Practical Essays by Alexander Bain (best electronic book reader TXT) 📕

condition, and the severity dies away. What is called on these occasions the "force of custom" is the application of the law of Accommodation, or Relativity modified by habit.

[RELATIVITY IN PLEASURES.]

It is a familiar experience of mankind, yet hard to realise upon mere testimony, that the pleasures of rest, repose, retirement, are wholly relative to foregone labour and toil; after the first shock of transition, they are less and less felt, and can be renewed only after a renewal of the contrasting experience. The description, in "Paradise Lost," of the delicious repose of Adam and Eve in Eden is fallacious; the poet credits them with an intensity of pleasure attainable only by the brow-sweating labourer under the curse.

The delights of Knowledge are relative to previous Ignorance; for, although the possession of knowledge is in many ways a lasting good, yet the full intensity of the charm is felt only at the moment of passing from mystery to explanation, from blankness of impression to intellectual attainment. This form of the pleasure is sustained only by new acquisitions and new discoveries. Moreover, in the minor forms of the gratification due to knowledge, we never escape the law of relativity; the "power" delights us by relation to our previous impotence. Plato supposed that, in knowledge, we have an example of a _pure_ pleasure, meaning one that had no reference to foregone privation or pain; but such "purity" would be a barren fact, not unlike the pure air of a bladeless and waterless desert. A state of uninterrupted good health, although a prime condition of enjoyment, is of itself a state of neutrality or indifference. The man that has never been ill cannot sing the joys of health; the exultation of that strain is attainable only by the valetudinarian.

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These examples have been remarked upon in every age. It is the moral weakness of being carried away by a present strong feeling, as if the state would last for ever, that blinds each of us in turn to the stern reality of the fact. There are, however, numerous instances, coming under Relativity, wherein the indispensable correlative is more or less dropped out of sight and disavowed. These are the proper errors or fallacies of Relativity, a branch of the comprehensive class termed "Fallacies of Confusion". The object of the present essay is to exhibit a few of these errors as they occur in questions of practical moment.

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When it is said, as by Carlyle and others, "speech is silvern, silence is golden," there is implied a condition of things where speech has been in excess; and but for this excess, the assertion is untrue. One might as well talk of the delights of hunger, or of cold, or of solitary confinement, on the ground of there being times when food, warmth, or society may be in excess, and when the opposing states would be a joyful change.

The Relativity of Pleasures, although admitted in many individual cases, has often been misconceived. The view is sometimes expressed, that there can be no pleasure without a previous pain; but this goes beyond the exigencies of the principle. We cannot go on for ever with any delight; but mere remission, without any counterpart pain, is enough for our entering with zest on many of our pleasures. A healthy man enjoys his meals without any sensible previous pain of hunger. We do not need to have been miserable for some time as a preparation for the reading of a new poem. It is true that if the sense of privation has been acute, the pleasure is proportionally increased; and that few pleasures of any great intensity grow up from indifference: still, remission and alternation may give a zest for enjoyment without any consciousness of pain.

The principle of Comparison is capriciously made use of by Paley, in his account of the elements of Happiness. He applies it forcibly and felicitously to depreciate certain pleasures--as greatness, rank, and station--and withholds its application from the pleasures that he more particularly countenances,--namely, the social affections, the exercise of the faculties, and health.

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[SIMPLICITY OF STYLE A RELATIVE MERIT.]

The great praise often accorded to Simplicity of Style, in literature, is an example of the suppression of the correlative in a case of mutual relationship. Simplicity is not an absolute merit; it is frequently a merit by correlation. Thus, if a certain subject has never been treated except in abstruse and difficult terminology, a man of surpassing literary powers, setting it forth in homely and intelligible language, produces a work whose highest praise is expressed by Simplicity. Again, after the last century period of artificial, complex, and highly-wrought composition, the reaction of Cowper and Wordsworth in favour of simplicity was an agreeable and refreshing change, and was in great part acceptable because of the change. It does not appear that Wordsworth comprehended this obvious fact; to him, a simplicity that cost nothing to the composer, and brought no novelty to the reader, had still a transcendent merit.

