theological friend who had great reputation as a dogmatist. He had for many years a garden of fallacies which was one of the show places. It was in a sheltered situation, so that many fine old dogmas flourished which we do not often, in these days, see growing out of doors. Everything went well until the locality became infested with destructive criticism. He tried all the usual remedies without success. At last he became utterly discouraged, and cut out all the dead wood, and uprooted all the dogmas that were attacked by the pest. Since then he has given up his more ambitious plans, and he has only a simple little place where he cultivates those fruits of the spirit which are not affected by destructive criticism. It is only fair to say that he is making a very pleasant place of it.

“For the encouragement of those who are not ready to take such heroic methods, it may be said that eternal vigilance, though not a panacea, will do much. Some of the most dreaded species of critics are not so dangerous as they seem. Many persons fear the Criticus Academicus. I have, however, seen fallacies which survived the attacks of this species and fell easy victims to the more troublesome Criticus Vulgaris, or Common Gumption.

“The worst pest is what is known as the Reductio ad Absurdum. This is a kind of scale which grows upon a promising argument and eats out its life. It is so innocent in its appearance that at first one does not suspect its deadly character. In fact, it is sometimes taken as an agreeable ornament. After a little while the argument is covered over with a sort of dry humor. There is then no remedy.”

In the chapter on the use of artificial fertilizers, Scholasticus deals particularly with statistics. He refers incidentally to their use in the cultivation of valid arguments. Their importance here is universally acknowledged. “It should be remembered,” he says, “that in this case success depends upon the extreme care with which they are used. An unusual amount of discrimination is demanded in their application. For this reason, if solid conclusions, that head well, are expected, only experts of good character can be trusted to do the work.