Book: A Strange Story, Volume 7.

E >> Edward Bulwer Lytton >> A Strange Story, Volume 7.




"But here comes my argument. I care not how ideas are formed,--the
material point is, how are the capacities to receive ideas formed? The
ideas may all come from experience, but the capacity to receive the ideas
must be inherent. I take the word 'capacity' as a good plain English
word, rather than the more technical word 'receptivity,' employed by Kant.
And by capacity I mean the passive power[6] to receive ideas, whether in
man or in any living thing by which ideas are received. A man and an
elephant is each formed with capacities to receive ideas suited to the
several places in the universe held by each.

"The more I look through Nature the more I find that on all varieties of
organized life is carefully bestowed the capacity to receive the
impressions, be they called perceptions or ideas, which are adapted to the
uses each creature is intended to derive from them. I find, then, that
Man alone is endowed with the capacity to receive the ideas of a God, of
Soul, of Worship, of a Hereafter. I see no trace of such a capacity in
the inferior races; nor, however their intelligence may be refined by
culture, is such capacity ever apparent in them.

"But wherever capacities to receive impressions are sufficiently general
in any given species of creature to be called universal to that species,
and yet not given to another species, then, from all analogy throughout
Nature, those capacities are surely designed by Providence for the
distinct use and conservation of the species to which they are given.

"It is no answer to me to say that the inherent capacities thus bestowed
on Man do not suffice in themselves to make him form right notions of a
Deity or a Hereafter; because it is plainly the design of Providence that
Man must learn to correct and improve all his notions by his own study and
observation. He must build a hut before he can build a Parthenon; he must
believe with the savage or the heathen before he can believe with the
philosopher or Christian. In a word, in all his capacities, Man has only
given to him, not the immediate knowledge of the Perfect, but the means to
strive towards the Perfect. And thus one of the most accomplished of
modern reasoners, to whose lectures you must have listened with delight,
in your college days, says well:--

"'Accordingly the sciences always studied with keenest interest are
those in a state of progress and uncertainty; absolute certainty and
absolute completion would be the paralysis of any study, and the last
worst calamity that could befall Man, as he is at present
constituted, would be that full and final possession of speculative
truth which he now vainly anticipates as the consummation of his
intellectual happiness.'[7]

"Well, then, in all those capacities for the reception of impressions from
external Nature which are given to Man and not to the brutes, I see the
evidence of Man's Soul. I can understand why the inferior animal has no
capacity to receive the idea of a Deity and of Worship--simply because the
inferior animal, even if graciously admitted to a future life, may not
therein preserve the sense of its identity. I can understand even why
that sympathy with each other which we men possess and which constitutes
the great virtue we emphatically call Humanity, is not possessed by the
lesser animals (or, at least, in a very rare and exceptional degree) even
where they live in communities, like beavers, or bees, or ants; because
men are destined to meet, to know, and to love each other in the life to
come, and the bond between the brute ceases here.

"Now the more, then, we examine the inherent capacities bestowed
distinctly and solely on Man, the more they seem to distinguish him from
the other races by their comprehension of objects beyond his life upon
this earth.

"'Man alone,' says Muller, 'can conceive abstract notions; and it is in
abstract notions--such as time, space, matter, spirit, light, form,
quantity, essence--that man grounds, not only all philosophy, all
science, but all that practically improves one generation for the
benefit of the next.'

"And why? Because all these abstract notions unconsciously lead the mind
away from the material into the immaterial,--from the present into the
future. But if Man ceases to exist when he disappears in the grave, you
must be compelled to affirm that he is the only creature in existence whom
Nature or Providence has condescended to deceive and cheat by capacities
for which there are no available objects. How nobly and how truly has
Chalmers said:--

"'What inference shall we draw from this remarkable law in Nature that
there is nothing waste and nothing meaningless in the feelings and
faculties wherewith living creatures are endowed? For each desire
there is a counterpart object; for each faculty there is room and
opportunity for exercise either in the present or the coming
futurity. Now, but for the doctrine of immortality, Man would be an
exception to this law,-he would stand forth as an anomaly in Nature,
with aspirations in his heart for which the universe had no antitype
to offer, with capacities of understanding and thought that never
were to be followed by objects of corresponding greatness through the
whole history of his being!

