“ASK ME: I LIVE HERE”

Evening Star, Issue 21079, 16 April 1932, Page 2

“ASK ME: I LIVE HERE”

It often happens that when people want information about some person or problem they go to the wrong quarter for in. In the city you ask the address of someone from a man in the street. He may reply; “I don’t know. I am a stranger here." We read the other day about how the officials of a big convention in an American city solved this difficulty. They got a badge, on which was written: 11 Ask me: 1 live here." They pinned these badges on certain people. As these moved about through the crowd strangers would know whom to ask for information, and would not bo bothering wrong people or missing the right ones in their quest of knowledge.

The incident gives us a very good peg on which to hang some thoughts regarding life and duty. In one of his books Oliver Wendell Holmes says that ho could write history in the shortest volume that was ever seen. Taking a blank card, he put something on it and handed it round. This was what he put on it:

Two worlds are ours, separated by the thinnest of partitions. In the lower its symbol is a question-mark; in the higher, wonder, admiration, ecstasy. In the lower endless asking, doubt, inquiry. The power and progress of life depend on putting questions. And how vast aro the spheres which prompt them. Here is the whole universe of life and things outside us. It comes knocking at our door and says: “ Ask me." How multitudinous aro the numbers of things that are thus offering themselves to us, ready to give up treasures of truth and wisdom, of knowledge and life. Every breath of air, every blade of grass, every atom of sun and sea, every song of birds', sweep of stars, stir of insects; every movement of the illimitable in the universe of things and thought keeps saying to us “ Ask me." “To every man it is as

if the whole cosmos were made for him to use his faculties upon, to learn, to know, to love, to hate.” Away back some 2,300 years ago there was a great man who taught tho world the value of asking. And his method, known as the Socratic, is reckoned to this day as the surest way to knowledge. He declared that he was divinely commissioned to this duty. So he went about the streets of Athens questioning and cross-examining everyone who was willing to talk with him. Of the beauty of his character and of tho immense impetus ho gave to thought and life there is no need to write. Ho confined his inquiries mainly to men and their being and doing. In our own history Bacon has done for Nature what Socrates did for human nature. He was tho first to give heed to her invitation; “ Ask mo.” Up till then ipeoplo had approached Nature with preconceived notions, prejudices, ideas of their own. Bacon said: 4 Let us put aside our own notions, and just see what Nature’s are. Let us ask her for her facts, and adjust ours accordingly.” So began the inductive philosophy which has won us such triumphs in the sphere of thought and fact. We now have reached an age in which asking has become a passion. Everything is challenged for its life. Doubt, criticism, inquiry, investigation—these are the watchwords of tho time. We are back again to the Athens of St. Paul's day, when a sort of prurient itch, not for truth or knowledge, hut about truth and knowledge, infects everybody.

This has its good and its bad sides. Of tho former, of the asking from Nature and men for the truth and beauty that they can give us, we need say nothing. Everybody is agreed on the point. But this asking has its perils also. Wo have referred to Socrates as a master of the art of inquiry. Byron gays of him: Well did’st thou speak, Athena’s wisest son; All that we know is nothing can be known.

That quite misrepresents Socrates. “ He never wavered in his belief,’’-says Professor Church in his ‘ Trial and Death of Socrates,' “ that knowledge was ultimately attainable; but he knew that he knew nothing himself, and in that his knowledge consisted.” But there was a contemporary of Socrates, Pyrrho, whom it would exactly describe. His name survives in our language—Pyrrhonism—as a synonym for universal scepticism. “Wo know nothing,” said Pyrrho, ” nob even that ive do not know.” He held that what arc called first principles were selfcontradictory and capable of establishing nothing. Socrates made doubt the pathway to truth. Pyrrho, believing that truth was unattainable, made doubt an end in itself. This ideal of life—Pyrrhonism—is popular among us to-day. A school of science tells us that it is the search that matters, not the end. for there is no end, only a perpetual quest. And multitudes who arc not scientists have made doubt and inquiry the spirit and temper of their lives. This is one of the perils of the questing attitude of life.

