by one of us with five planks on his shoulder, and it was 'Chinese no gooda' once again. Then came a Chink with six planks, but immediately afterwards a soldier came along with seven, looking very hot and uncomfortable beneath such a heavy load. We all shouted derisively, 'Chinese no gooda,' and there was a long pause, and we thought the victory was ours. But suddenly the Chinks burst into gleeful laughter and clapped their hands in mad excitement. We did not know what had happened, until we saw a Chink staggering under a kind of pagoda which his comrades had erected on his stalwart shoulders. It was built up of sixteen planks! Perspiring, breathing hard, and taking short, rapid steps, his pagoda on the verge of toppling over every instant, he reached the stack and then allowed the structure to collapse amid wild shouts of Chineesha gooda, Ingaleesha no gooda!' It was a warm day, and none of us felt inclined to dispute the final verdict at this meeting of East and West. The Manchester Guardian "THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN'* BY BERTRAND RUSSELL SINCERE believers in Christ's teaching have always been rare, but perhaps they are as common now as in any previous age. An unusual combination of qualities is necessary if a man is to find in the Gospels something like what Christ apparently meant to teach. There is needed, to begin with, the rare power of reading traditional and familiar words freshly, without allowing orthodox glosses to obscure their meaning. Perfect disinterestedness is required so far as temporal rewards What Is the Kingdom of Heaven? By A. Clutton-Brock. Methuen. 5s. net. are concerned, and no very strong desire for positive achievement in art or science or politics. Those who possess these preliminary qualifications must be able to complete them by belief in the reality of a transfigured world behind phenomena, such as all the great mystics have inhabited. This world Christ called the Kingdom of Heaven, and to it all His moral teaching is related. Mr. Clutton-Brock is one of the few who, fulfilling these conditions, are able genuinely to believe what is officially professed throughout the Western world. To him the Kingdom of Heaven is the only true reality, and is only to be seen through conversion. The truth [he says] is to be known only by the converted mind; for that alone is capable of experiencing the Kingdom of Heaven, which is reality. The experience of the unconverted mind is not experience of reality at all, but only of certain fragments of reality never seen in their right relation to each other. From this basis Mr. Clutton-Brock develops a mild English mysticism, showing the true spirit of statesmanlike compromise in the chapter on politics, which explains that religion is compatible with a citizen's duties, and loving one's neighbor affords no argument against killing him. Mr. Clutton-Brock believes, if I have understood him rightly, that we shall perceive the Kingdom of Heaven about us as soon as we learn to view things otherwise than in a relation of use to ourselves. The mystic believes -and in this Mr. Clutton-Brock agrees with him that his vision results from seeing things without the distorting mists of the Ego. To the skeptic it seems, on the contrary, that the mystic's view is, of all others, the most distorted by emotions of the Self; that the characteristics which the mystic finds in all that is real are only the reflection of his own feeling, like the universal blueness of the world when one is wearing blue spectacles; and that, as Kant taught, the elements shared by everything we experience are the elements contributed by ourselves. Mr. Clutton-Brock appeals to such things as 'the certainty we feel when we experience fully a great work of art.' No one ever experienced this certainty more completely than Haydon in regard to his own pictures; yet we all believe he was mistaken. Subjective certainty is terribly delusive; and among the most delusive of subjective certainties is the belief that mysticism springs from unbiased contemplation of the world. From the philosophical point of view, one of the essentials of mysticism, when it is less modest than Mr. Clutton-Brock's, is the belief that knowledge is obtained, not by a study of the object, but by inducing a certain mood in the subject. The man who is not a mystic or a skeptic believes that by studying objects he can acquire a certain amount of information about them, all of it subject to a risk of error, but in some cases only to a very small risk. He believes that, for the study of objects, it is not necessary to be in a certain emotional state, but only to have the normal degree of receptivity to impressions. If, however, he is a student of physiology and psychology, he is aware that various abnormal states diminish receptivity, and at the same time enormously enhance the subjective certainty of what appear to be impressions. He knows that those who drink too much see snakes, while those who eat too little see angels. But he finds no reason to believe in the snakes or the angels, except as subjective phenomena, because they are not seen by other observers in a normal condition. are willing to face the fact that there is some risk of error in all our beliefs, and are able to see that this fact does not mean that it is foolish to believe anything. Hallucinations and delusions occur, but they occur discoverably and rarely; they, do not prevent the probability that what we see and hear is really taking place. In certain men and certain moods, however, there is a craving for certainty, a horror of the mere possibility of error. This is part of the longing for security, which is one of the weaknesses into which we are led by timidity. There is no way of eliminating all risk, and those who try hardest succeed least. Under the influence of the mystic vision, we feel quite certain that we know, and that all risk of error has been eliminated. But we find just