. . . . . . . . . . . .

"'With the inferior animals there is a certain squareness of
adjustment, if we may so term it, between each desire and its
correspondent gratification. The one is evenly met by the other, and
there is a fulness and definiteness of enjoyment up to the capacity
of enjoyment. Not so with Man, who, both from the vastness of his
propensities and the vastness of his powers, feels himself chained
and beset in a field too narrow for him. He alone labours under the
discomfort of an incongruity between his circumstances and his
powers; and unless there be new circumstances awaiting him in a more
advanced state of being, he, the noblest of Nature's products here,
would turn out to be the greatest of her failures.'[8]

"This, then, I take to be the proof of Soul in Man, not that he has a
mind--because, as you justly say, inferior animals have that, though in a
lesser degree--but because he has the capacities to comprehend, as soon as
he is capable of any abstract ideas whatsoever, the very truths not needed
for self-conservation on earth, and therefore not given to yonder ox and
opossum,--namely, the nature of Deity, Soul, Hereafter. And in the
recognition of these truths, the Human society, that excels the society of
beavers, bees, and ants, by perpetual and progressive improvement on the
notions inherited from its progenitors, rests its basis. Thus, in fact,
this world is benefited for men by their belief in the next, while the
society of brutes remains age after age the same. Neither the bee nor the
beaver has, in all probability, improved since the Deluge.

"But inseparable from the conviction of these truths is the impulse of
prayer and worship. It does not touch my argument when a philosopher of
the school of Bolingbroke or Lucretius says, 'that the origin of prayer is
in Man's ignorance of the phenomena of Nature.' That it is fear or
ignorance which, 'when rocked the mountains or when groaned the ground,
taught the weak to bend, the proud to pray.' My answer is, the brutes are
much more forcibly impressed by natural phenomena than Man is; the bird
and the beast know before you and I do when the mountain will rock and the
ground groan, and their instinct leads them to shelter; but it does not
lead them to prayer. If my theory be right that Soul is to be sought not
in the question whether mental ideas be innate or formed by experience, by
the sense, by association or habit, but in the inherent capacity to
receive ideas, then, the capacity bestowed on Man alone, to be impressed
by Nature herself with the idea of a Power superior to Nature, with which
Power he can establish commune, is a proof that to Man alone the Maker has
made Nature itself proclaim His existence,--that to Man alone the Deity
vouchsafes the communion with Himself which comes from prayer."

"Even were this so," said I, "is not the Creator omniscient? If all-wise,
all-foreseeing? If all-foreseeing, all-pre-ordaining? Can the prayer of
His creature alter the ways of His will?"

