Then Hassan ben Brahim, the camel-driver, lifted up his voice and
said: "The sun is hot."
This statement gave me considerable food for reflection.
In the first place,
Hassan is a number one liar. Had he not said that he was afraid
to cross the desert with only one camel, and having thus induced
me to pay for two, brought one of them so antique and infirm that
he had to send it back to Bou Saada?
In the second place,
Hassan was a fool. Had he not started on a long desert journey without
money, food, or water? Had he not shivered all one cloudy night
in fear that the flood would carry us away?
Clearly, no reliance
could be placed upon Hassan!
So, before assenting
to his proposition, I looked about for corroboration of some kind.
"By 'the sun'
you mean, I take it (said I to Hassan), that glorious and beneficent
luminary which is apparently a small disk in the heavens above us,
but in reality a vast globe, the centre and father of our system,
in diameter so many miles, in distance so many miles"- I gave
him the exact figures- "around which this planet revolves in
365 days, 4 hours, 37 minutes and 28.0387541 seconds."
"No!" said
the churl; "I mean that." And he pointed to the orb in
question.
One could not reason
with the clod! But his appeal to the evidence of my sight was far
from convincing me of his integrity or of the accuracy of his observation;
for he had said (in his haste), "The sun is hot," and
heat, as such (I reflected at leisure), is not truly appreciable
by the eye.
And then it dawned
upon me! This camel-driver was a mystic! He was asserting a relation
between two senses. A relation in what? In something that was certainly
not either of those two senses; in something that must be a reconciler
between them, a court of appeal, a... yes! a soul.
This was absurd: Haeckel
has shown it to be absurd. So I halted the camel and got out my
sweater, and buttoned my jacket over it, and continued the journey.
Why did I feel uncomfortable?
Why did I perspire? My friends, I cannot tell!
The night brought
counsel. In the morning I attacked Hassan's position with horse,
foot, and artillery.
"How dare you?"
I said. " We have an instrument for registering degrees, the
thermometer. Produce your thermometer!
Hassan seemed abashed;
he only wiped his brow.
"No!" I
continued, "you are an impudent fellow, a pretender to knowledge,
a sophist, a scholiast, and several other things ending in 'ast,'
I dare say, if the truth were known!"
The victim hummed
some rubbish about "the eyes of Arabi," which he thought
superior to a gazelle's; but I did not take his point.
"Hassan"
said I, "yon know absolutely nothing. You do not know that
heat is a vibration of molecules, that heat is molecular motion!
And is this perceptible even to feeling? Perish the thought! By
feeling, who would ever have found out about molecules? Understand
then, once and for all, that heat as such cannot be felt!"
The poor man was by
now, metaphorically speaking, a mere pulp. The volcanic grey matter
of his Arab brain sizzled under the cold spray of my intellectual
acumen.
He hit the camel repeatedly
and gave his wheezy whistle.
I had won; the rest
of the day's march was for me a smiling silence.
Yet night found me
disturbed. On what profound metaphysical conceptions (I mused) rest
our simplest certainties! Think of Huxley, and the smashing blows
that he delivered at "commonsense" metaphysics; how they
crumbled to powder before him!
If I contemplate "the
sun," how rapidly it becomes a mere subjective phenomenon,
a puppet of the ego, or at least a strange, mystical, unknown, perhaps
unknowable being. Subjective or objective, certainly my idea of
it is dependent upon me; it is the objective school (surely!) that
insists that things exist without my co- operation. Yet is not that
the very proof that the object must be conjoined with my sense before
it exists for me? Then "the sun" means "the relation
of some unknown thing with my organs of sight."
And this relation
is neither "it" nor "I." Nor is it in time or
space, this relation. What is a relation? In what does it take place?
Fortunately, I stopped
there. Another step and I should have had to postulate a soul, and
the Rationalist Press Association might have got to hear of it-
and then?
The boot, and my last
link with respectability snapped for ever!
The dawn broke at
last, and we resumed the trudge across the sands. "Hassan!"
I said earnestly, "you are concealing something! You are keeping
back from me the fact that your opinion that the sun is hot (by
which of course yon only mean that exposure to the rays of the sun
produces effects similar to those caused by those bodies which we
have agreed to describe as hot) is founded upon the fact that your
experience teaches you to associate the visible appearance of yon
glorious orb with sensations of heat. You are wrong! I, for example,
can testify that one may be exceeding cold in bright sunshine. And,
besides, your experience may be very limited."
"Forty-four yeyears,
man and boy," he grunted, "ave I druv this 'ere ruddy
oont." (I translate freely from his classical Arabic.)
I took no notice.
"For instance," I remarked, "suppose you went to
London for forty-four years more. You- who know nothing of electricity-
would return to Algeria and say that in London bright stars appeared
in the streets at nightfall. It would never strike you that those
stars would not appear unless men kindled them, and I am just as
presumptuous in supposing that the appearance of the sun would take
place if (say) the sea dried up!
"You see no connecting
links between the arc lamps in Piccadilly and the generating station
tucked away somewhere; I see no connection between the sunrise and
the existence of the sea- and we both try and trade off our ignorance
as knowledge! There was (and is) no answer to the problem of the
Chinese philosopher, who dreamt that he was a butterfly and, awaking,
called his disciples and said: 'I Chwang dreamt that I was a butterfly.
Now, is it so, or am I a butterfly that has gone to sleep and is
dreaming that it is Chwang?'
