THE UNEDUCATED MIND MEN who are engaged in teaching are apt at times to be rather depressed at finding how confused are the minds of their pupils, but they can comfort themselves with the thought (if the thought does give comfort) that the mass of men are in a state of still far worse mental confusion. At any rate, the failure to realise the fact is serious for us who live under a democracy. We may easily give too much weight to the sayings of people who do not really know what they mean, or give credit to well-set-up and capable men for an understanding which they do not possess. It is, perhaps, only when you meet them in the free court of open-air propaganda, and allow yourself to be heckled, that you realise the workings of the uneducated mind. Christian Evidence work in Hyde Park reproduces many of the features of the ancient world, and the conditions under which our religion and our philosophy had their origin. There are many coming and going, hearing and asking questions, trying to entangle teachers in their talk. As in Origen's day, 'the philosophers who talk in public make no distinction in the choice of their hearers. Anyone who likes stands and listens.' 1 'The first quality of all,' if a man is to be at all successful, is still that of Socrates, who, as Epictetus reminds us, ' never lost his temper in argument, never uttered anything abusive, never anything insolent, but bore abuse from others and quelled strife.' 2 He has still just the same types to deal with, the man who, like the Queen of Sheba, comes to prove him with hard questions, the man who, like Thrasymachus, makes speeches instead of answering, and after, 'like a bathman, deluging our ears with his words, has a mind to go away,'3 as well as the man who, like Rosa Dartle, ' only asks for information.' And if you leave your platform and go and mix with the crowd you will find worse behind. In putting questions only the bolder and more thoughtful come forward, and the cranks and queer people have to be short in speech; if they are not you can control them and bring them to the point. But to listen to or to take part in the informal discussions that go on all round the speakers is to 1 Contra Celsum, iii., 44. * Discourses, bk. ii., ch. 12, ed. P. E. Matheson (Oxford, 1916), p. 186. come into direct contact with the way masses of men think and talk. I It is not too much to say that the vast majority are quite incapable of thinking logically, unable, that is, to use words properly, or to think by any accurate reasoning process. A large number are quite incoherent in their speech. When they try to ask a question they ramble on in a flow of continuous talk in which one part has no obvious connection with another, of which the sentences frequently begin in one way and continue in another, and do not end at all. Mrs. Nickleby is a close reasoner compared to them, and Miss Bates an utterer of terse epigrams. I cannot give an example, as I have never been able to get down notes of the variety of subjects touched on in one such question.' The attempt to fix on some salient point to answer I can only compare with the attempt to catch your hat when the wind has blown it off your head just as you think you have got it off it goes again out of your grasp. This is quite the most exhausting work in open-air propaganda. Others will put a quite intelligible question to you, and when you have answered it will simply repeat it. I have had a man do this half a dozen times in succession. He kept on asking,' Do you not think that the laws of God sometimes contradict the laws of man?'-a matter which had occupied perhaps a third of my previous lecture. Others will repeat the same question Sunday after Sunday. One man has asked me,' Is there any evidence in the Bible for the immortality of the soul?' at intervals for two and a half years. The same man asks me from time to time, 'Doesn't your creed say that Christ is of one substance with the Father, and don't your articles say that God is without body, parts, or passions?' I regularly explain to him what' substance means in the creeds, and that it does not mean 'matter' as in common speech. In vain. He listens apparently, but he takes nothing in. Even better educated men are often incapable of listening. I have had a man, who, I am told, is a doctor, ask me a question about cruelty to animals and, as I tried to answer it, gaze at me, like Mrs. Jellaby, with a vague, far-away look, 'as if I were a steeple in the distance,' as Caddy would have said, and then just repeat his question. The same man had heard me answer the old question about the Bishop of London's income, and a week or two after I heard him repeating from the Secularist platform the old taunts as if it were all for his private use. I do not think he was dishonest; it was merely that his mind was closed to new ideas. Sometimes the mental defect seems to be due to a very limited experience or to arrested mental development. It is not an uncom mon thing to have the question put,' Who made God?' It is, I think, quite sincerely asked, just as it is a quite common question of children at a certain age I once got into conversation with some navvies on the top of a North London tram who were arguing about Adam and Eve, saying that God ought to have been locked up for appropriating the tree of knowledge just as much as Eve (I think it was), but they supposed He was not because there was no one to do it. I thought at first that they were joking and trying to draw me, but apparently they were quite serious and sincere. The majority, of course, have a quite inadequate command of words. Isn't all ethics the outcome of economic conditions?' is a typical question the meaning of which is quite clear. Even where the language is more confused it is generally fairly easy to see what the questioner is driving at; even if he rambles on from one subject to another the connection is, as a rule, easy to supply. The chief exceptions are Jews, who, in addition to an imperfect command of English, seem to think in quite a different manner, so that I am often quite at a loss to attach any meaning at all to what they say. Sometimes another Jew in the audience with a better command of our tongue will explain. Sometimes the unaccustomed attempt to put thought into definite words seems itself to be the cause of confusion. The other day a man found himself arguing that all the examiners in the University of London were bribed. I do not think that he really meant it, but he began by saying that money had more to do with education than brains, and went on to say that examinations were no fair test, and that all examiners were human, and that it was human to take bribes, but my