Positive Liberty

My cyber-colleagues here have been busy addressing the faith or lack thereof of our (Founding) Fathers and about how American religious pluralism plays out in our varied observance, or lack thereof, of what were, once upon a time in a culture far, far away, understood to be primarily if not exclusively Christian holidays. That’s all well and good and I hope they get it all straightened out.

My personal beliefs (or lack thereof) of a religious, spiritual and/or transcendental basis are (1) complicated and (2) none of your business. I often like to quip that I am an Episcopalian which is mighty close to being a Christian (though farther all the time), but even that doesn’t commit me to whatever counts as Episcopalian or Anglican dogma (if there is such a thing, which I doubt). In any case, your spiritual mileage may vary.

This whole business of faith and reason is murky at best. I also like to quip that philosophy is a bit of a mug’s game, and I’m just the sort of mug to make that claim; but I will assert without arguing here that one of the signal philosophical achievements of the 20th century was progress in sorting out how truth assertions about empirical matters differ from truth assertions about purely formal or analytic assertions and especially how normative (ethical and aesthetic) and religious (and philosophical!) claims fall in some sort of ontological and epistemological twilight zone outside and yet related to both.

In the (holiday) spirit of attempting to muddle through the murk just a bit, my Christmas present to you is one of the classic articles of 20th century analytic philosophy, the late John Wisdom’s “Gods.” The article appears here “below the fold,” as it were and, I freely admit, without permission from Wisdom’s literary estate. Sadly, much of Wisdom’s work is out of print now and thus not readily available. Let it be known that I take full responsibility and hereby indemnify my co-bloggers in the event Professor Wisdom’s executors object, in which case I will, of course, promptly remove the article from this site.

[Transcription Note: This article was originally published in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1944. The text here transcribed is from Philosophy and Psycho-Analysis, first California paper-bound printing, 1969. Pagination markers, e.g., "[151]” are to that publication. Any format differences are because of my inability to use HTML code properly. I have made no changes to the original punctuation and spelling although neither comport with modern American usage and some spellings (e.g., Dostoievsky, sceptic) may be somewhat off-putting to the contemporary American reader. At two points in the text I have marked “[sic]” after concluding that they were most likely genuine typographical errors in the original (i.e., reprinted) text. — DAR]

GODS

By John Wisdom

1. The existence of God is not an experimental issue in the way it was. An atheist or agnostic might say to a theist ‘You still think there are spirits in the trees, nymphs in the streams, a God of the world.’ He might say this because he noticed the theist in time of drought pray for rain and make a sacrifice and in the morning look for rain. But disagreement about whether there are gods is now less of this experimental or betting sort than it used to be. This is due in part, if not wholly, to our better knowledge of why things happen as they do.

It is true that even in these days it is seldom that one who believes in God has no hopes or fears which an atheist has not. Few believers now expect prayer to still the waves, but some think it makes a difference to people and not merely in ways the atheist would admit. Of course with people, as opposed to waves and machines, one never knows what they won’t do next, so that expecting prayer to make a difference to them is not so definite a thing as believing in its mechanical efficacy. Still, just as primitive people pray in a business-like way for rain so some people still pray for others with a real feeling of doing something to help. However, in spite of this persistence of an experimental element in some theistic belief, it remains true that Elijah’s method on Mount Carmel of settling the matter of what god or gods exist would be far less appropriate to-day than it was then.

2. Belief in gods is not merely a matter of expectation of a world to come. Someone may say ‘The fact that a theist no more than an atheist expects prayer to bring down fire from heaven or cure the sick does not mean that there is no difference between them as to the facts, it does not mean that the theist has no expectations different from the atheist’s. For very often those who believe in God believe in another world and believe that God is there and that we shall go to that world when we die.’

[150] This is true, but I do not want to consider here expectations as to what one will see and feel after death nor what sort of reasons these logically unique expectations could have. So I want to consider those theists who do not believe in a future life, or rather, I want to consider the differences between atheists and theists in so far as these differences are not a matter of belief in a future life.

3. What are these differences? And is it that theists are superstitious or that atheists are blind? A child may wish to sit a while with his father and he may, when he has done what his father dislikes, fear punishment and feel distress at causing vexation, and while his father is alive he may feel sure of help when danger threatens and feel that there is sympathy for him when disaster has come. When his father is dead he will no longer expect punishment or help. Maybe for a moment an old fear will come or a cry for help escape him, but he will at once remember that this is no good now. He may feel that his father is no more until perhaps someone says to him that his father is still alive though he lives now in another world and one so far away that there is no hope of seeing him or hearing his voice again. The child may be told that nevertheless his father can see him and hear all he says. When he has been told this the child will still fear no punishment nor expect any sign of his father, but now, even more than he did when his father was alive, he will feel that his father sees him all the time and will dread distressing him and when he has done something wrong he will feel separated from his father until he has felt sorry for what he has done. Maybe when he himself comes to die he will be like a man who expects to find a friend in the strange country where he is going, but even when this is so, it is by no means all of what makes the difference between a child who believes that his father lives still in another world and one who does not.

