Taking the paper with him Mr. Carey retired to his study. Philip changed
his chair for that in which his uncle had been sitting (it was the only
comfortable one in the room), and looked out of the window at the pouring
rain. Even in that sad weather there was something restful about the green
fields that stretched to the horizon. There was an intimate charm in the
landscape which he did not remember ever to have noticed before. Two years
in France had opened his eyes to the beauty of his own countryside.
He thought with a smile of his uncle's remark. It was lucky that the turn
of his mind tended to flippancy. He had begun to realise what a great loss
he had sustained in the death of his father and mother. That was one of
the differences in his life which prevented him from seeing things in the
same way as other people. The love of parents for their children is the
only emotion which is quite disinterested. Among strangers he had grown up
as best he could, but he had seldom been used with patience or
forbearance. He prided himself on his self-control. It had been whipped
into him by the mockery of his fellows. Then they called him cynical and
callous. He had acquired calmness of demeanour and under most
circumstances an unruffled exterior, so that now he could not show his
feelings. People told him he was unemotional; but he knew that he was at
the mercy of his emotions: an accidental kindness touched him so much that
sometimes he did not venture to speak in order not to betray the
unsteadiness of his voice. He remembered the bitterness of his life at
school, the humiliation which he had endured, the banter which had made
him morbidly afraid of making himself ridiculous; and he remembered the
loneliness he had felt since, faced with the world, the disillusion and
the disappointment caused by the difference between what it promised to
his active imagination and what it gave. But notwithstanding he was able
to look at himself from the outside and smile with amusement.
"By Jove, if I weren't flippant, I should hang myself," he thought
cheerfully.
His mind went back to the answer he had given his uncle when he asked him
what he had learnt in Paris. He had learnt a good deal more than he told
him. A conversation with Cronshaw had stuck in his memory, and one phrase
he had used, a commonplace one enough, had set his brain working.
"My dear fellow," Cronshaw said, "there's no such thing as abstract
morality."
When Philip ceased to believe in Christianity he felt that a great weight
was taken from his shoulders; casting off the responsibility which weighed
down every action, when every action was infinitely important for the
welfare of his immortal soul, he experienced a vivid sense of liberty. But
he knew now that this was an illusion. When he put away the religion in
which he had been brought up, he had kept unimpaired the morality which
was part and parcel of it. He made up his mind therefore to think things
out for himself. He determined to be swayed by no prejudices. He swept
away the virtues and the vices, the established laws of good and evil,
with the idea of finding out the rules of life for himself. He did not
know whether rules were necessary at all. That was one of the things he
wanted to discover. Clearly much that seemed valid seemed so only because
he had been taught it from his earliest youth. He had read a number of
books, but they did not help him much, for they were based on the morality
of Christianity; and even the writers who emphasised the fact that they
did not believe in it were never satisfied till they had framed a system
of ethics in accordance with that of the Sermon on the Mount. It seemed
hardly worth while to read a long volume in order to learn that you ought
to behave exactly like everybody else. Philip wanted to find out how he
ought to behave, and he thought he could prevent himself from being
influenced by the opinions that surrounded him. But meanwhile he had to go
on living, and, until he formed a theory of conduct, he made himself a
provisional rule.
"Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the
corner."
He thought the best thing he had gained in Paris was a complete liberty of
spirit, and he felt himself at last absolutely free. In a desultory way he
had read a good deal of philosophy, and he looked forward with delight to
the leisure of the next few months. He began to read at haphazard. He
entered upon each system with a little thrill of excitement, expecting to
find in each some guide by which he could rule his conduct; he felt
himself like a traveller in unknown countries and as he pushed forward the
enterprise fascinated him; he read emotionally, as other men read pure
literature, and his heart leaped as he discovered in noble words what
himself had obscurely felt. His mind was concrete and moved with
difficulty in regions of the abstract; but, even when he could not follow
the reasoning, it gave him a curious pleasure to follow the tortuosities
of thoughts that threaded their nimble way on the edge of the
incomprehensible. Sometimes great philosophers seemed to have nothing to
say to him, but at others he recognised a mind with which he felt himself
at home. He was like the explorer in Central Africa who comes suddenly
upon wide uplands, with great trees in them and stretches of meadow, so
that he might fancy himself in an English park. He delighted in the robust
common sense of Thomas Hobbes; Spinoza filled him with awe, he had never
before come in contact with a mind so noble, so unapproachable and
austere; it reminded him of that statue by Rodin, L'Age d'Airain, which
he passionately admired; and then there was Hume: the scepticism of that
charming philosopher touched a kindred note in Philip; and, revelling in
the lucid style which seemed able to put complicated thought into simple
words, musical and measured, he read as he might have read a novel, a
smile of pleasure on his lips. But in none could he find exactly what he
wanted. He had read somewhere that every man was born a Platonist, an
Aristotelian, a Stoic, or an Epicurean; and the history of George Henry
Lewes (besides telling you that philosophy was all moonshine) was there to
show that the thought of each philospher was inseparably connected with
the man he was. When you knew that you could guess to a great extent the
philosophy he wrote. It looked as though you did not act in a certain way
because you thought in a certain way, but rather that you thought in a
certain way because you were made in a certain way. Truth had nothing to
do with it. There was no such thing as truth. Each man was his own
philosopher, and the elaborate systems which the great men of the past had
composed were only valid for the writers.