"For the answer to a question," returned Faber, "which is not unfrequently
asked by the clever men of the world, I ought to refer you to the skilled
theologians who have so triumphantly carried the reasoner over that ford
of doubt which is crossed every day by the infant. But as we have not
their books in the wilderness, I am contented to draw my reply as a
necessary and logical sequence from the propositions I have sought to
ground on the plain observation of Nature. I can only guess at the
Deity's Omniscience, or His modes of enforcing His power by the
observation of His general laws; and of all His laws, I know of none more
general than the impulse which bids men pray,--which makes Nature so act,
that all the phenomena of Nature we can conceive, however startling and
inexperienced, do not make the brute pray, but there is not a trouble that
can happen to Man, but what his impulse is to pray,--always provided,
indeed, that he is not a philosopher. I say not this in scorn of the
philosopher, to whose wildest guess our obligations are infinite, but
simply because for all which is impulsive to Man, there is a reason in
Nature which no philosophy can explain away. I do not, then, bewilder
myself by seeking to bind and limit the Omniscience of the Deity to my
finite ideas. I content myself with supposing that somehow or other, He
has made it quite compatible with His Omniscience that Man should obey the
impulse which leads him to believe that, in addressing a Deity, he is
addressing a tender, compassionate, benignant Father, and in that
obedience shall obtain beneficial results. If that impulse be an
illusion, then we must say that Heaven governs the earth by a lie; and
that is impossible, because, reasoning by analogy, all Nature is
truthful,--that is, Nature gives to no species instincts or impulses which
are not of service to it. Should I not be a shallow physician if, where I
find in the human organization a principle or a property so general that I
must believe it normal to the healthful conditions of that organization, I
should refuse to admit that Nature intended it for use? Reasoning by all
analogy, must I not say the habitual neglect of its use must more or less
injure the harmonious well-being of the whole human system? I could have
much to add upon the point in dispute by which the creed implied in your
question would enthrall the Divine mercy by the necessities of its Divine
wisdom, and substitute for a benignant Deity a relentless Fate. But here
I should exceed my province. I am no theologian. Enough for me that in
all my afflictions, all my perplexities, an impulse, that I obey as an
instinct, moves me at once to prayer. Do I find by experience that the
prayer is heard, that the affliction is removed, the doubt is solved?
That, indeed, would be presumptuous to say. But it is not presumptuous to
think that by the efficacy of prayer my heart becomes more fortified
against the sorrow, and my reason more serene amidst the doubt."

I listened, and ceased to argue. I felt as if in that solitude, and in
the pause of my wonted mental occupations, my intellect was growing
languid, and its old weapons rusting in disuse. My pride took alarm. I
had so from my boyhood cherished the idea of fame, and so glorified the
search after knowledge, that I recoiled in dismay from the thought that I
had relinquished knowledge, and cut myself off from fame. I resolved to
resume my once favourite philosophical pursuits, re-examine and complete
the Work to which I had once committed my hopes of renown; and,
simultaneously, a restless desire seized me to communciate, though but at
brief intervals, with other minds than those immediately within my
reach,--minds fresh from the old world, and reviving the memories of its
vivid civilization. Emigrants frequently passed my doors, but I had
hitherto shrunk from tendering the hospitalities so universally accorded
in the colony. I could not endure to expose to such rough strangers my
Lilian's mournful affliction, and that thought was not less intolerable to
Mrs. Ashleigh. I now hastily constructed a log-building a few hundred
yards from the house, and near the main track taken by travellers through
the spacious pastures. I transported to this building my books and
scientific instruments. In an upper story I placed my telescopes and
lenses, my crucibles and retorts. I renewed my chemical experiments; I
sought to invigorate my mind by other branches of science which I had
hitherto less cultured,--meditated new theories on Light and Colour,
collected specimens in Natural History, subjected animalcules to my
microscope, geological fossils to my hammer. With all these quickened
occupations of thought, I strove to distract myself from sorrow, and
strengthen my reason against the, illusion of my fantasy. The Luminous
Shadow was not seen again on my wall, and the thought of Margrave himself
was banished.

