CONFUSIONS.

Surely the analytical faculty must be very rare, or we should not so commonly find people confounding together things essentially distinct. Any one who possesses that faculty naturally, and has followed some occupation which strengthens it, must be continually amused if he has a humorous turn, or irritated if he is irascible, by the astounding mental confusions in which men contentedly pass their lives. To be just, this account ought to include both sexes, for women indulge in confusions even more frequently than men, and are less disposed to separate things when they have once been jumbled together.

A confusion of ideas in politics which is not uncommon amongst the enemies of all change is to believe that whoever desires the reform of some law wants to do something that is not legal, and has a rebellious, subversive spirit. Yet the reformer is not a rebel; it is indeed the peculiar distinction of his position not to be a rebel, for there has never been a real reformer (as distinguished from a revolutionist) who wished to do anything illegal. He desires, certainly, to do something which is not legal just at present, but he does not wish to do it so long as it remains in the condition of illegality. He wishes first to make it legal by obtaining legislative sanction for his proposal, and then to do it when it shall have become as legal as anything else, and when all the most conservative people in the kingdom will be strenuous in its defence as “part and parcel of the law of the land.”

Another confusion in political matters which has always been extremely common is that between private and public liberty. Suppose that a law were enacted to the effect that each British subject without exception should go to Mass every Sunday morning, on pain of death, and should take the Roman Catholic Sacrament of Holy Communion, involving auricular confession, at Easter; such a law would not be an infringement of the sensible liberty of Roman Catholics, because they do these things already. Then they might say, “People talk of the tyranny of the law, yet the law is not tyrannical at all; we enjoy perfect liberty in England, and it is most unreasonable to say that we do not.” The Protestant part of the community would exclaim that such a law was an intolerable infringement of liberty, and would rush to arms to get rid of it. This is the distinction between private and public liberty. There is private liberty when some men are not interfered with in the ordinary habits of their existence; and there has always been much of such private liberty under the worst of despotisms; but there is not public liberty until every man in the country may live according to his own habits, so long as he does not interfere with the rights of others. Here is a distinction plain enough to be evident to a very commonplace understanding; yet the admirers of tyrants are often successful in producing a confusion between the two things, and in persuading people that there was “ample liberty” under some foreign despot, because they themselves, when they visited the country that lay prostrate under his irresistible power, were allowed to eat good dinners, and drive about unmolested, and amuse themselves by day and by night according to every suggestion of their fancy.

Many confusions have been intentionally maintained by political enemies in order to cast odium on their adversaries; so that it becomes of great importance to a political cause that it should not bear a name with two meanings, or to which it may be possible to give another meaning than that which was originally intended. The word “Radical” is an instance of this. According to the enemies of radicalism it has always meant a political principle that strikes at the root of the constitution; but it was not that meaning of the word which induced the first Radicals to commit the imprudence of adopting it. The term referred to agriculture rather than tree-felling, the original idea being to uproot abuses as a gardener pulls weeds up by the roots. I distinctly remember my first boyish notion of the Radicals. I saw them in a sort of sylvan picture,—violent savage men armed with sharp axes, and hewing away at the foot of a majestic oak that stood for the glory of England. Since then I have become acquainted with another instance of the unfortunate adoption of a word which may be plausibly perverted from its meaning. The French republican motto is LibertÉ, ÉgalitÉ, FraternitÉ, and to this day there is hardly an English newspaper that does not from time to time sneer at the French Republicans for aspiring to equality, as if equality were not impossible in the nature of things, and as if, supposing an unnatural equality to be established to-day, the operation of natural causes would not bring about inequality to-morrow. We are told that some men would be stronger, or cleverer, or more industrious than others, and earn more and make themselves leaders; that children of the same parents, starting in life with the same fortunes, never remain in precisely the same positions; and much more to the same purpose. All this trite and familiar reasoning is without application here. The word ÉgalitÉ in the motto means something which can be attained, and which, though it did not exist in France before the Revolution, is now almost a perfect reality there,—it means equality before the law; it means that there shall not be privileged classes exempt from paying taxes, and favored with such scandalous partiality that all posts of importance in the government, the army, the magistracy, and the church are habitually reserved for them. If it meant absolute equality, no Republican could aim at wealth, which is the creation of inequality in his own favor; neither would any Republican labor for intellectual reputation, or accept honors. There would not even be a Republican in the gymnastic societies, where every member strives to become stronger and more agile than his fellows, and knows that, whether in his favor or against him, the most striking inequalities will be manifested in every public contest. There would be no Republicans in the University, for has it not a hierarchy with the most marked gradations of title, and differences of consideration and authority? Yet the University is so full of Republicans that it is scarcely too much to say that it is entirely composed of them. I am aware that there are dreamers in the working classes, both in France and elsewhere, who look forward to a social state when all men will work for the same wages,—when the Meissonier of the day will be paid like a sign-painter, and the sign-painter like a white-washer, and all three perform each other’s tasks by turns for equality of agreeableness in the work; but these dreams are only possible in extreme ignorance, and lie quite outside of any theories to be seriously considered.