Likewise one who believes in God may face death differently from one who does not, but there is another difference between them besides this. This other difference may still be described as a belief in another world, only this belief is not a matter of expecting one thing rather than another here or hereafter, it is not a matter of a world to come but of a world that now is, though beyond our senses.

[151] We are at once reminded of those other unseen worlds which some philosophers ‘believe in’ and others ‘deny’, while non-philosophers unconsciously ‘accept’ them by using them as models with which to ‘get the hang of’ the patterns in the flux of experience. We recall the timeless entities whose changeless connections we seek to represent in symbols, and the values which stand firm [FN #1 -- In another world, Dr. Joad says in the New Statesman recently.] amidst our flickering satisfaction and remorse, and the physical things which, though not beyond the corruption of moth and rust, are yet more permanent than the shadows they through upon the screen before our minds. We recall, too, our talk of souls and of what lies in their depths and is manifested to us partially and intermittently in our own feelings and the behaviour of others. The hypothesis of mind, of other human minds and of animal minds, is reasonable because it explains for each of us why certain things behave so cunningly all by themselves unlike even the most ingenious machines. Is the hypothesis of minds in flowers and trees reasonable for like reasons – someone who adjusts the blossom to the bees, someone whose presence may at times be felt – in a garden in high summer, in the hills when clouds are gathering, but not, in a cholera epidemic?

4. The question ‘Is belief in gods reasonable?’ has more than one source. It is clear now that in order to grasp fully the logic of belief in divine minds we need to examine the logic of belief in animal and human minds. But we cannot do that here and so for the purposes of this discussion about divine minds let us acknowledge the reasonableness of our belief in human minds without troubling ourselves about its logic. The question of the reasonableness of belief in divine minds then becomes a matter of whether there are facts in nature which support claims about divine minds in the way facts in nature support our claims about human minds.

In this way we resolve the force behind the problem of the existence of gods into two components, one metaphysical and the same which prompts the question ‘Is there ever any behaviour which gives reason to believe in any sort of mind?’ and one which finds expression in ‘Are there any other mind-patterns in [152] nature beside the human and animal patterns which we can all easily detect, and are these other mind-patterns super-human?’

Such over-determination of a question syndrome is common. Thus, the puzzling questions ‘Do dogs think?’, ‘Do animals feel?’ are partly metaphysical puzzles and partly scientific questions. They are not purely metaphysical; for the reports of scientists about the poor performance of cats in cages and old ladies’ stories about the remarkable performances of their pets are not irrelevant. But nor are these questions purely scientific; for the stories never settle them and therefore they have other sources. One other source is the metaphysical source we have already noticed, namely, the difficulty about getting behind an animal’s behaviour to its mind, whether it is a non-human animal or a human one.

But there’s a third component in the force behind these questions, these disputes have a third source, and it is one which is important in the dispute which finds expression in the words ‘I believe in God’, ‘I do not.’ This source comes out well if we consider the question ‘Do flowers feel?’ Like the questions about dogs and animals this question about flowers comes partly from the difficulty we sometimes feel over inference from any behaviour to thought or feeling and partly from ignorance as to what behaviour is to be found. But these questions, as opposed to a like question about human beings, come also from hesitation as to whether the behaviour in question is enough mind-like, that is, is it enough similar to or superior to human behaviour to be called ‘mind-proving’? Likewise, even when we are satisfied that human behaviour shows mind and even when we have learned whatever mind-suggesting things there are in nature which are not explained by human and animal minds, we may still ask ‘But are these things sufficiently striking to be called a mind-pattern? Can we fairly call them manifestations of a divine being?

‘The question’, someone may say, ‘has then become merely a matter of the application of a name. And “What’s in a name?”‘

5. But the line between a question of fact and a question or decision as to the application of a name is not so simple as this way of putting things suggests. The question ‘What’s in a name?’ is engaging because we are inclined to answer both ‘Nothing’ and ‘Very much’. And this ‘Very much’ has more than one source. We might have tried to comfort Heloise by saying ‘It isn’t that [153] Abelard no longer loves you, for this man isn’t Abelard’; we might have said to poor Mr. Tebrick in Mr. Garnett’s Lady into Fox ‘But this is no longer Silvia’. But if Mr. Tebrick replied ‘Ah, but it is!’ this might come not at all from observing facts about the fox which we have not observed, but from noticing facts about the fox which we had missed, although we had in a sense observed all that Mr. Tebrick had observed. It is possible to have before one’s eyes all the items of a pattern and still to miss the pattern. Consider the following conversation:

‘”And I think Kay and I are pretty happy. We’ve always been happy.”

