THE PRICKING OF THUMBS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 12991, 7 October 1905, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE PRICKING OF THUMBS.

• |HT TOHUNGA. To mortal manand immortal woman likei wiseeven on this earth many joys have i been given. The chiefest and, greatest of I which, if we would only confess our inner- . most emotions, is the joy of saying " I told r you so." Doubtless there are other tem--1 porary feelings which for the moment sur- > pass this. The joy of the first bite of the apple, and even of occasional subsequent J bites, will not- be questioned by any man or woman who has bitten. But those joys ; evaporate and dissipate with tho years, as i mists before this morning sun, unless you have managed to pasteurise them and seal them up in patent tins, sold only to the ; elect. Whereas the joy of saying "I told you so" is with us always, more and more as we get old and unpleasant. And closely allied to it, as man is said to be allied to the monkey, is the instinct of premonition, of which one phase is the 1 pricking of our thumbs. In passing one may remark that upon the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil grow the virtues as well as the vices. The ; wave of spiritual consciousness that is sometimes called ".conversion;" the uplifting oF the soul that sanctifies the mother when first she holds a man-child in her arms; the white happiness that comes to that child when the mother-love first becomes visible to his growing insight; with other marvellously enlightening moments of which we can only speak in whispers, as when in some holy place, grow as fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Ignorance is not. necessarily happiness, nor knowledge necessarily misery. And if our thumbs prick at the coming of . evil surely our hearts also leap at the coming of good. By the pricking of my thumbs Something evil this way comes is not merely* a poetic fancy but part of a verv real belief, common to all the world, ami as accepted by the most highly civilised as by the most savage. We,may not actually put it in that particular form, but we all more or less acquiesce in the spirit of ihe idea; what is more we arc all inclined to act upon it. We all believe more or less in the premonitions. We may laugh at our own illogicality, amuse ourselves by explaining things as prejudices and coinci- ! dences, but the fact remains that in the ' bottom of * our hearts we all believe that there i£ an instinct^ latent in us that 'peers into the Future as with our eye we peer into the landscape before us. That this instinct-sight is dim, that the Future is shrouded in darkness, that at the most we only receive faint impressions, doesn't alter in the remotest degree our universal belief in the premonitions. *• Naturally, we are all inconsistent. 'We j shouldn't be human if we were absolutely and pitilessly consistent. We should be either entirely divine or entirely fiendish, entirely wise or entirely foolish, and the world would Ik- hideously dull because the unexpected would never happen. And the sauce of life is in the happening of the unexpected, in the perpetual alertness imposed upon us by our not quite knowing what will happen next . The 'man who would eliminnate all risk from, living is a tired and weary man, not a brisk, and capable one, and it is not altogether a delusion that the j fox enjoys being bunted. For although he may not" enjoy the hunt when it gets too : close'' behind him lie does enjoy the physical alertness which is his in order that lie may be' ; ready, fur the unexpected. • ; But th|t is another matter. . The particular' pafctvtof man's-, inconsistency is that a belief -in freewill intertwines all our fatalisms, just as a belief in fatalism intertwines all our sense of individuality. That may be inconsistent in us, but it is so. And the thing we call the premonition is felt not as the foreshadowing of the inevitable, but. as the presentation to us of a choice—whether we will avoid or not some yet avoidable future. It is a "warning*." And though we laugh at " warnings''we only laugh with r our lips and not with our lives. - The premonitions may take any one of an Infinite-Variety of shapes, from that of an inarticulate uneasiness to that of a defined and realistic dream. They govern us much more than we admit. There is hardly a shipwreck which does not call. out some well-authenticated instance of persons who have refused to take passage because of their strange fear of what might happen to them, and in addition to this class of cases there are many others in which vague uneasiness leads to an alteration of plans without any suggestion of conscious premonitions. But obviously in »the overwhelming majority of cases there is no subsequent justification of premonition. ' If a man refuses to go sailing, and the boat is capsized in a squall and everybody who went is drowned, we perceive the premonition. But if a man refuses to go sailing, ,and tne boat comes safely back we do not perceive as clearly that he might have fallen overboard and been drowned. If a man moves on a battlefield and a shell falls where he. had stood the escape is apparent. But if he moves among singing bullets and does not get struck we do not make the connection between an instinctive change of position and escape from death. Then, again, we are crude in our ideas. We take the premonitions so seriously that we always imagine them only as avoiding "death for us. We do not as readily see that they may guide us, if we allow them, in The daily walks of life. A man walks down one street after hesitating at the corner, and from that moment, if he only analysed it, his life is essentially different to what it might have been had he walked down the other street as was in" his mind. Or he meets a casual acquaintance, whom he may pass by for ever or not. He does not pass by, but stops and makes a life-long friend whom he knows is different to all his other friends, and to fundamentally influence him. Any man may see this for himself with a moment's thought. Our true friendships are not the children of mere juxtaposition and propinquity. They are the children of our premonitions; anil our enemies are usually, the same. ' The man who is friendless in life is almost invariably the man who will not "let himself go,' who is afraid to trust his impulses, who cannot bring himself to act without reason, and to accept at their real value the premonitions of his instincts. And the man whose life is full of friendship is the man who can instinctively, as the man who succeeds in business is "the man who can act promptly without quite knowing why. Even at billiards good play is always instinctive play; even at chess the brilliant player is the one who feels ahead rather than reasons ahead; and there never yet was a great sailor or a great soldier or a great orator or a great anything else who could explain after his masterstrokes just whv he made them. From the greater we understand the iesser. There was never yet anything done in life that was worth doing which was reasoned out in cold blood, which was figured out on a slate. And why should it be? We poor little pigmies, we human ants on a rolling globe, we petty beings who are only, great in our own eyes, whose brains cannot keep us from a million avoidable evils, have gained more by our instincts than by our reason, and always must. For the instincts are the real ■ us, the knowledge of the imperishable " ego" that has lived through the ages, and will live on for ages more, while the reason is the merely superficial thing, the i varnish and gild ing of education, which can [ make pine look like mahogany, and pewter | like gold, but cannot make them wear, i The difference between the unlettered peas- j ant woman and the cultured university pro- | . feasor is only the difference of a few years j differently employed, while common between them is tiJeir whole spiritual develop- ! ment. Spiritually or physically the peasant ! may be, and usually is, a higher type than : the professor, which is why the schools ' have always lauded "reason" to the skies, ; that being the only thing in which they are clearly superior. Yet, 1 in spite of that laudation, we all know that we feel better than we think, that when we follow our premonitions \vc do that which is fitting for us to do with greatly more certainty lhait jwfteg jFfi try tg react® about it,