Part 5
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
[Illustration]
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.