‘Bill lifted up his glass and put it down without drinking.

‘”Would you mind saying that again?” he asked.

‘”I don’t see what’s so queer about it. Taken all in all, Kay and I have really been happy.”

‘”All right,” Bill said gently, “Just tell me how you and Kay have been happy.”

‘Bill had a way of being amused by things which I could not understand.

‘”It’s a little hard to explain,” I said. “It’s like taking a lot of numbers that don’t look alike and that don’t mean anything until you add them all together.”

‘I stopped, because I hadn’t meant to talk to him about Kay and me.

‘”Go ahead,” Bill said. “What about the numbers.” And he began to smile.

‘”I don’t know why you think it’s funny,” I said. “All the things that two people do together, to people like Kay and me, add up to something. There are the kids and the house and the dog and all the people we have known and all the times we’ve been out to dinner. Of course, Kay and I do quarrel sometimes but when you add it all together, all if it isn’t as bad as the parts of it seem. I mean, maybe that’s all there is to anybody’s life.”

‘Bill poured himself another drink. He seemed about to say something and checked himself. He kept looking at me’

[FN #2 -- H. M. Pulham, Esq., p. 320, by John P. Marquand.]

Or again, suppose two people are speaking of two characters in a story which both have read [FN #3 -- e.g. Havelock Ellis's autobiography.] or of two friends which both [154] have known, and one says ‘Really she hated him’, and the other says ‘She didn’t, she loved him’. Then the first may have noticed what the other has not although he knows no incident in the lives of the people they are talking about which the other doesn’t know too, and the second speaker may say ‘She didn’t, she loved him’ because he hasn’t noticed what the first noticed, although he can remember every incident the first can remember. But then again he may say ‘She didn’t, she loved him’ not because he hasn’t noticed the patterns in time which the first has noticed but because though he has noticed them he doesn’t feel he still needs to emphasize them with ‘Really she hated him’. The line between using a name because of how we feel and because of what we have noticed isn’t sharp. ‘A difference as to the facts’. ‘a discovery’, ‘a revelation’, these phrases cover many things. Discoveries have been made not only by Christopher Columbus and Pasteur, but also by Tolstoy and Dostoievsky and Freud. Things are revealed to us not only by the scientists with microscopes, but also by the poets, the prophets, and the painters. What is so isn’t merely a matter of ‘the facts’, For sometimes when there is agreement as to the facts there is still argument as to whether defendant did or did not ‘exercise reasonable care’, was or was not ‘negligent’.

And though we shall need to emphasize how much ‘There is a God’ evinces an attitude to the familiar [FN #4 -- 'Persuasive Definitions', Mind, July, 1938, by Charles Leslie Stevenson, should be read here. It is very good.] we shall find in the end that it also evinces some recognition of patterns in time easily missed and that, therefore, differences as to there being any gods is in part a difference as to what is so and therefore as to the facts, though not in the simple ways which first occurred to us.

6. Let us now approach these points by a different road.

6.1. How it is that an explanatory hypothesis, such as the existence of God, may start by being experimental and gradually become something quite different can be seen from the following story:

Two people return to their long neglected garden and find among the weeds a few of the old plants surprisingly vigorous. One says to the other ‘It must be that a gardener has been coming and doing something about these plants’. Upon inquiry they find that no neighbour has ever seen anyone at work in their garden. [155] The first man says to the other ‘He must have worked while people slept’. The other says ‘No, someone would have heard him and besides, anybody who cared about the plants would have kept down those weeds’. The first man says ‘Look at the way these are arranged. There is purpose and a feeling of beauty here. I believe that someone comes, someone invisible to mortal eyes. I believe that the more carefully we look the more we shall find confirmation of this’. They examine the garden ever so carefully and sometimes they come on new things suggesting that a gardener comes and sometimes they come on new things suggesting the contrary and even that a malicious person has been at work. Besides examining the garden carefully they also study what happens to gardens left without attention. Each learns all the other learns about this and about the garden. Consequently, when after all this, one says ‘I still believe a gardener comes’ while the other says ‘I don’t’ their different words now reflect no difference as to what they have found in the garden, no difference as to what they would find in the garden if they looked further and no difference about how fast untended gardens fall into disorder. At this stage, in this context, the gardener hypothesis has ceased to be experimental, the difference between one who accepts and one who rejects it is now not a matter of the one expecting something the other does not expect. What is the difference between them? The one says ‘A gardener comes unseen and unheard. He is manifested only in his works with which we are all familiar’, the other says ‘There is no gardener’ and with this difference in what they say about the gardener goes a difference in how they feel toward the garden, in spite of the fact that neither expects anything of it which the other does not expect.