In this building I passed many hours of each day; more and more earnestly
plunging my thoughts into depths of abstract study, as Lilian's
unaccountable dislike to my presence became more and more decided. When I
thus ceased to think that my life cheered and comforted hers, my heart's
occupation was gone. I had annexed to the apartment reserved for myself
in the log-hut a couple of spare rooms, in which I could accommodate
passing strangers. I learned to look forward to their coming with
interest, and to see them depart with regret; yet, for the most part, they
were of the ordinary class of colonial adventurers,--bankrupt tradesmen,
unlucky farmers, forlorn mechanics, hordes of unskilled labourers, now and
then a briefless barrister, or a sporting collegian who had lost his all
on the Derby. One day, however, a young man of education and manners that
unmistakably proclaimed the cultured gentleman of Europe, stopped at my
door. He was a cadet of a noble Prussian family, which for some political
reasons had settled itself in Paris; there he had become intimate with
young French nobles, and living the life of a young French noble had soon
scandalized his German parents, forestalled his slender inheritance, and
been compelled to fly his father's frown and his tailor's bills. All this
he told me with a lively frankness which proved how much the wit of a
German can be quickened in the atmosphere of Paris. An old college
friend, of birth inferior to his own, had been as unfortunate in seeking
to make money as this young prodigal had been an adept in spending it.
The friend, a few years previously, had accompanied other Germans in a
migration to Australia, and was already thriving; the spendthrift noble
was on his way to join the bankrupt trader, at a German settlement fifty
miles distant from my house. This young man was unlike any German I ever
met. He had all the exquisite levity by which the well-bred Frenchman
gives to the doctrines of the Cynic the grace of the Epicurean. He owned
himself to be good for nothing with an elegance of candour which not only
disarmed censure, but seemed to challenge admiration; and, withal, the
happy spendthrift was so inebriate with hope,--sure that he should be rich
before he was thirty. How and wherefore rich, he could have no more
explained than I can square the circle. When the grand serious German
nature does Frenchify itself, it can become so extravagantly French!

I listened, almost enviously, to this light-hearted profligate's babble,
as we sat by my rude fireside,--I, sombre man of science and sorrow, he,
smiling child of idleness and pleasure, so much one of Nature's
courtier-like nobles, that there, as he smoked his villanous pipe, in his
dust-soiled shabby garments, and with his ruffianly revolver stuck into
his belt, I would defy the daintiest Aristarch who ever presided as critic
over the holiday world not to have said, "There smiles the genius beyond
my laws, the born darling of the Graces, who in every circumstance, in
every age, like Aristippus, would have socially charmed; would have been
welcome to the orgies of a Caesar or a Clodius, to the boudoirs of a
Montespan or a Pompadour; have lounged through the Mulberry Gardens with a
Rochester and a Buckingham, or smiled from the death-cart, with a
Richelieu and a Lauzun, a gentleman's disdain of a mob!"

I was so thinking as we sat, his light talk frothing up from his careless
lips, when suddenly from the spray and the sparkle of that light talk was
flung forth the name of Margrave.

"Margrave!" I exclaimed. "Pardon me. What of him?"

"What of him! I asked if, by chance, you knew the only Englishman I ever
had the meanness to envy?"

"Perhaps you speak of one person, and I thought of another."

"Pardieu, my dear host, there can scarcely be two Margraves! The one of
whom I speak flashed like a meteor upon Paris, bought from a prince of the
Bourse a palace that might have lodged a prince of the blood-royal,
eclipsed our Jew bankers in splendour, our jeunesse doree in good looks
and hair-brain adventures, and, strangest of all, filled his salons with
philosophers and charlatans, chemists and spirit-rappers; insulting the
gravest dons of the schools by bringing them face to face with the most
impudent quacks, the most ridiculous dreamers,--and yet, withal, himself
so racy and charming, so bon prince, so bon enfant! For six months he was
the rage at Paris: perhaps he might have continued to be the rage there
for six years, but all at once the meteor vanished as suddenly as it had
flashed. Is this the Margrave whom you know?"

"I should not have thought the Margrave whom I knew could have reconciled
his tastes to the life of cities."

"Nor could this man: cities were too tame for him. He has gone to some
far-remote wilds in the East,--some say in search of the Philosopher's
Stone; for he actually maintained in his house a Sicilian adventurer, who,
when at work on that famous discovery, was stifled by the fumes of his own
crucible. After that misfortune, Margrave took Paris in disgust, and we
lost him."

"So this is the only Englishman whom you envy! Envy him? Why?"

