Previous: Autumn IX. Scientific positivism
X. Cosmogony
It may well be that what we call the unknowable will be for ever the unknown. In that thought is there not a pathos beyond words? It may be that the human race will live and pass away; all mankind, from him who in the world’s dawn first shaped to his fearful mind an image of the Lord of Life, to him who, in the dusking twighlight of the last age, shall crouch before a deity of stone or wood; and never one of that long lineage have learnt the wherefore of his being. The prophets, and martyrs, their noble anguish vain and meaningless; the wise whose thought strove to eternity, and was but an idle dream; the pure of heart whose life was a vision of the living God, the suffering and the mourners whose solace was in a world to come, the victims of injustice who cried to the Judge Supreme -- all gone down into silence, and the globe that bare them circling dead and cold through soundless space. The most tragic aspect of such a tragedy is that it is not unthinkable. The soul revolts, but dare not see in this revolt the assurance of its higher destiny. Viewing our life thus, is it not easier to believe that the tragedy is played with no spectator? And of a truth, of a truth, what spectator can there be? The day may come when, to all who live, the Name of Names will be but an empty symbol, rejected by reason and by faith. Yet the tragedy will be played on.
It is not, I say, unthinkable; but that is not the same thing as to declare that life has no meaning beyond the sense it bears to human intelligence. The intelligence itself rejects such a supposition; in my case, with impatience and scorn. No theory of the world which ever came to my knowledge is to me for one moment acceptable; the possibility of an explanation which would set my mind at rest is to me inconceivable; no whit the less am I convinced that there is a Reason of the All; one which transcends my understanding, one no glimmer of which will ever touch my apprehension; a Reason which must imply a creative power, and therefore, even whilst a necessity of my thought, is by the same criticized into nothing. A like antimony with that which affects our conception of the infinite in time and space. Whether the rational processes have reached their final development, who shall say? Perhaps what seem to us the impassable limits of thought are but the conditions of a yet early stage in the history of man. Those who make them a proof of a “future state” must necessarily suppose gradations in that futurity; does the savage, scarce risen above the brute, enter upon the same “new life” as the man of highest civilization? Such gropings of the mind certify our ignorance: the strange thing is that they can be held by any one to demonstrate that our ignorance is final knowledge.
XI. Brave New World
Yet that, perhaps, will be the mind of coming man; if not the final attainment of his intellectual progress, at all events a long period of self-satisfaction, assumed as finality. We talk of the “ever aspiring soul”; we take for granted that if one religion passes away, another must arise. But what if man presently find himself without spiritual needs? Such modification of his being cannot be deemed impossible; many signs of our life to-day seems to point towards it. If the habits of thought favoured by physical science do but sink deep enough, and no vast calamity come to check mankind in its advance to material contentment, the age of true positivism may arise... the word supernatural will have no sense; superstition will be a dimly understood trait for the early race; and where now we perceive an appalling Mystery, everything will be lucid and serene as a geometric demonstration. Such an epoch of Reason might be the happiest the world could know. Indeed, it would either be that, or it would never come about at all. For suffering and sorrow are the great Doctors of Metaphysic; and, remembering this, one cannot count very surely upon the rationalist millennium.
Alpha.
Wow. This really is Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World. And you can see Settembrini arguing for, and Naphta against, this idea in The Magic Mountain. And that “suffering and sorrow are the great Doctors of Metaphysic” is why Settembrini is so wary of Hans’ reverence for death and illness. But this also brings up the question of why I’ve always been so interested in cosmogony? You can’t get much more healthy and free of suffering and sorrow then I’ve been. I can’t explain it except to say I was apparently born that way.
Here Gissing seems to me to set the stage for both Brave New World and The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq. Both the Gissing, and this quote from Heinrich Heine (from Faust by Goethe, The Norton Critical Edition, page 564)...
...with [the "historical"] Faust ends the medieval religious era, and there begins the modern, critical era of science. It is indeed very significant that at precisely the time when by public belief Faust lived, the Reformation began, and that he himself is supposed to have founded the art which secures for knowledge a victory over faith, namely the printing press; an art, however, which also robbed us of the Catholic peace of mind and plunged us into doubt and revolutions -- or, as someone else would put it, finally delivered us into the hands of the devil. But no, knowledge, the understanding of things through the intellect, science gives us at last the pleasures of which religious faith, Catholic Christianity, has cheated us for so long; we apprehend that men are called not only to a heavenly but also to an earthly equality; the political brotherhood preached to us by philosophy is more beneficial to us than the purely spiritual brotherhood which Christianity has procured for us....
...set the stage for The Magic Mountain. All these books are really about the same thing. And Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, would trace this trend toward positivism, an emphasis on the scientific and on this world rather than the next, back to Socrates. But of all these writers, only Nietzsche really seems to have any confidence in the ultimate success of this trend. (Insert syphilis joke here)
...with [the "historical"] Faust ends the medieval religious era, and there begins the modern, critical era of science. It is indeed very significant that at precisely the time when by public belief Faust lived, the Reformation began, and that he himself is supposed to have founded the art which secures for knowledge a victory over faith, namely the printing press; an art, however, which also robbed us of the Catholic peace of mind and plunged us into doubt and revolutions -- or, as someone else would put it, finally delivered us into the hands of the devil. But no, knowledge, the understanding of things through the intellect, science gives us at last the pleasures of which religious faith, Catholic Christianity, has cheated us for so long; we apprehend that men are called not only to a heavenly but also to an earthly equality; the political brotherhood preached to us by philosophy is more beneficial to us than the purely spiritual brotherhood which Christianity has procured for us....
...set the stage for The Magic Mountain. All these books are really about the same thing. And Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, would trace this trend toward positivism, an emphasis on the scientific and on this world rather than the next, back to Socrates. But of all these writers, only Nietzsche really seems to have any confidence in the ultimate success of this trend. (Insert syphilis joke here)
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