But is this the whole difference between them – that the one calls the garden by one name and feels one way towards it, while the other calls it by another name and feels in another way towards it? And if this is what the difference has become then is it any longer appropriate to ask ‘Which is right?’ or ‘Which is reasonable?’

And yet surely such questions are appropriate when one person says to another ‘You still think the world’s a garden and not a wilderness, and that the gardener has not forsaken it’ or ‘You still [156] think there are nymphs of the streams, a presence in the hills, a spirit of the world’. Perhaps when a man sings ‘God’s in His heaven’ we need not take this as more than an expression of how he feels. But when Bishop Gore or Dr. Joad write about belief in God and young men read them in order to settle their religious doubts the impression is not simply that of persons choosing exclamations with which to face nature and the ‘changes and chances of this mortal life’. The disputants speak as if they are concerned with a matter of scientific fact, or of trans-sensual, trans-scientific and metaphysical fact, but still of fact and still a matter about which reasons for and against may be offered, although no scientific reasons in the sense of field surveys for fossils or experiments on delinquents are to the point.

6.2. Now can an interjection have a logic? Can the manifestation of an attitude in the utterance of a word, in the application of a name, have a logic? When all the facts are known how can there still be a question of fact? How can there still be a question? Surely as Hume says ‘… after every circumstance, every relation is known, the understanding has no further room to operate’? [FN #5 -- Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. Appendix I.]

6.3. When the madness of these questions leaves us for a moment we can all easily recollect disputes which though they cannot be settled by experiment are yet disputes in which one party may be right and the other wrong and in which both parties may offer reasons and the one better reasons than the other. This may happen in pure and applied mathematics and logic. Two accountants or two engineers provided with the same data may reach different results and this difference is resolved not be collecting further data but by going over the calculations again. Such differences indeed share with differences as to what will win a race, the honour of being among the most ’settlable’ disputes in the language.

6.4. But it won’t do to describe the theistic issue as one settlable by such calculation, or as one about what can be deduced in this vertical fashion from the facts we know. No doubt dispute about God has sometimes, perhaps especially in mediaeval times, been carried on in this fashion. But nowadays it is not and we must look for some other analogy, some other case in which a dispute is settled but not by experiment.

[157] 6.5. In courts of law it sometimes happens that opposing counsel are agreed as to the facts and are not trying to settle a question of further fact, are not trying to settle whether the man who admittedly had quarreled with the deceased did or did not murder him, but are concerned with whether Mr. A who admittedly handed his long-trusted clerk signed blank cheques did or did not exercise reasonable care, whether a ledger is or is not a document, [FN #6 --The Times, March 2nd, 1945. Also in The Times of June 13th, 1945, contrast the case of Hannah v. Peel with that of the cruiser cut in two by a liner. In the latter case there is not agreement as to the facts. See also the excellent articles by Dr. Glanville L. Williams in the Law Quarterly Review, 'Language and the Law', January, and April 1945, and 'The Doctrine of Repugnancy', October, 1943, January, 1944, and April, 1944. The author, having set out how arbitrary are many legal decisions, needs now to set out how far from arbitrary they are - if his readers are ready for the next phase in the dialectic process.] whether a certain body was or was not a public authority.

In such cases we notice that the process of argument is not a chain of demonstrative reasoning. It is a presenting and representing of those features of the case which severally co-operate in favour of the conclusion, in favour of saying what the reasoner wishes said, in favour of calling the situation by the name by which he wishes to call it. The reasons are like the legs of a chair, not the links of a chain. Consequently although the discussion is a priori and the steps are not a matter of experience, the procedure resembles scientific argument in that the reasoning is not vertically extensive but horizontally extensive – it is a matter of the cumulative effect of several independent premises, not of the repeated transformation of one or two. And because the premises are severally inconclusive the process of deciding the issue becomes a matter of weighing the cumulative effect of one group of severally inconclusive items against the cumulative effect of another group of severally inconclusive items, and thus lends itself to description in terms of conflicting ‘probabilities’. This encourages the feeling that the issue is one of fact – that it is a matter of guessing from the premises at a further fact, at what is to come. But this is a muddle. The dispute does not cease to be a priori because it is a matter of the cumulative effect of severally inconclusive premises. The logic of the dispute is not that of a chain of deductive reasoning as in a mathematical calculation. But nor is it a matter of collecting from several inconclusive items of [158] information an expectation as to something further, as when a doctor from a patient’s symptoms guesses at what is wrong, or a detective from many clues guesses the criminal. It has its own sort of logic and its own sort of end – the solution of the question at issue is a decision, a ruling by the judge. But it is not an arbitrary decision though the rational connections are neither quite like those in vertical deductions nor like those in inductions in which from many signs we guess at what is to come; and though the decision manifests itself in the application of a name it is n o more merely the application of a name than is the pinning on of a medal merely the pinning on of a bit of metal. Whether a lion with stripes is a tiger or a lion is, if you like, merely a matter of the application of a name. Whether Mr. So-and-So of whose conduct we have so complete a record did or did not exercise reasonable care is not merely a matter of the application of a name or, if we choose to say it is, then we must remember that with this name a game is lost and won and a game with very heavy stakes. With the judges’ choice of a name for the facts goes an attitude, and the declaration, the ruling, is an exclamation evincing that attitude. But it is an exclamation which not only has a purpose but also has a logic, a logic surprisingly like that of ‘futile’, ‘deplorable’, ‘graceful’, ‘grand’, ‘divine’.

