The Darkest Hours - 18 Chilling Dystopias in One Edition. Samuel Butler
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to know Ernest Everhard.
Battle royal raged, and the ministers grew red-faced and excited, especially at the moments when Ernest called them romantic philosophers, shadow-projectors, and similar things. And always he checked them back to facts. “The fact, man, the irrefragable fact!” he would proclaim triumphantly, when he had brought one of them a cropper. He bristled with facts. He tripped them up with facts, ambuscaded them with facts, bombarded them with broadsides of facts.
“You seem to worship at the shrine of fact,” Dr. Hammerfield taunted him.
“There is no God but Fact, and Mr. Everhard is its prophet,” Dr. Ballingford paraphrased.
Ernest smilingly acquiesced.
“I’m like the man from Texas,” he said. And, on being solicited, he explained. “You see, the man from Missouri always says, ‘You’ve got to show me.’ But the man from Texas says, ‘You’ve got to put it in my hand.’ From which it is apparent that he is no metaphysician.”
Another time, when Ernest had just said that the metaphysical philosophers could never stand the test of truth, Dr. Hammerfield suddenly demanded:
“What is the test of truth, young man? Will you kindly explain what has so long puzzled wiser heads than yours?”
“Certainly,” Ernest answered. His cocksureness irritated them. “The wise heads have puzzled so sorely over truth because they went up into the air after it. Had they remained on the solid earth, they would have found it easily enough—ay, they would have found that they themselves were precisely testing truth with every practical act and thought of their lives.”
“The test, the test,” Dr. Hammerfield repeated impatiently. “Never mind the preamble. Give us that which we have sought so long—the test of truth. Give it us, and we will be as gods.”
There was an impolite and sneering scepticism in his words and manner that secretly pleased most of them at the table, though it seemed to bother Bishop Morehouse.
“Dr. Jordan9 has stated it very clearly,” Ernest said. “His test of truth is: ‘Will it work? Will you trust your life to it?’”
“Pish!” Dr. Hammerfield sneered. “You have not taken Bishop Berkeley10 into account. He has never been answered.”
“The noblest metaphysician of them all,” Ernest laughed. “But your example is unfortunate. As Berkeley himself attested, his metaphysics didn’t work.”
Dr. Hammerfield was angry, righteously angry. It was as though he had caught Ernest in a theft or a lie.
“Young man,” he trumpeted, “that statement is on a par with all you have uttered to-night. It is a base and unwarranted assumption.”
“I am quite crushed,” Ernest murmured meekly. “Only I don’t know what hit me. You’ll have to put it in my hand, Doctor.”
“I will, I will,” Dr. Hammerfield spluttered. “How do you know? You do not know that Bishop Berkeley attested that his metaphysics did not work. You have no proof. Young man, they have always worked.”
“I take it as proof that Berkeley’s metaphysics did not work, because—” Ernest paused calmly for a moment. “Because Berkeley made an invariable practice of going through doors instead of walls. Because he trusted his life to solid bread and butter and roast beef. Because he shaved himself with a razor that worked when it removed the hair from his face.”
“But those are actual things!” Dr. Hammerfield cried. “Metaphysics is of the mind.”
“And they work—in the mind?” Ernest queried softly.
The other nodded.
“And even a multitude of angels can dance on the point of a needle—in the mind,” Ernest went on reflectively. “And a blubber-eating, fur-clad god can exist and work—in the mind; and there are no proofs to the contrary—in the mind. I suppose, Doctor, you live in the mind?”
“My mind to me a kingdom is,” was the answer.
“That’s another way of saying that you live up in the air. But you come back to earth at meal-time, I am sure, or when an earthquake happens along. Or, tell me, Doctor, do you have no apprehension in an earthquake that that incorporeal body of yours will be hit by an immaterial brick?”
Instantly, and quite unconsciously, Dr. Hammerfield’s hand shot up to his head, where a scar disappeared under the hair. It happened that Ernest had blundered on an apposite illustration. Dr. Hammerfield had been nearly killed in the Great Earthquake11 by a falling chimney. Everybody broke out into roars of laughter.
“Well?” Ernest asked, when the merriment had subsided. “Proofs to the contrary?”
And in the silence he asked again, “Well?” Then he added, “Still well, but not so well, that argument of yours.”
But Dr. Hammerfield was temporarily crushed, and the battle raged on in new directions. On point after point, Ernest challenged the ministers. When they affirmed that they knew the working class, he told them fundamental truths about the working class that they did not know, and challenged them for disproofs. He gave them facts, always facts, checked their excursions into the air, and brought them back to the solid earth and its facts.
How the scene comes back to me! I can hear him now, with that war-note in his voice, flaying them with his facts, each fact a lash that stung and stung again. And he was merciless. He took no quarter,12 and gave none. I can never forget the flaying he gave them at the end:
“You have repeatedly confessed to-night, by direct avowal or ignorant statement, that you do not know the working class. But you are not to be blamed for this. How can you know anything about the working class? You do not live in the same locality with the working class. You herd with the capitalist class in another locality. And why not? It is the capitalist class that pays you, that feeds you, that puts the very clothes on your backs that you are wearing to-night. And in return you preach to your employers the brands of metaphysics that are especially acceptable to them; and the especially acceptable brands are acceptable because they do not menace the established order of society.”
Here there was a stir of dissent around the table.
“Oh, I am not challenging your sincerity,” Ernest continued. “You are sincere. You preach what you believe. There lies your strength and your value—to the capitalist class. But should you change your belief to something that menaces the established order, your preaching would be unacceptable to your employers, and you would be discharged. Every little while some one or another of you is so discharged.13 Am I not right?”
This time there was no dissent. They sat dumbly acquiescent, with the exception of Dr. Hammerfield, who said:
“It is when their thinking is wrong that they are asked to resign.”
“Which is another way of saying when their thinking is unacceptable,” Ernest answered, and then went on. “So I say to you, go ahead and preach and earn your pay, but for goodness’ sake leave the working class alone. You belong in the enemy’s camp. You have nothing in common with the working class. Your hands are soft with the work others have performed for you. Your stomachs are round with the plenitude of eating.” (Here Dr. Ballingford winced, and every eye glanced at his prodigious girth. It was said he had not seen his own feet in years.) “And your minds are filled with doctrines that are buttresses of the established order. You are as much mercenaries (sincere mercenaries, I grant) as were the men of the Swiss Guard.14 Be true to your salt