"It is the experience
of man that the appearance of the evening star heralds the darkness;
but the truth is that the darkness causes the appearance of the
stars. It is only in the great shadow of the earth that we may behold
them, save from the darkness of a well. What a whirl of sophistry
and confusion is all this babble of cause and effect! How all experience
may deceive us! Hurrah!" (I broke off), "there is our
oasis! How the palms wave and the minarets glitter and the waters
gleam!
"No!" said
Hassan; "it is a mirage."
"Scoundrel,"
I retorted, now thoroughly incensed with his stupidity and falsehood,
"how do you know?"
"I have been
here before (says he as cool as custard), and I know there is no
oasis within many days' journey. By my eyes I could not tell."
"Then you judge
an optical phenomenon by treacherous memory, slave, beast, reptile,
socialist that you are?
"And yet I (even
I) cannot get beyond William the First ten sixty- six, William the
Second ten eighty-seven, Henry the First... and I knew them all,
once!
"Why, Hassan,
you are a bundle of uncertainties. Come now, confess! That remark
of yours about the sun was interrogative? Or at most a feeler? You
wanted to know what I thought about it? You had an intuition and
wanted to test it?"
"No," said
the Sahara of obstinacy; "I just passed the remark."
"Yes, I see,
a mere idle frivolous bit of small-talk. A sort of joke?"
"No joke in the
summer," he growled.
"Don't answer
me back!" I snapped. (Something had made me irritable- not
the heat of the sun, of course.) "I don't want you to speak;
I'm trying to argue with you (I was on the right side of the Rationalist
Press Association, that time!). But- you didn't mean you were sure,
did you? You sort of threw out the suggestion?
"Dead sure,"
says he, and hits the camel again.
Disgusted with his
brutality and Boeotian bathos, I fell back, and walked alone, meditating.
He was sure, thought
I. And Perdurabo is sure that he will endure unto The End, that
his khu will be a mighty khu for ever and ever, and that he hath
indeed talked with his holy guardian angel and seen God face to
face. And Charles Watts is sure that Perdurabo is an ass, and suspends
his opinion about Hassan ben Brahim until he has submitted the question
to Haeckel and got a firman or an ukase about it. And Aleister Crowley
is sure that nobody can distinguish between Perdurabo and Hassan
and Charles Watts, saying-
"On life's curtain
Is written this one certainty-
that naught is certain."
What is the test?
Is it the common experience of men? Then sure the sun moves round
the earth, and there are no such things as molecules, and there
are such things as spirits.
Is it the common experience
of the instructed and competent among mankind?
The men who designed
and built Luxor and Anahuradapura bore witness to gods visible and
tangible. Lombroso assented to Eusapia Palladino, A. R. Wallace
believes in spirits, Newton thought Euclid proved the existence
of God, and Kelvin relied for the same proof upon biology. Worse,
Newman "worshipped idols and a piece of bread," and I
(who am hardly likely to allow that any one is more instructed and
competent than I am) believe in the Great Brotherhood, and the certain
heritage of man in the Holy Kingdom. I believe in the Holy Ghost,
the Holy Catholic Church (not Christianity), the communion of saints;
the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen!
This conviction is
not to be shaken, for it is based upon the same rock as Hassan's
conviction about the sun. It is my experience. Like any other experience,
it comes through the senses; but it takes place in some unknown
fortress within the five outlying towers of sense, in some secret
cave of the heart and brain that even Ernst Haeckel has not dissected
out.
Let him say that "as
your mind decays (though I don't see how it can decay any more)
you will lose this assured knowledge of your immortality."
"Yes, and I lose
the sun, and the heat of the sun."
"But your Holy
Guardian Angel is only a phantom of your diseased brain."
"But in that
same brain is the sun."
"But other men
testify to the sun."
"But other men
testify to the Angel."
"But the majority
of men accept the sun and deny the Angel."
"I am not a democrat.
All the men whom I respect testify to the Angel, and don't care
twopence about the sun."
"But I can show
the sun to any man who had never seen it, and he would add his testimony
to its truth."
"For 'sun' read
'Angel' and you have my exact position."
"Show Him to
me! This instant!"
"Patience a moment;
it requires a little trouble, even a little work."
"Ah! I have you
at last. I can show the sun to any man at any moment!"
"Not if he is
in England, and if it is night, and if he has cataract."
"I should remove
him from England and wait for the morning and perform an operation."
"Exactly; I will
arrange your moral climate, and ask you to have patience for an
hour or two until the dawn, and remove the scales from your sight."
"Bah! I can't
waste my time arguing with a fool."
"I have not disagreed-
so far- with anything that you have said. Why should I begin now?"
Nay, this interior
certainty of Truth; this Faith in the Validity of Essential Relations;
this Knowledge that stands behind and apart from Evidence; this
Understanding which makes the darkness light, this Wisdom which
directs the Will; are not these Children of One Ineffable Brilliance,
one Selfhood beyond all Self?
And a Voice came unto
me, saying-
"This Interior
Certainty is the Camel that goeth ten days in the desert bearing
water in his belly, as thou goest ten times seven years in the desert
of life, where the Water of pure Truth is not found. And this Camel
was furnished with sufficient water from the Well, yet at the end
of the journey, if he be athirst, he shall drink deeply at his will
from the unfailing fountains, and rest under the shadow of the never-withering
palms.
"Rise up, therefore,
and proceed upon thy way, for thy water is inexhaustible, and thereof
shalt thou give to drink unto many men that be athirst."