6.6. Suppose two people are looking at a picture or natural scene. One says ‘Excellent’ or ‘Beautiful’ or ‘Divine’; the other says ‘I don’t see it’. He means he doesn’t see the beauty. And this reminds us of how we felt the theist accuse the atheist of blindness and the atheist accuse the theist of seeing what isn’t there. And yet surely each sees what the other sees. It isn’t that one can see part of the picture which the other can’t see. So the difference is in a sense not one as to the facts. And so it cannot be removed by the one disputant discovering to the other what so far he hasn’t seen. It isn’t that the one sees the picture in a different light and so, as we might say, sees a different picture. Consequently the difference between them cannot be resolved by putting the picture in a different light. And yet surely this is just what can be done in such a case – not be moving the picture but by talk perhaps. To settle a dispute as to whether a piece of music is good or better than another we listen again, with a [159] picture we look again. Someone perhaps points to emphasize certain features and we see it in a different light. Shall we call this ‘field work’ and ‘the last of observation’ or shall we call it ‘reviewing the premises’ and the beginning of deduction (horizontal)’?

If in spite of all this we choose to say that a difference as to whether a thing is beautiful is not a factual difference we must be careful to remember that there is a procedure for settling these differences and that this consists not only in reasoning and redescription as in the legal case, but also in a more literal re-setting-before with re-looking or re-listening.

6.7. And if we say as we did at the beginning that when a difference as to the existence of a God is not one as to future happenings then it is not experimental and therefore not as to the facts, we must not forthwith assume that there is no right and wrong about it, no rationality or irrationality, no appropriateness or inappropriateness, no procedure which tends to settle it, nor even that this procedure is in no sense a discovery of new facts. After all even in science this is not so. Our two gardeners even when they had reached the stage when neither expected any experimental result which the other did not, might yet have continued the dispute, each presenting and representing the features of the garden favouring his hypothesis, that is, fitting his model for describing the accepted fact; each emphasizing the pattern he wishes to emphasize. True, in science, there is seldom or never a pure instance of this sort of dispute, for nearly always with difference of hypothesis goes some difference of expectation as to the facts. But scientists argue about rival hypotheses with a vigour which is not exactly proportioned to difference in expectations of experimental results.

The difference as to whether a God exists involves our feelings more than most scientific disputes and in this respect is more like a difference as to whether there is beauty in a thing.

7. The Connecting Technique. Let us consider again the technique used in revealing or proving beauty, in removing a blindness, in inducing an attitude which is lacking, in reducing a reaction that is inappropriate. Besides running over in a special way the features of the picture, tracing the rhythms, making sure that this and that are not only seen but noticed, and their relation to each other – besides all this – there are other things we can do [160] to justify our attitude and alter that of the man who cannot see. For features of the picture may be brought out by setting beside it other pictures; just as the merits of an argument may be brought out, proved, by setting beside it other arguments, in which striking but irrelevant features of the original are changed and relevant features emphasized; just as the merits and demerits of a line of action may be brought out by setting beside it other actions. To use Susan Stebbing’s example: Nathan brought out for David certain features of what David had done in the matter of Uriah the Hittite by telling him a story about two sheep-owners. This is the kind of thing we very often do when someone is ‘inconsistent’ or ‘unreasonable’. This is what we do in referring to other cases in law. The paths we need to trace from other cases to the case in question are often numerous and difficult to detect and the person with whom we are discussing the matter may well draw attention to connections which, while not incompatible with those we have tried to emphasize, are of an opposite inclination. A may have noticed in B subtle and hidden likenesses to an angel and reveal these to C, while C has noticed in B subtle and hidden likenesses to a devil which he reveals to A.