Literature and life supply us with abundant examples of the peril. Shakespeare has given us a well-known illustration of it in ‘ Hamlet,’ He is, as Lowell says, “ an ingrained sceptic.” His scepticism is more a matter of mood than of mind, of feeling than of reason. Ho doubts everything—the immortality of the: soul; his friend Horatio, even after he has sworn him on the cross of his sword, Ophelia—- “ are you honest?” the ghost, after he has had a little time to think about it, and so on. Then he is called upon to act decisively and quickly, and ho breaks down. His persistent doubting and scepticism has ravelled out tho throats of resolution, of courage, and ho makes a moss of his life. “ The noblest gifts of person, temperament, and mind slip like sand through the grasp of an infirm purpose.” Ami the experience of life confirms this. •John Stuart Mill tolls ns that ho came to look upon tho “ habit of endless

analysis as a perpetual worm at the root both of tho passions and tho virtues.” So “ Amiel,” in that fascinating ‘ Journal ’ of his, records how his spirit of doubt, of analysis, of self-criticism and the criticism of others was gradually unfitting him for action. That is one of the perils of getting into the habit of asking, doubting, analysing, and criticising.

Tho other peril is going to tho wrong quarter to sock truth and knowledge. “ Ask me: 1 live here.” That's a principle that as a rule should be acted upon in every sphere and at every stage of life. When we want information, knowledge, truth we should ask those who make it the business of their existence to know and realise and live and niove in these things. A man’s being has three compartments—-body, soul, spirit. Take, c.g., the body, the physical part of a man. There arc many questions wo want to know about it. Wo want to know how to feed it, clothe it, cure it if it falls sick, etc. Well, there are people who have made the study of these things their lifework. They live in it, as it were. Common sense would suggest we should ask them. But common sense is a most uncommon thing, and nowhere more so than in these spheres. So wo find sick folks consulting every Tom, Jack, and Harry who offer their cheap nostrums for cure and healing. How otherwise could the quacks and medicine mountebanks become millionaires, as many of them do. “ Ignorance,” says Felix Holt, “is not so damnable as humbug, but when it takes to prescribing pills it may do more harm.” It Certainly may and does, especially when the two are in partnership, as they usually are. It is pathetic, if it were not so tragic, to see how poor people in their illnesses are humbugged into disobedience to the common-sense maxim, “Ask mo: I live here.”

The same principle applies with even greater force to the mental part of our being. It is pretty well recognised that the only way to intellectual development is obedience to it. If wo want to get mental knowledge, we ask those who are masters in this .department. So it is, or at least so it should be, in social relationships. It should be, but unfortunately it is not. The classes and the masses exist apart, or are only united by a cash nexus, which, unless softened by sympathetic human contact, ends in contempt and industrial chaos. Ono-balf the world, as we hear it often said,' does not know how the other half lives; and the cynic adds only too truly neither does it care, f.nd we reap the;

consequences. If somehow the poor a could have the experiences for a while; t of tho well-to-do, they might under- “ stand that it is not so ennablo a lot: () as it looks in tho distance. And if r the well-to-do were to go down to where 1< the poor dwell, and hear, them say w “ Ask me; 1 live here,” tho situation 0 might have beeh saved. Perhaps after a the whirlwind they may confess with L poor old Lear: l[j s 0 1 have ta’en i Too little care of this I Take physic, ■ pomp; F.xpose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake tho supcrllux to them And show the heavens more just. ~ hen all is said and done the final solution of the problem lies in the principle “Ask me; I live here.” One last illustration: it lies in tho higher region of the life—the spiritual compartment. Here, again, the principle holds with still greater force. And because tho faculties and functions involved are tho highest, failure is the most disastrous. There is no sphere in which the principle “Ask me: I live here ” is so constantly violated as in that of religion. We have people who call themselves Rationalists, and we have people who call themselves Christians, and both are often guilty of doing this. The latter have not gone to those who have honestly become sceptics. They have not obeyed tho injunction “ Ask me: 1 live here,” and so we find them making foolish charges and laying themselves open to tho penalties of dogmatic ignorance. And tho same is frequently trm of those who call themselves Rationalists. They have confined their investigations mainly to tho negative side of the question. They have read only the literature bearing on that, but know next to nothing of what can bo said on the other side by those who aro qualified to say “ Ask me: I live here.” One has only to read what they write in books and newspapers to see that they are often abusing tho liberty of talking of things they know nothing about. The Christian religion started its career, as did the inductive science, by saying to those who questioned and doubted “ Come and see.” Its authority is not the authority of intellectual dogma, but of verified experience. When it fails, either in tho individual or the nation, it is because its inquirers did not act on tho principle “ Ask me; I live hero.”