Religious intolerance, when quite sincere and not mixed up with social contempt or political hatred, is founded upon a remarkable confusion of ideas, which is this. The persecutor assumes that the heretic knowingly and maliciously resists the will of God in rejecting the theology which he knows that God desires him to receive. This is a confusion between the mental states of the believer and the unbeliever, and it does not accurately describe either, for the believer of course accepts the doctrine, and the unbeliever does not reject it as coming from God, but precisely because he is convinced that it has a purely human origin.

“Are you a Puseyite?” was a question put to a lady in my hearing; and she at once answered, “Certainly not, I should be ashamed of being a Puseyite.” Here was a confusion between her present mental state and her supposed possible mental state as a Puseyite; for it is impossible to be a real Puseyite and at the same time to think of one’s belief with an inward sense of shame. A believer always thinks that his belief is simply the truth, and nobody feels ashamed of believing what is true. Even concealment of a belief does not imply shame; and those who have been compelled, in self-defence, to hide their real opinions, have been ashamed, if at all, of hiding and not of having them.

A confusion common to all who do not think, and avoided only with the greatest difficulty by those who do, is that between their own knowledge and the knowledge possessed by another person who has different tastes, different receptive powers, and other opportunities. They cannot imagine that the world does not appear the same to him that it appears to them. They do not really believe that he can feel quite differently from themselves and still be in every respect as sound in mind and as intelligent as they are. The incapacity to imagine a different mental condition is strikingly manifested in what we call the Philistine mind, and is one of its strongest characteristics. The true Philistine thinks that every form of culture which opens out a world that is closed against himself leaves the votary exactly where he was before. “I cannot imagine why you live in Italy,” said a Philistine to an acquaintance; “nothing could induce me to live in Italy.” He did not take into account the difference of gifts and culture, but supposed the person he addressed to have just his own mental condition, the only one that he was able to conceive, whereas, in fact, that person was so endowed and so educated as to enjoy Italy in the supreme degree. He spoke the purest Italian with perfect ease; he had a considerable knowledge of Italian literature and antiquities; his love of natural beauty amounted to an insatiable passion; and from his youth he had delighted in architecture and painting. Of these gifts, tastes, and acquirements the Philistine was simply destitute. For him Italy could have had no meaning. Where the other found unfailing interest he would have suffered from unrelieved ennui, and would have been continually looking back, with the intolerable longing of nostalgia, to the occupations of his English home. In the same spirit a French bourgeois once complained in my hearing that too much space was given to foreign affairs in the newspapers, “car, vous comprenez, cela n’intÉresse pas.” This was simply an attribution of his personal apathy to everybody else. Certainly, as a nation, the French take less interest in foreign affairs than we do, but they do take some interest, and the degree of it is exactly reflected by the importance given to foreign affairs in their journals, always greatest in the best of them. An Englishman said, also in my hearing, that to have a library was a mistake, as a library was of no use; he admitted that a few books might be useful if the owner read them through. Here, again, is the attribution of one person’s experience to all cases. This man had never himself felt the need of a library, and did not know how to use one. He could not realize the fact that a few books only allow you to read, whilst a library allows you to pursue a study. He could not at all imagine what the word “library” means to a scholar,—that it means the not being stopped at every turn for want of light, the not being exposed to scornful correction by men of inferior ability and inferior industry, whose only superiority is the great and terrible one of living within a cabfare of the British Museum. I remember reading an account of the establishment of a Greek professorship in a provincial town, and it was wisely proposed, by one who understood the difficulties of a scholar remote from the great libraries, that provision should be made for the accumulation of books for the use of the future occupants of the chair, but the trustees (honest men of business, who had no idea of a scholar’s wants and necessities) said that each professor must provide his own library, just as road commissioners advertise that a surveyor must have his own horse.