Imagine that a man picks up some flowers that lie half withered on a table and gently puts them in water. Another man says to him ‘You believe flowers feel’. He says this although he know,[sic] that the man who helps the flowers doesn’t expect anything of them which he himself doesn’t expect, for he himself expects to flowers to be ‘refreshed’ and to be easily hurt, injured, I mean, by rough handling, while the man who puts them in water does not expect them to whisper ‘Thank you’. The Sceptic says ‘You believe flowers feel’ because something about the way the other man lifts the flowers and puts them in water suggests an attitude to the flowers which he feels inappropriate although perhaps he would not feel it inappropriate to butterflies. He feels that this attitude to flowers is somewhat crazy just as it is sometimes felt that a lover’s attitude is somewhat crazy even when this is not a matter of his having false hopes about how the person he is in love with will act. It is often said in such cases that reasoning is useless. But the very person who says this feels that the lover’s attitude is crazy, is inappropriate like some dreads and hatreds, such as some horrors [161] of enclosed places. And often one who says ‘It is useless to reason [sic] proceeds at once to reason with the lover, nor is this reasoning always quite without effect. We may draw the lover’s attention to certain things done by her he is in love with and trace for him a path to these from things done by others at other times [FN #7 -- Thus, like the scientist, the critic is concerned to show up the irrelevance of time and space.] which have disgusted and infuriated him. And by this means we may weaken his admiration and confidence, make him feel it is unjustified and arouse his suspicion and contempt and make him feel our suspicion and contempt reasonable. It is possible, of course, that he has already noticed the analogies, the connections, we point out and that he has accepted them – that is, he has not denied them nor passed them off. He has recognized them and they have altered his attitude, altered his love, but he still loves. We then feel that perhaps it is we who are blind and cannot see what he can see.

8. Connecting and Disconnecting. But before we confess ourselves thus inadequate there are other fires his admiration must pass through. For when a man has an attitude which it seems to us he should not have or lacks one which it seems to us he should have then, not only do we suspect that he is not influenced by connections which we feel should influence him and draw his attention to these, but also we suspect he is influenced by connections which should not influence him and draw his attention to these. It may, for a moment, seem strange that we should draw his attention to connections which we feel should not influence him, and which, since they do influence him, he has in a sense already noticed. But we do – such is our confidence in ‘the light of reason’.

Sometimes the power of these connections comes mainly from a man’s mismanagement of the language he is using. This is what happens in the Monte Carlo fallacy, where by mismanaging the laws of chance a man passes from noticing that a certain colour or number has not turned up for a long while to an improper confidence that now it soon will turn up. In such cases our showing up of the false connections is a process we call ‘explaining a fallacy in reasoning’. To remove fallacies in reasoning we urge a man to call a spade a spade, ask him what he means by ‘the [162] State’ and having pointed out ambiguities and vaguenesses ask him to reconsider the steps in his argument.

9. Unspoken Connections. Usually, however, wrongheadedness or wrongheartedness in a situation, blindness to what is there or seeing what is not, does not arise merely from mismanagement of language but is more due to connections which are not mishandled in language, for the reason that they are not put into language at all. And often these misconnections too, weaken in the light of reason, if only we can guess where they lie and turn it on them. In so far as these connections are not presented in language the process of removing their power is not a process of correcting the mismanagement of language. But it is still akin to such a process; for though it is not a process of setting out fairly what has been set out unfairly, it is a process of setting out fairly what has not been set out at all. And we must remember that the line between connections ill-presented or half-presented in language and connections operative but not presented in language, or only hinted at, is not a sharp one.

Whether or not we call the process of showing up these connections ‘reasoning to remove bad unconscious reasoning’ or not, it is certain that in order to settle in ourselves what weight we shall attach to someone’s confidence or attitude we not only ask him for his reasons but also look for unconscious reasons both good and bad; that is, for reasons which he can’t put into words, isn’t explicitly aware of, is hardly aware of, isn’t aware of at all – perhaps it’s long experience which he doesn’t recall which lets him know a squall is coming, perhaps it’s old experience which he can’t recall which makes the cake in the tea mean so much and makes Odette so fascinating. [FN #8 -- Proust: Swann's Way, Vol. I, p. 58, Vol. II. Phoenix Edition.]