the same subjective certainty where it is demonstrably mistaken. The Germans, at first, were sure they would win the war, because otherwise life would have been too painful. It was emotion, not study of the circumstances, that produced their certainty; and it is emotion that produces the mystic's certainty. Mr. Clutton-Brock regards every man as an absolute skeptic who mistrusts generalizations about the universe, that is, who thinks that the way to find out about things is to look at them, rather than to work one's self up into a certain frame of mind. By speaking in this way he produces an appearance of inconsistency in those who disagree with him; for, having first dubbed them skeptics, he then shows that they, nevertheless, believe various things. There are [he says] skeptical philosophers who tell us most convincingly what we are not to believe; who do most heroically resist their own will to believe. Mr. Bertrand Russell, for instance, watches for the will to believe like a terrier at a rat-hole. He will prove to you that the very hypotheses on Ordinary men, in ordinary moods, which science is supposed to be based, such as the hypothesis of causation, mean nothing at all. He is forever facing bravely the truth that there is no meaning in anything. But skeptics are not consistent, he tells us: they yield to the will to believe in one direction. Their one article of faith is, in fact, the capacity of the reason to be converted. Man, utterly animal or even mechanical in all else, is capable of feats of pure reason in discrediting himself and all his beliefs. As his reason becomes more and more converted, he becomes more and more skeptical. To deal with such criticisms, it is necessary first of all to take them out of their rhetorical dress. We must get rid of the 'all or nothing' frame of mind. Take, for example, the law of causality. Like all other laws in science it requires fresh formulations from time to time, both through increased knowledge of phenomena and through improved delicacy of analysis. Fresh formulations do not prove that the old law was worthless, or that it did not contain a measure of truth; they prove only that it is now possible to approach nearer to a true formulation, though it is very unlikely that perfect truth is attainable. To say, as Mr. Clutton-Brock does, that such arguments amount to the contention that law of causality means nothing at all,' is mere groundless rhetoric. The next step is to get rid of such abstractions as 'reason' and 'the will to believe,' and to return to a commonsense study of our means of knowing. Some of our beliefs are verifiable by observation, others are not; experience shows that the verifiable beliefs are more apt to prove true when they spring from study of the object than when they are based on emotion. The general nature of the universe is a matter as to which our beliefs are not verifiable by observation, since the tiny observable sample of the universe may be peculiarly unfortunate. We may have got the one bad strawberry in the basket, the one rotten egg out of the dozen, the one tin that gives us ptomaine poisoning. The rest of the universe may be as delightful as the optimists say it is. We cannot, therefore, test the relative advantages of observation and emotion in the case of beliefs about the universe at large. Let us take a more homely illustration. Suppose you are waiting for your bus, which is one of several kinds that pass the place where you are waiting. You see a bus coming in the distance, but you cannot yet see what sort it is. The person whom Mr. Clutton-Brock calls a skeptic will suspend judgment until he can see the number of the bus. The person who follows Mr. CluttonBrock's precepts will persuade himself that he knows and loves the bus on its own account, and not merely on account of its uses; hence he will conclude, in a glow of optimism, that it must be the right bus, and will get in without troubling to verify his belief. His procedure is comfortable at the moment, but it may ultimately land him in quite the wrong place. The view which I am calling 'scientific' is not one which says that all knowledge is impossible, unless by 'knowledge' you mean something absolute, infallible, and incapable of increased exactitude. The view which I call scientific holds that knowledge of objects is to be derived from study of the objects, or (if they are not amenable to direct observation) by inference from objects that can be observed, the inference being of a sort that has been frequently verified in experience. Neither the study nor the inference will be infallible, but experience shows that, by due care, knowledge so obtained can be much more often right than wrong in the expectations that it raises. Experience also shows that very strong emotions as regards the object are apt, in verifiable cases, to interfere with observation, and to produce beliefs which turn out to be false. Strong emotions produce a feeling of certainty which subsequent experience shows to be fallacious. Many men went into the war with the certainty that they would survive; many others with the certainty that they would not. But death paid no heed to these certainties. All this is so much a matter of commonplace that one would be ashamed to repeat it if it were not ignored. Coming at last to the application, it is clear that Mr. Clutton-Brock's certainty about the Kingdom of Heaven is of the same nature as a soldier's certainty that he will not be killed: it is an objectification of emotion, not an observation of visible fact. To the mystic, of course, it appears to be observation; so do snakes to the drunkard. But the reasons which induce the outsider to dissent are similar in the two cases. We hesitate to draw the parallel, because what the mystic tells us is pleasant and his life is virtuous; but these are scientifically irrelevant considerations. The supposed skepticism of those whom Mr. Clutton-Brock criticizes