The thing then was to discover what one was and one's system of philosophy
would devise itself. It seemed to Philip that there were three things to
find out: man's relation to the world he lives in, man's relation with the
men among whom he lives, and finally man's relation to himself. He made an
elaborate plan of study.
The advantage of living abroad is that, coming in contact with the manners
and customs of the people among whom you live, you observe them from the
outside and see that they have not the necessity which those who practise
them believe. You cannot fail to discover that the beliefs which to you
are self-evident to the foreigner are absurd. The year in Germany, the
long stay in Paris, had prepared Philip to receive the sceptical teaching
which came to him now with such a feeling of relief. He saw that nothing
was good and nothing was evil; things were merely adapted to an end. He
read The Origin of Species. It seemed to offer an explanation of much
that troubled him. He was like an explorer now who has reasoned that
certain natural features must present themselves, and, beating up a broad
river, finds here the tributary that he expected, there the fertile,
populated plains, and further on the mountains. When some great discovery
is made the world is surprised afterwards that it was not accepted at
once, and even on those who acknowledge its truth the effect is
unimportant. The first readers of The Origin of Species accepted it with
their reason; but their emotions, which are the ground of conduct, were
untouched. Philip was born a generation after this great book was
published, and much that horrified its contemporaries had passed into the
feeling of the time, so that he was able to accept it with a joyful heart.
He was intensely moved by the grandeur of the struggle for life, and the
ethical rule which it suggested seemed to fit in with his predispositions.
He said to himself that might was right. Society stood on one side, an
organism with its own laws of growth and self-preservation, while the
individual stood on the other. The actions which were to the advantage of
society it termed virtuous and those which were not it called vicious.
Good and evil meant nothing more than that. Sin was a prejudice from which
the free man should rid himself. Society had three arms in its contest
with the individual, laws, public opinion, and conscience: the first two
could be met by guile, guile is the only weapon of the weak against the
strong: common opinion put the matter well when it stated that sin
consisted in being found out; but conscience was the traitor within the
gates; it fought in each heart the battle of society, and caused the
individual to throw himself, a wanton sacrifice, to the prosperity of his
enemy. For it was clear that the two were irreconcilable, the state and
the individual conscious of himself. THAT uses the individual for its
own ends, trampling upon him if he thwarts it, rewarding him with medals,
pensions, honours, when he serves it faithfully; THIS, strong only in
his independence, threads his way through the state, for convenience'
sake, paying in money or service for certain benefits, but with no sense
of obligation; and, indifferent to the rewards, asks only to be left
alone. He is the independent traveller, who uses Cook's tickets because
they save trouble, but looks with good-humoured contempt on the personally
conducted parties. The free man can do no wrong. He does everything he
likes--if he can. His power is the only measure of his morality. He
recognises the laws of the state and he can break them without sense of
sin, but if he is punished he accepts the punishment without rancour.
Society has the power.
But if for the individual there was no right and no wrong, then it seemed
to Philip that conscience lost its power. It was with a cry of triumph
that he seized the knave and flung him from his breast. But he was no
nearer to the meaning of life than he had been before. Why the world was
there and what men had come into existence for at all was as inexplicable
as ever. Surely there must be some reason. He thought of Cronshaw's
parable of the Persian carpet. He offered it as a solution of the riddle,
and mysteriously he stated that it was no answer at all unless you found
it out for yourself.
"I wonder what the devil he meant," Philip smiled.
And so, on the last day of September, eager to put into practice all these
new theories of life, Philip, with sixteen hundred pounds and his
club-foot, set out for the second time to London to make his third start
in life.
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