I am well aware of the distinction between the question ‘What reasons are there for the belief that S is P?’ and the question ‘What are the sources of beliefs that S is P?’ There are cases where investigation of the rationality of a claim which certain persons make is done with very little inquiry into why they say what they do, into the causes of their beliefs. This is so when we have very definite ideas about what is really logically relevant to their claim and what is not. Offered a mathematical theorem we ask for the proof; offered the generalization that parental [163] discord causes crime we ask for the correlation co-efficients. But even in this last case, if we fancy that only the figures are reasons we underestimate the complexity of the logic of our conclusion; and yet it is difficult to describe the other features of the evidence which have weight and there is apt to be disagreement about the weight they should have. In criticizing other conclusions and especially conclusions which are largely the expression of an attitude, we have not only to ascertain what reasons there are for them but also to decide what things are reasons and how much. This latter process of sifting reasons from causes is part of the critical process for every belief, but in some spheres it has been done pretty fully already. In these spheres we don’t need to examine the actual processes to believe and distil from them a logic. But in other spheres this remains to be done. Even in science or on the stock exchange or in ordinary life we sometimes hesitate to condemn a belief or a hunch [FN #9 -- Here I think of Mr. Stace's interesting reflection in Mind, January, 1945, "The Problem of Unreasoned Beliefs'.] merely because those who believe it cannot offer the sort of reasons we had hoped for. And now suppose Miss Gertrude Stein finds excellent the work of a new artist while we see nothing in it. We nervously recall, perhaps, how pictures by Picasso, which Miss Stein admired and others rejected, later came to be admired by many who gave attention to them, and we wonder whether the case is not a new instance of her perspicacity and our blindness. But if, upon giving all our attention to the work in question, we still do not respond to it, and we notice that the subject matter of the new pictures is perhaps birds in wild places and learn that Miss Stein is a birdwatcher, then we begin to trouble ourselves less about her admiration.

It must not be forgotten that our attempt to show up misconnections in Miss Stein may have an opposite result and reveal to us connections we had missed. Thinking to remove the spell exercised upon his patient by the old stories of the Greeks, the psycho-analyst may himself fall under that spell and find in them what his patient has found and, incidentally, what made the Greeks tell those tales.

10. Now what happens, what should happen, when we inquire in this way into the reasonableness, the propriety of belief in gods? The [164] answer is: A double and opposite-phased change. Wordsworth writes:

‘… And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things…’

[FN #10 -- Tintern Abbey.]

We most of us know this feeling. But is it well placed like the feeling that here is first-rate work, which we sometimes rightly have even before we have fully grasped the picture we are looking at of the book we are reading? Or is it misplaced like the feeling in a house that has long been empty that someone secretly lives there still. Wordsworth’s feeling is the feeling that the world is haunted, that something watches in the hills and manages the stars. The child feels that the stone tripped him when he stumbled, that the bough struck him when it flew back in his face. He has to learn that the wind isn’t buffeting him, that there is not a devil in it, that he was wrong, that his attitude was inappropriate. And he learns that the wind wasn’t hindering him so he also learns it wasn’t helping him. But we know how, though he learns, his attitude lingers. It is plain that Wordsworth’s feeling is of this family.

Belief in gods, it is true, is often very different from belief that stones are spiteful, the sun kindly. For the gods appear in human form and from the waves and control these things and by so doing reward and punish us. But varied as are the stories of the gods they have a family likeness and we have only to recall them to feel sure of the other main sources which co-operate with animism to produce them.

What are the stories of the gods? What are our feelings when we believe in God? They are feelings of awe before power, dread of the thunderbolts of Zeus, confidence in the everlasting [165] arms, unease beneath the all-seeing eye. They are feelings of guilt and inescapable vengeance, of smothering hate and of a security we can hardly do without. We have only to remind ourselves of these feelings and the stories of the gods and goddesses and heroes in which these feelings find expression, to be reminded of how we felt as children to our parents and the big people of our childhood. Writing of a first telephone call from his grandmother, Proust says: ‘… it was rather that this isolation of the voice was like a symbol, a presentation, a direct consequence of another isolation, that of my grandmother, separated for the first time in my life, from myself. The orders or prohibitions which she addressed to me at every moment in the ordinary course my life, the tedium of obedience or the fire of rebellion which neutralized the affection that I felt for her were at this moment only that voice, a phantom, as unpalpable as that which would come to revisit me when my grandmother was dead. “Speak to me!” but then it happened that, left more solitary still, I ceased to catch the sound of her voice. My grandmother could no longer hear me… I continued to call her, sounding the empty night, in which I felt that her appeals also must be straying. I was shaken by the same anguish which, in the distant past, I had felt once before, one day when, a little child, in a crowd, I had lost her.’

Giorgio de Chirico, writing of Courbet, says; ‘The word yesterday envelops us with its yearning echo, just as, on waking, when the sense of time and the logic of things remain a while confused, the memory of a happy hour we spent the day before may sometimes linger reverberating within us. At times we think of Courbet and his work as we do of our own father’s youth.’

When a man’s father fails him by death or weakness how much he needs another father, one in the heavens with whom is ‘no variableness n or shadow of turning’.

We understood Mr. Kenneth Graham when he wrote of the Golden Age we feel we have lived in under the Olympians. Freud says: ‘The ordinary man cannot imagine this Providence in any other form but that of a greatly exalted father, for only such a one could understand the needs of the sons of men, or be softened by their prayers and be placated by the signs of their [166] remorse. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so incongruous with reality….’ ‘So incongruous with reality’! It cannot be denied.