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It has been a frequent practice of late years to celebrate the praises of Knowledge. Many eloquent speakers have dilated on the happiness and the superiority of the enlightened and the cultivated man. Now, the correlative or obverse must be equally true: there must be a corresponding degradation and disqualification attaching to ignorance and the want of instruction. This correlative and equally cogent statement is suppressed on certain occasions, and by persons that would not demur to the praises of knowledge: as, when we are told of the native good sense, the untaught sagacity, the admirable instincts of the people,--that is, of the ignorant or the uneducated. Hence the great value of the expository device of following up every principle with its, counter-statement, the matter denied when the principle is affirmed. If knowledge is a thing superlatively good, ignorance--the opposite of knowledge--is a thing superlatively bad. There is no middle standing ground.

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In the way that people use the argument from Authority, there is often an unfelt contradiction from not adverting to the correlative implication. If I lay stress upon some one's authority as lending weight to my opinion, I ought to be equally moved in the opposite direction when the same authority is against me. The common case, however, is to make a great flourish when the authority is one way, and to ignore it when it is the other way. This is especially the fashion in dealing with the ancient philosophers. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are quoted with much complacency when they chime in with a modern view; but, in points where they contradict our cherished sentiments, we treat them with a kind of pity as half-informed pagans. It is not seen that men liable to such gross errors as they are alleged to have committed--say on Ethics--are by that fact deprived of all weight in allied subjects, as, for example, Politics--in which Aristotle is still quoted as an authority.

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[DIGNITY OF ALL LABOUR ABSURD.]

Many of the sins against Relativity can be traced to rhetorical exaggeration. Some remarkable instances of this can be cited.

When a system of ranks and dignities has once been established, there are associations of dignity and of indignity with different conditions and occupations. It is more dignified to serve in the army than to engage in trade; to be a surgeon is more honourable than to be a watchmaker. In this state of things a fervid rhetorician, eager to redress the inequalities of mankind, starts forth to preach the dignity of _all_ labour. The device is a self-contradiction. Make all labour alike dignified, and nothing is dignified; you simply abolish dignity by depriving it of the contrast that it subsists upon.

Pope's lines--


Honour and shame from no condition rise;
Act well your part; there all the honour lies--


cannot be exempted from the fallacy of self-contradiction. Differences of condition are made by differences in the degree of honour thereto attached. If every man that did his work well were put on a level, in point of honour, with every other man that did the same; if the gatekeeper of a mansion, by being unfailingly punctual in opening the gate, were to be equally honoured with a great leader of the House of Commons, then, indeed, equality of pay would be the only thing wanted to abolish all differences of condition. There is, no doubt, in society, a quantity of misplaced honour; but so long as there are employments exceptionally arduous, and virtues signally beneficent in their operation, honour is a legitimate spur and reward, and should be graduated according to the desert in each case.

In spurring the ardour of youth to studious exertion, it is common to repeat the Homeric maxim, "to supplant every one else, and stand out first". The stimulating effect is undoubted; it is strong rhetorical brandy. Yet only one man can be first, and the exhortation is given simultaneously to a thousand.[5]

[JUSTICE ADMIRABLE ONLY IF RECIPROCATED.]

In the discussion and inculcation of the moral duties and virtues, there has been, in all ages, a tendency to suppress correlative facts, and to affirm unconditionally what is true only with a condition. Thus, the admirable nature of Justice, and the happiness of the Just man, are a proper theme to be extolled with all the power of eloquence. It has been so with every civilized people, pagan as well as Christian. In the dialogues of Plato, justice is a prominent subject, and is adorned with the full splendour of his genius. Aristotle, in one of the few moments when he rises to poetry, pronounces justice "greater than the evening-star or the morning-star". Now all this panegyric is admissible only on the supposition of _reciprocal_ justice. Plato, indeed, had the hardihood to say that the just man is happy in himself, and by reason of his justice, even although others are unjust to him; but the position is untenable. A man is happy in his justice if it procure for him justice in return; as a citizen is happy in his civil obedience, if it gain him protection in return. There are two parties in the case, and the moralist should obtain access to both; he should induce the one to fulfil his share before promising to the other the happiness of justice and obedience. It may be rhetorical, but it is not true, that justice will make a man happy in a society where it is