One of the most serious reasons why it is imprudent to associate with people whose opinions you do not wish to be made responsible for is that others will confound you with them. There is an old Latin proverb, and also a French one, to the effect that if a man knows what your friends are, he knows what you are yourself. These proverbs are not true, but they well express the popular confusion between having something in common and having everything in common. If you are on friendly terms with clergymen, it is inferred that you have a clerical mind; when the reason may be that you are a scholar living in the country, and can find no scholarship in your neighborhood except in the parsonage houses. You associate with foreigners, and are supposed to be unpatriotic; when in truth you are as patriotic as any rational and well-informed creature can be, but have a faculty for languages that you like to exercise in conversation. This kind of confusion takes no account of the indisputable fact that men constantly associate together on the ground of a single pursuit that they have in common, often a mere amusement, or because, in spite of every imaginable difference, they are drawn together by one of those mysterious natural affinities which are so obscure in their origin and action that no human intelligence can explain them.

Not only are a man’s tastes liable to be confounded with those of his personal acquaintances, but he may find some trade attributed to him, by a perfectly irrational association of ideas, because it happens to be prevalent in the country where he lives. I have known instances of men supposed to have been in the cotton trade simply because they had lived in Lancashire, and of others supposed to be in the mineral oil trade for no other reason than because they had lived in a part of France where mineral oil is found.

Professional men are usually very much alive to the danger of confusion as affecting their success in life. If you are known to do two things, a confusion gets established between the two, and you are no longer classed with that ease and decision which the world finds to be convenient. It therefore becomes a part of worldly wisdom to keep one of the occupations in obscurity, and if that is not altogether possible, then to profess as loudly and as frequently as you can that it is entirely secondary and only a refreshment after more serious toils. Many years ago a well-known surgeon published a set of etchings, and the merit of them was so dangerously conspicuous, so superior, in fact, to the average of professional work, that he felt constrained to keep those too clever children in their places by a quotation from Horace,—

“O laborum
Dulce lenimen!”

To present one’s self to the world always in one character is a great help to success, and maintains the stability of a position. The kings in the story-books and on playing cards who have always their crowns on their heads and sceptres in their hands, appear to enjoy a decided advantage over modern royalty, which dresses like other people and enters into common interests and pursuits. Literary men admire the prudent self-control of our literary sovereign, Tennyson, who by his rigorous abstinence from prose takes care never to appear in public without his singing robes and his crown of laurel. Had he carelessly and familiarly employed the commoner vehicle of expression, there would have been a confusion of two Tennysons in the popular idea, whilst at present his name is as exclusively associated with the exquisite music of his verse as that of Mozart with another kind of melody.

The great evil of confusions, as they affect conversation, is that they constantly place a man of accurate mental habits in such trying situations that, unless he exercises the most watchful self-control, he is sure to commit the sin of contradiction. We have all of us met with the lady who does not think it necessary to distinguish between one person and another, who will tell a story of some adventure as having happened to A, when in reality it happened to B; who will attribute sayings and opinions to C, when they properly belong to D; and deliberately maintain that it is of no consequence whatever, when some suffering lover of accuracy undertakes to set her right. It is in vain to argue that there really does exist, in the order of the universe, a distinction between one person and another, though both belong to the human race; and that organisms are generally isolated, though there has been an exception in the case of the Siamese twins. The death of the wonderful swimmer who attempted to descend the rapids of Niagara afforded an excellent opportunity for confounders. In France they all confounded him with Captain Boyton, who swam with an apparatus; and when poor Webb was sucked under the whirlpool they said, “You see that, after all, his inflated dress was of no avail.” Fame of a higher kind does not escape from similar confusions. On the death of George Eliot, French readers of English novels lamented that they would have nothing more from the pen that wrote “John Halifax,” and a cultivated Frenchman expressed his regret for the author of “Adam Bede” and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”[24]