But here a new aspect of the matter may strike us. [FN #11 -- I owe to the late Dr. Susan Isaacs the thought of this different aspect of the matter, of this connection between the heavenly Father and 'the good father' spoken of in psycho-analysis.] For the very facts which make us feel that now we can recognize systems of superhuman, sub-human, elusive, beings for what they are – this persistent projections of infantile phantasies – include facts which make these systems less fantastic. What are these facts? They are patterns in human reactions which are well described by saying that we are as if there were hidden within us powers, person, not ourselves and stronger than ourselves. That this is so may perhaps be said to have been common knowledge yielded by ordinary observation of people, [FN #12 -- Consider Tolstoy and Dostoievsky - I do not mean, of course, that their observation was ordinary.] but we did not know the degree in which this is so until recent study of extraordinary cases in extraordinary conditions had revealed it. I refer, of course, to the study of multiple personalities and the wider studies of psycho-analysts. Even when the results of this work are reported to us that is not the same as tracing the patterns in the details of the case on which the results are based; and even that is not the same as taking part in the studies oneself. One thing not sufficiently realized is that some of the thing shut within us are not bad but good.

Now the gods, good and evil and mixed, have always been mysterious powers outside us rather than within. But they have always been within. It is not a modern theory but an old saying that in each of us a devil sleeps. Eve said: ‘The serpent beguiled me.’ Helen says to Menelaus:

‘… And yet how strange it is!
I ask not thee; I ask my own sad thought,
What was there in my heart, that I forgot
My home and land and all I loved, to fly
With a strange man? Surely it was not I,
But Cypris there!’

[FN #13 -- Euripides: The Trojan Women, Gilbert Murry's Translation. Roger Hinks in Myth and Allegory in Ancient Art writes (p. 108): 'Personifications made their appearance very early in Greek poetry.... It is out of the question to call these terrible beings "abstractions".... They are real daemons to be worshipped and propitiated.... These beings we observe correspond to states of mind. The experience of man teaches him that from time to time his composure is invaded and overturned by some power from outside, panic, intoxication, sexual desire.'
What use to shoot off guns at unicorns?
Where one horn's hit another fierce horn grows.
These beasts are fabulous, and none were born
Of woman who could lay a fable low.'—
The Glass Tower, Nicholas Moore, p. 100.]

[167] Elijah found that God was not in the wind, nor in the thunder, but in a still small voice. The kingdom of Heaven is within us, Christ insisted, though usually about the size of a grain of mustard seed, and he prayed that we should become one with the Father in Heaven.

New knowledge made it necessary either to give up saying ‘The sun is sinking’ or to give the words a new meaning. In many contexts we preferred to stick to the old words and give them a new meaning which was not entirely new but, on the contrary, practically the same as the old. The Greeks did not speak of the dangers of repressing instincts but they did speak of the dangers of thwarting Dionysos, of neglecting Cypris for Diana, of forgetting Poseidon for Athena. We have eaten of the fruit of a garden we can’t forget though we were never there, a garden we still look for though we can never find it. Maybe we look for too simple a likeness to what we dreamed. Maybe we are not as free as we fancy from the old ideal that Heaven is a happy hunting ground, or a city with streets of gold. Lately Mr. Aldous Huxley has recommended our seeking not somewhere beyond the sky or late in time but a timeless state not made of the stuff of this world, which he rejects, picking it into worthless pieces. But this sound to me still too much a looking for another place, not indeed one filled with sweets but instead so empty that some of us would rather remain in the Lamb or the Elephant, where, as we know, they stop whimpering with another bitter and so far from sneering at all things, hang pictures of winners at Kempton and stars of the ‘nineties. Something good we have for each other is freed there, and in some degree and for a while the miasma of time is rolled back without obliging us to deny the present.

The artists who do most for us don’t tell us only of fairylands. Proust, Manet, Breughel, even Botticelli and Vermeer show us reality. And yet they give us for a moment exhilaration without anxiety, peace without boredom. And those who, like Freud, work in a different way against that which too often comes over us and forces us into deadness and despair, [FN #14 -- Matthew Arnold: Summer Night.] also deserve critical, patient and courageous attention. For they, too, work to release us from human bondage into human freedom.

Many have tried to find ways of salvation. The reports they bring back are always incomplete and apt to mislead even when they are not in words but in music or paint. But they are by no means useless; and not the worst of them are those which speak of oneness with God. But in so far as we become one with Him He becomes one with us. St. John says he is in us as we love one another.

This love, I suppose, is not benevolence but something that comes of the oneness with one another of which Christ spoke. Sometimes it momentarily gains strength. Hate and the Devil do too. And what is oneness without otherness?