"Because he is the only Englishman I ever met who contrived to be rich and
yet free from the spleen; I envied him because one had only to look at his
face and see how thoroughly he enjoyed the life of which your countrymen
seem to be so heartily tired. But now that I have satisfied your
curiosity, pray satisfy mine. Who and what is this Englishman?"

"Who and what was he supposed at Paris to be?"

"Conjectures were numberless. One of your countrymen suggested that which
was the most generally favoured. This gentleman, whose name I forget, but
who was one of those old roues who fancy themselves young because they
live with the young, no sooner set eyes upon Margrave, than he exclaimed,
'Louis Grayle come to life again, as I saw him forty-four years ago! But
no--still younger, still handsomer--it must be his son!"

"Louis Grayle, who was said to be murdered at Aleppo?"

"The same. That strange old man was enormously rich; but it seems that he
hated his lawful heirs, and left behind him a fortune so far below that
which he was known to possess that he must certainly have disposed of it
secretly before his death. Why so dispose of it, if not to enrich some
natural son, whom, for private reasons, he might not have wished to
acknowledge, or point out to the world by the signal bequest of his will?
All that Margrave ever said of himself and the source of his wealth
confirmed this belief. He frankly proclaimed himself a natural son,
enriched by a father whose name he knew not nor cared to know."

"It is true. And Margrave quitted Paris for the East. When?"

"I can tell you the date within a day or two, for his flight preceded mine
by a week; and, happily, all Paris was so busy in talking of it, that I
slipped away without notice."

And the Prussian then named a date which it thrilled me to hear, for it
was in that very month, and about that very day, that the Luminous Shadow
had stood within my threshold.

The young count now struck off into other subjects of talk: nothing more
was said of Margrave. An hour or two afterwards he went on his way, and I
remained long gazing musingly on the embers of the dying glow on my
hearth.

[1] "Are intelligence and instinct, thus differing in their relative
proportion in man as compared with all other animals, yet the same in kind
and manner of operation in both? To this question we must give at once an
affirmative answer. The expression of Cuvier, regarding the faculty of
reasoning in lower animals, 'Leur intelligence execute des operations du
meme genre,' is true in its full sense. We can in no manner define reason
so as to exclude acts which are at every moment present to our
observation, and which we find in many instances to contravene the natural
instincts of the species. The demeanour and acts of the dog in reference
to his master, or the various uses to which he is put by man, are as
strictly logical as those we witness in the ordinary transactions of
life."--Sir Henry Holland, chapters on "Mental Physiology," p. 220.

The whole of the chapter on Instincts and Habits in this work should be
read in connection with the passage just quoted. The work itself, at once
cautious and suggestive, is not one of the least obligations which
philosophy and religion alike owe to the lucubrations of English medical
men.

[2] Abercrombie's Intellectual Powers, p. 26. (15th Edition.)

[3] OEuvres de Descartes, vol. x. p. 178, et seq. (Cousin's Edition.)

[4] M. Tissot the distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Dijon, in his
recent work, "La Vie dans l'Homme," p. 255, gives a long and illustrious
list of philosophers who assign a rational soul (ame) to the inferior
animals, though he truly adds, "that they have not always the courage of
their opinion."

[5] Some idea of the extent of research and imagination bestowed on this
subject may be gleaned from the sprightly work of Pierquin de Gemblouz,
"Idiomologie des Animaux," published at Paris, 1844.

[6] "Faculty is active power: capacity is passive power."--Sir W.
Hamilton: Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, vol. i. p.178.

[7] Sir W. Hamilton's "Lectures," vol. i. p. 10.

[8] Chalmers, "Bridgewater Treatise," vol. ii. pp. 28, 30. Perhaps I
should observe, that here and elsewhere in the dialogues between Faber and
Fenwick, it has generally been thought better to substitute the words of
the author quoted for the mere outline or purport of the quotation which
memory afforded to the interlocutor.

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