LORD DERBY ON ECCLESIASTES.
TORD DERBY'S speeches, though he is perhaps, of all public men among us, the one who best deserves to be called wise, will hardly live down through the ages as the sentences of " Ecclesiastes " have done, surviving not only civilisations, but even races and creeds. In his little fight of Monday with the reflective old Syrian, we must, however, assign to him, on his one limited point, the credit of the deeper insight. The wise old Jewish philosopher, so much more meditative than Solomon, to whom his work was in earlier days ignorantly attributed, said, " He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow," an opinion from which, says Lord Derby, with that certitude which is a note of his intellect and is not dogmatism, " I do most emphatically dissent." So do most of his countrymen, and though their constant reitera- tion of their belief• in knowledge is wearisome beyond de- scription, and their exultation in it repulsive in its arrogance, they must, on the whole, be in the right. The object for which man's life was given him is not happiness, or, as Sir Arthur Helps once wrote, he would have been endowed with five minutes' foresight; but it is to accuse God to say that any faculty of man was intended to increase his sorrow. Nor has the faculty of accumulating knowledge increased it. People sing such hymns to the triumphs of mechanical science, and to the results of modern inductive reasoning, that in the recoil one is apt to grow unreasonable, and to believe for a moment that because our control of steam and electricity mainly increases bustle, therefore knowledge itself is unwisely praised, and adds little to the sum of human happiness. In one way so it does, for the first constituent of happi- ness is content, and as yet knowledge, whatever else it has secured, has brought no increase of content to those sections of the world—very small sections still—where knowledge most prevails ; but that is mainly because, of all knowledge, that which their inhabitants know least of is their own past. They hardly recognise their positive gains, and some of their guides tell them that they may be summed up in the Lucifer-match. Chloroform, which is as concrete as a match, may at least be added to the list ; and surgical skill, which of itself has reduced the pain, mental as well as bodily, of all Europe, for though all do not suffer from accident or wound, all may. But, in truth, the concrete gains from the increase of knowledge matter little in comparison with those which are non-material. The greatest foe to human happiness is terror, and knowledge has extinguished many forms of terror. There are men who say that spiritual develop- ment has increased terror, that the Pagan had no fears where the Christian has a hundred; but they have never realised what the dominance of superstition—not a supersti- tion, but superstition by itself—really means. They do not know the kind of mental life that men once endured from vague terrors of the supernatural, the horror of ghosts, the horror of magic—which even among Europeans, and only two centuries ago, produced epidemics of terror-struck insanity, and to this day dominates Africa and many parts of Asia— the horror of hostile Fate, the horror of penalties not to be averted falling on their victims for acts not to be avoided. At this moment one hundred and fifty millions of Indians believe every unexpected misfortune to be punishment for sins committed in a previous, and of course unknown; life, and that belief, which—we speak from personal knowledge— frequently drives imaginative Hindoos insane, is in comparison with many superstitions, in comparison, for instance, with the vampire idea once universal in Europe, a noble and an intel- lectual one. The relief from the terrorising superstitions which accompanies knowledge is of itself inconceivable gain. The ignorant fear all things, from the lightning to the law, and the mere removal of that fear of itself outweighs all that knowledge can have added to the mass of human misery. Think of the condition of Europe as the millennial year, the year A.D. 1000, approached, and of what is really implied in that outburst of ignorant terror which covered the greater part of the Continent, which filled the churches with wealth offered in propitiation, which interrupted or forbade all business, including the sale of land, and which, incredible as it seems, actually suspended the custom of marry- ing and giving in marriage. Those who disbelieve that knowledge can remove some forms of misery, must by some misuse of thought confine knowledge to material things, and believe that improved justice is not due to its increase. If they allow that it is due, in a measure at all events—for the growth of sympathy is not wholly derived from growth in knowledge—they must be ignorant of what oppression really means, of what sort of life Europeans lived when a great majority, especially outside England, were liable almost at any moment to be placed as Armenians are now placed when Koords are on the war-path, placed so that no man's life or daughter or belongings were safe from violence for an hour. It was a simple increase in knowledge, the discovery of gunpowder, which broke the power of the robber barons, and by confining victory to regular armies ultimately ex- tinguished private war. It is increased knowledge, among other influences, which has given us civilised order ; and what that means to mankind in happiness, and means most of all to the poor, let those who have lived in countries where order has never been, or has given way, describe to the men who have forgotten what ignorant warriors or brigands or popu- laces will do. But why seek for such evidence when it is all around us Ask any one of those who really know, ask any really experienced doctor, or missionary, or school-teacher, whether the profoundly ignorant, the men and women of the residuum who know nothing, are more happy than the cultured, whether they do not suffer more from fear, from disease—we mean, of course, when the diseases are the same—and from all the semi-madnesses which we class together in the phrase, " want of self-restraint." One ignorant woman of the slums will suffer more in a week from ecstasies of anger, anger rising to insanity, than a hundred cultivated women will suffer from the same cause in their lives. There is no reason for pitying the lowest class of Europe so unanswerable as their suffering from sheer ignorance. They know less than the half-civilised, who almost everywhere possess a fund of traditional skill ; and though knowledge is not culture or civilisation, it is its necessary, substructure. Take all know., ledge from Scotland, save what is possessed by Fiji, and you would have in Scotchmen more energetic Fijians,—that is, a race so unhappy, that in. its unrest and sell-abhorrence it surrendered freedom. Nobody took Fiji.
The author of Ecclesiastes, an Omar Khayyam in feeling, whose brain yet compelled him to believe that all is vanity save obedience to God, though so nearly wise that good men have for ages attributed to him the grace which we call inspiration— that is, an insight into spiritual truth impossible to the un- assisted mind—was nevertheless an Asiatic, sharing in that dis- trust of knowledge which, alike for good and bad reasons, so many Asiatic thinkers have expressed. The Asiatics care little for human happiness, realising even too fully how ephemeral this life is ; theyhave, too, lazy minds for all their subtlety, and they hate to be bored with masses of facts, which, with their deep appreciation of the overwhelming importance of the super- natural, they hold to be of no moment. "Let the comet go," says the Arab sheikh ; " what is the comet to me ? God made it, and its comings and goings are his affair, not mine." "Let the comet go," says the Buddhist; "wisdom can only be developed by meditation from within the soul, and external facts matter nothing." The more you know, the more you will be perplexed, is the central idea of Omar Khayyam, and so it was also of " Ecclesiastes," who, according to the most recent commentators, was a Jew of Palestine, living just at the time when a wave of Alexandrian thought was worrying all who, like him, while steeped in earthly interests, were yet forced to believe. You see precisely the same emotion in men of to-day of a somewhat similar type, the men who recognise the new knowledge, yet feel that their faith cannot be shaken. They grow half-impatient of teaching which does not alter their central conviction, but adds so grievously to their perception of the perplexities involved in human life, and in any view of the divine policy by which that life is guided. That is, we conceive, the sorrow, or rather the sadness, of which the old Syrian spoke, in words which were as true in the sense he intended as they are untrue in the sense which Lord Derby and the majority of his countrymen have read into them. Even outside theology, it is not gladness which is brought to the learned by masses of new facts, which must be assimilated and explained by a theory which, even while speculating, they believe to be necessarily true. The convinced Darwinian feels occasionally just as " Ecclesiastes " felt, almost angry when new data for thought are brought to him, and is half-tempted to say with him that, for the mind alike of teacher and taught, increase of knowledge is but increase of the mental burden.
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