amounts only to the very simple maxim that the way to know about people and things is to study them, not to sit down and feel emotions about them. A man in love is not supposed to be the best judge of the character of the object of his passion; and a mystic is a man in love with the universe. The universe may, by good luck, deserve his commendations. But the method by which he arrives at them is one which, where it can be tested, is found to lead to error much more often than to truth; therefore, cool reflection gives no reason to trust the method where no test is possible. The Athenæum SELBORNE REVISITED BY H. MASSINGHAM Ir a man, be he ornithologist and lover, wishes to get the feel of Gilbert White and Selborne, let him read Mr. W. H. Hudson's account of his first visit to this remote little Hampshire village. village. Mr. Hudson sat under that famous, patriarchal yew in the churchyard, and there, not the ghost, but a kind of earthly emanation, a faint surviving image of the man, appeared to him. The two conversed and compared notes, the eighteenth century questioning, the twentieth responding. And this duet is an incomparable piece of prose, by which we are made to comprehend what is hidden, in the difference between the eighteenth century and the modern attitude to nature, to all but imagination. Nor, in a few lines, could the intimate personality of the gentle, domestic, old scholar of nature be more completely and magically summoned out of the past. When, therefore, I set out for Selborne over the high tableland from Petersfield through Froxfield and East Tisted, I felt I was doing the best I could for the emotional promise of the day by keeping an attentive eye for the birds in my neighborhood and an attentive inward ear for that refined and spiritualized conversation, like the vivid though leisurely intonations of two blackbirds. I was glad to find the yellow-hammer common along the hedgerows, for he is a favorite of mine, and I wasted a good deal of time watching them singing their little hymns of praise, like a sighing gust of wind among tall grasses, beaks comically lifted to heaven and golden heads shining in the sun. It is a curious thing that White never distinguished between the yellow and the much rarer cirl bunting. Here, too, turtledoves had settled for the sum mer and their low, tremulous croodling notes accompanied me for a couple of miles. They have a bewitching loveflight, sailing down to earth, with arched wings and expanded whitebarred tails, in a slanting glide, that makes the curves of Milo's Venus look insignificant. There were several pairs of lapwings building in the fields, and I once turned aside to try and find a nest, not because I cared whether I found it or not, but simply for the pleasure of having their company in a world where the wild birds shun our presence as Coleridge's walker fled the 'fearful fiend, that close behind him treads.' So I walked about, enjoying the unique sensation of these glorious birds following me all over the field, flying close round my head, and displaying the utmost anxiety and fearlessness. But at last I grew ashamed of getting my pleasure at the expense of a noble passion and slunk off, being seen safely and some distance off the premises by the outraged tenants. So I jogged along that lavish and varied though never grand country; finding both whitethroats, the lesser just as demonstrative and excitable as his cousin, and singing his garrulous warble (like the chaffinch's without the upward note at the end, and shriller and more piercing), with crest raised, body shaken, and throat puffed out in the fine frenzy of melody; hearing an occasional blackcap and garden warbler, and seeing two or three jays and magpies, loveliest of all the feathered outcasts until I arrived at the long, winding street of Selborne village. The first thing I did was to climb the 'zigzag' (constructed in White's time) of Selborne Hangar, to wander on the common. Birds do not frequent the beech which White called 'the most lovely of all forest trees, whether we consider its smooth rind or bark, its glossy foliage, or graceful pendulous boughs,' for the simple reason that its woods permit no undergrowth, and nowadays there are no honey-buzzards (as there were in his) to build upon the canopy of foliage. But there were none on the common, the wildest, most desolate, and untamed land, commanding many a fine prospect of the irregular, rolling, fecund Hampshire country. It was a paradise for birds, with wide spaces, isolated trees, thick matted undergrowth of bramble and furze and thorn, and, indeed, every variety of unclipped, untended bush and little areas of bracken and grassland. Yet in this seventh heaven for feathered cherubs, I heard but the commonest songs and saw but three birds—a swallow, a jay, and a hen blackbird. True, I found a throstle's nest, and that went some way toward compensating me. How wonderfully beautiful the eggs are in their natural home little blue oval skies, powdered at the poles with black stars and with a greenish tinge over the blue, as if the earth had stained the heavens! In the collector's cabinet they look and are no more than pebbles or colored marbles. So I made haste to avoid the bitterness which a realization of the steady decline in wild-bird life always brings, and set off down the pretty village street for the Plestor, the little square with the sycamore which has supplanted 'the vast oak, the delight of young and old,' overturned by a tempest in 1703. Thence into the churchyard, keeping the eyes resolutely turned away from 'The Wakes,' which now looks like a suburban residence of London. Well, thank God for the churchyard and the mossy-girthed yew and the cypresses and the squat, square tower of the church. Thank, too, the blessed spirit of the place which hides the small leaning gravestone of Gilbert White with long, waving grasses. That stone, with 'G. W.' upon it and the dates of his |