impression all the time was that the effort to find words absorbed all his consciousness, and that he was unable to think at the same time of what he was saying. A leader of some of the unemployed not long ago was offered the work of painting lamp-posts and replied that he would like to paint them red in the blood of the aristocracy.' He was a very decent man, and when afterwards he was asked why he had said it he replied, 'Well, you know, when you are at the head of a lot of men you've got to say something.' I was once at a big meeting at the Albert Hall in favour of women's suffrage, and at one time a dear old lady with white curls was crying out, Blood, blood! I shan't be satisfied till I have had blood.' I do not believe really that she would have willingly hurt a fly. People are often surprised to see Secularists, who an hour before were saying all sorts of things about Christians, shaking hands with them and sitting down to tea with them in a quite friendly way. They do not realise how much that is said on platforms is said in a purely Pickwickian sense. Sometimes, I confess, I am baffled completely. A man once asked me, 'How do you reconcile a sterile and fertile being denying himself his physical rights and taking the consequences of his acts?' and by some flash of intuition I divined that he meant, 'Do you think it possible for a man to live chastely?' and he did! But when, on another occasion, he asked, 'I have a taste with highly problematical evolutionary problems. Which should I prefer? I mean which alternative should I prefer, if I choose between highly possible and highly impossible theories, between theism and atheism?' I confess that I was puzzled for an answer. Nor was the matter cleared up when he continued, 'Should I not prefer the highly impossible to the highly probable which is worked out by the atheist in evolutionary problems?' explaining that he thought that' the principles of the universal are potentially subject to a qualitative and quantitativeness of the human mind in all the categories.' I suppose it meant something to him, and I have seen the same man attending public University lectures. At any rate, he threw some light for me on the problem of Christian Science, and how certain persons may be able to find a meaning in Science and Health. One other habit of the uneducated mind is not infrequent, namely that of catching at words. There are large numbers of people in the same stage of mental development as were the Athenians who were struck by the methods of Euthydemus as described by Plato. They put words in the place of things, and fly off at tangents where two meanings coincide in one word. 'You say the Gospel is free. Then you ought to give away your books instead of selling them.' I have had this said several times. I was once arguing against determinism by an appeal to experience. I said, 'At half-past two this afternoon I was sitting by the fire. My feelings said, "Stay where you are!" My mind said, “If you do you will be late for the park." So with my will I determined 'Oh,' interrupted my questioner, 'you determined. Then you are a determinist!' As Coleridge said, ' Controversy is not seldom excited in consequence of the disputants attaching a different meaning to the same word.' 4 Or sometimes it is a thing irrelevantly connected that brings conviction. Smith the weaver, who corroborated Jack Cade's assertion that he was the son of Edward Mortimer, who was stolen away and brought up as a bricklayer, by saying, 'He made a chimney in my father's house, and the bricks are alive at this day to testify it,' 5 or even Calcott, who proved the genuineness of the Chatterton discoveries by showing the actual chest that he found the manuscript in, would be quite at home with the man who corroborates the assertions that missions do more harm than good Biographia Literaria, ch. xiv., ed. Shawcross (Oxford, 1817), vol. ii., 2 Henry VI., Act IV., Sc. II. P. 10. Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson, April 29, 1776. and that missionaries go with a Bible in one hand and a brandy bottle in the other by saying, 'I know that is true because I have been there [sic] myself.' II These, it may be argued, are exceptions, too many, no doubt, in number, but not forming the mass of ordinary men. That is so, no doubt, but common logical faults and fallacies are surprisingly frequent even among the more intelligent type. The majority seem to be quite unable to hold more than one idea at a time in their minds. They have no idea of seeing the other side while they are thinking of one. Consequently they have no power of balancing evidence. They like clear-cut answers and are bored by any attempt to present a complex piece of evidence. Qualifications puzzle them, and they are apt to be chiefly impressed by the last word. This leads to what has been called the Entweder-Oder-the 'Either-Or '-mind. For a long time I was puzzled at the way in which the old problem of free-will and determinism presented a difficulty to so many, till I realised that to a large number 'free' means absolutely unconditioned, that the alternative presented to them was omnipotence or rigid mechanism. How can you call a man free under present economic conditions? Is a bird in a cage free?' they ask, and when I answer 'Yes, free to hop from one perch to another inside the cage, and if, as is often the case, the door of the cage is open, free to fly out,' they only think that I am quibbling. They see that a man's life is conditioned by his surroundings, but the idea of a limited freedom seems to be unintelligible to them, so they argue that the only alternative to 'freedom' is determinism. At first I thought they were only arguing so for arguing's sake, but the difficulty has come up too often, and that from men obviously sincere, though I could not have believed it was a real puzzle to them. The sameEither-Or' dilemma appears in various forms. 'Should we believe on grounds of authority or of reason?' not 'To which should we give most weight?' That the grounds of belief are many and complex does not enter their minds. Either the Bible is true or it is a pack of lies.' If the stories of Genesis are not literal history they conclude that we have no reason to believe that Christ ever existed. Which is best, a good life or a right creed?' You must apparently be either good or orthodox. If a man is ill should you pray for him or call for a doctor?' and they think it quite a good and original answer if you say 'Why not do both?' 'Do we know things by discovery or revelation?' and they listen with a real, if puzzled, interest when you point out that what is discovery from man's point of view is revelation if we |