The Life of Reason or The Phases of Human Progress: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense, Volume VII, Book One

Appendix

Appendix PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION Twenty years separate me from the man I was when I wrote this book–years enlivened for me by many changes of scene and branded by a great war. There is hardly a page that would not need to be rewritten, if it was perfectly to express my present feelings. Mais quand l’homme change sans cesse, Au passé pourquoi rien changer? Some readers would perhaps prefer the original to my revised version, and if I lived another twenty years I might myself prefer it. The written letter, then, may as well stand; especially as nothing hinders me from setting forth my matured views in fresh works, leaving it for others to decide whether I have changed for the better. After all, there has been no change in my deliberate doctrine ; only some changes of mental habit. I now dwell by preference on other perspectives, in which the same objects appear with their relative bulks reversed, and inversely hiding one another; what lay before in the background–nature–has come forward, and the life of reason, which then held the centre of the stage, has receded. The vicissitudes of human belief absorb me less; the life of reason has become in my eyes a decidedly episodical thing, polyglot, interrupted, insecure. I cannot take every phase of art or religion or philosophy seriously, simply because it takes itself so. These things seem to me less tragic than they did, and more comic; and I am less eager to choose and to judge among them, as if only one form could be right. When our architecture is too pretentious, before we have set the cross on the spire, the foundations are apt to give way. I am consequently far less inclined to take a transcendental point of view, as if the spirit at every point were absolute, and its objects its creations. Spirit is absolute enough, so to speak, relatively, and in its own eyes, since willy-nilly it must soliloquize; but any puppet in the hands of a ventriloquist seems to soliloquize , if we have no notion whence its voice comes. The self that speaks in us is deeper than we suppose, and less ours; but that is nothing against it. Spirit is always worth listening to, and worth understanding sympathetically; the ventriloquist , if not the manikin, deserves admiration. It is spirit, too, that listens and understands, and grows thereby riper and more secure. Yet the oracles of spirit all have to be discounted; they are uttered in a cave. It was this murmur of nature, wayward and narcotic as it is, that I called reason in this book, and tried to catch and interpret nobly. I could hardly have undertaken or carried out such a task if I had not been accustomed to slip into the subjective, recovering at each step as far as I might the innocence of intellectual illusion, and painting things as they would seem from that angle, not as Appendix 184 they are. From childhood up I had lived in imagination, being fond of religion and poetry, and driven by circumstances to lead my inner life alone; and the philosophy that prevailed about me, though not one which I ever personally trusted, could not help encouraging me in this subjective habit, representing it as deeper, more critical, and more philosophical than any dogmatism. Nevertheless, subjectivity in me was never more than a method, a habit of poetic sympathy with the dreaming mind, whatever it might dream. It was a method appropriate to a book like this, a presumptive biography of the human intellect, which instead of the Life of Reason might have been called the Romance of Wisdom. Moreover, the thoughts I was endeavouring to evoke and to analyse were not all dead thoughts. Many of them survived in my own perplexities or in the various idealisms of those about me. One consequence was that I was often betrayed into expressions which, if not taken dramatically, would contradict my naturalism; that vulgar belief in material things about us which not only underlay the whole life of reason as I conceived it, but was also its explicit final deliverance. Another consequence was that, when I knew or feared that my reader might harbour the very illusion I was rehearsing, I was tempted to analyse it destructively, or argue against it: something really alien to the essential character of my...