Men who have trained themselves in habits of accurate observation often have a difficulty in realizing the confused mental condition of those who simply receive impressions without comparison and classification. A fine field for confused tourists is architecture. They go to France and Italy, they talk about what they have seen, and leave you in bewilderment, until you make the discovery that they have substituted one building for another, or, better still, mixed two different edifices inextricably together. Foreigners of this class are quite unable to establish any distinction between the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey, because both have towers; and they are not clear about the difference between the British Museum and the National Gallery, because there are columns in the fronts of both.[25] English tourists will stay some time in Paris, and afterwards not be able to distinguish between photographs of the Louvre and the HÔtel de Ville. We need not be surprised that people who have never studied architecture at all should not be sure whether St. Paul’s is a Gothic building or not, but the wonder is that they seem to retain no impressions received merely by the eye. One would think that the eye alone, without knowledge, would be enough to establish a distinction between one building and another altogether different from it; yet it is not so.

I cannot close this chapter without some allusion to a crafty employment of words only too well understood already by those who influence the popular mind. There is such a natural tendency to confusion in all ordinary human beings that if you repeatedly present to them two totally distinct things at the same time, they will, before long, associate them so closely as to consider them inseparable by their very nature. This is the reason why all those branches of education that train the mind in analysis are so valuable. To be able to distinguish between accidental connections of things or characteristics and necessary connections, is one of the best powers that education bestows upon us. By far the greater number of erroneous popular notions are due simply to the inability to make this distinction which belongs to all undisciplined minds. Calumnies, that have great influence over such minds, must lose their power as the habit of analysis enables people to separate ideas which the uncultivated mingle together.

Insufficient analysis leads to a very common sort of confusion between the defectiveness of a part only and a defect pervading the whole. An invention (as often happens) does not visibly succeed on the first trial, and then the whole of the common public will at once declare the invention to be bad, when, in reality, it may be a good invention with a local defect, easily remediable. Suppose that a yacht misses stays, the common sort of criticism would be to say that she was a bad boat, when, in fact, her hull and everything else might be thoroughly well made, and the defect be due only to a miscalculation in the placing of her canvas. I have myself seen a small steel boat sink at her anchorage, and a crowd laugh at her as badly contrived, when her only defect was the unobserved starting of a rivet. The boat was fished up, the rivet replaced, and she leaked and sank no more. When Stephenson’s locomotive did not go because its wheels slid on the rails, the vulgar spectators were delighted with the supposed failure of a benefactor of the human species, and set up a noise of jubilant derision. The invention, they had decided, was of no good, and they sang their own foolish gaudeamus igitur. Stephenson at once perceived that the only defect was want of weight, and he immediately proceeded to remedy it by loading the machine with ballast. So it is in thousands of cases. The common mind, untrained in analysis, condemns the whole as a failure, when the defect lies in some small part which the specialist, trained in analysis, seeks for and discovers.

I have not touched upon the confusions due to the decline of the intellectual powers. In that case the reason is to be sought for in the condition of the brain, and there is, I believe, no remedy. In healthy people, enjoying the complete vigor of their faculties, confusions are simply the result of carelessness and indolence, and are proper subjects for sarcasm. With senile confusions the case is very different. To treat them with hard, sharp, decided correction, as is so often done by people of vigorous intellect, is a most cruel abuse of power. Yet it is difficult to say what ought to be done when an old person falls into manifest errors of this kind. Simple acquiescence is in this case a pardonable abandonment of truth, but there are situations in which it is not possible. Then you find yourself compelled to show where the confusion lies. You do it as gently as may be, but you fail to convince, and awaken that tenacious, unyielding opposition which is a characteristic of decline in its earlier stages. All that can be said is, that when once it has become evident that confusions are not careless but senile, they ought to be passed over if possible, and if not, then treated with the very utmost delicacy and gentleness.