The cruise of the Nona The story of a cruise from Holyhead to the Wash, with reflections and judgments on life and letters, men and manners
mouth; and so on all along the coast east and west. The mouth of the
Kus, in Morocco, at Larache, and that of the Sebu, at Rabat, tell the
same story. All these places are to-day impossible or difficult.
The general answer given to this question is that rivers silt
themselves up in the process of time, and that is the obvious, rational
answer to give. These harbour-mouths were once deep, but the river kept
on bringing down mud and sand, checked at the mouth by the sea, and
forming a bar.
Like nearly all merely rational answers to distant questions on which
we have no direct evidence, this answer breaks down. The rivers have
been running for centuries incalculable. They have had half an eternity
in which to silt up their mouths; and if this were the chief factor at
work it must have reached its limits long before man sailed the sea.
It cannot be the chief factor at work. I fancy the chief factor must
be the heaving up and down of the earth. In places the level rises,
and the river-mouths become very difficult, and the lagoon becomes dry
land. In places the level sinks, and harbours of which you never hear
the use in antiquity come into play. The truth is, we know nothing
about these things, or so little as only to give food for speculation,
and for guesswork, which is the breeding-ground of false dogma and of
quarrel, and the true accelerator of the human mind. I find that things
affirmed carry a curious kind of conviction—a disturbed, exasperated
kind, when they repose upon an apparently sufficient process of
reasoned proof; whereas things affirmed, but reposing upon no proof
at all, are accepted most kindly, and the faith in them lasts much
longer and is altogether better rooted: indeed, sometimes (when the
thing affirmed without proof is true) it lasts from the moment of its
first affirmation throughout the story of all human life. I suppose
the reason of this is that things affirmed without proof repose upon
general experience, and have, converging to support them from every
side, a great body of half-recognised experiment.
Thus, a religious doctrine is tested by the moral experience of
innumerable individuals, and also by its effect upon society through
generations, and also by its consonance with a vast number of other
observed things, small and great.
There is here, to use a mathematical metaphor, integration.
Certitude comes from the integration of an indefinitely great number
of differentials. It is in this way that we have certitude of a
personality, of a voice, of a type. We see an elm tree half a mile
away, and say, ‘That is an elm tree,’ although if we could set
down exactly what it is we see, the indications would seem quite
insufficient for so certain a conclusion. What we see is but a vague
blotch, but we read into it, from an indefinitely large number of
slight indications, what we have always known nearer by for an elm tree.
This kind of belief stands on the broadest base, even when it deals
with things not appreciable to our senses (for instance, the ancient
Western doctrine of immortality). But the affirmations of the sort
called to-day ‘scientific,’ are balanced upon a point. The apparent
proof of them lies along a narrow chain, every link of which, behind
the first physical appreciation of the senses, depends upon a number of
postulates, each capable of breaking down under some new consideration.
For instance, our senses tell us, and we know, that if you mix two
known substances in a certain fashion, and in a certain proportion, say
two portions by weight of the one and four portions by weight of the
other, they will disappear, and a third totally different thing will
appear in their stead. That is what happens when you try any one of
a thousand chemical experiments. It is what happens when an electric
spark is passed through a certain mixture of oxygen and hydrogen under
certain conditions. We know that with the same conditions, and the
same proportionate weights this astonishing thing takes place: the
substitution of a third totally different thing for the two things
which have disappeared: all that remains being the combined weight,
which does not change. We also know that, under suitable conditions,
the new third thing, totally different from the two original things
it has supplanted, will disappear, and the two original things will
reappear; and we know that the combined weights of the first two, and
the weight of the third thing which takes their place, are the same.
All that is real knowledge, definite, proved and certain science, in
the old and exact sense of the word ‘science’—which signifies a sort
of knowledge depending upon proof so conclusive that the human reason
cannot admit the possibility of the opposite.
We further know that when we repeat these conditions a dozen, or
a myriad times, the same results appear, as in the case of any
other natural sequence in the physical world; as in the case of a
stone falling from a height, or a sound following from a blow. On
such knowledge we erect an hypothesis, we say that the mysterious
substitution of a third totally different thing for the first two, but
the maintenance of an equal weight throughout, can only _on the analogy
of our other experience_ be explained by the constitution of matter in
certain ultimate particles which we call ‘atoms’; for, as it seems to
our very limited imaginations, if that be not the ultimate constitution
of matter, the only other way in which the thing can take place, the
only other way imaginable to us—that is, capable of being presented to
our minds as a picture—is a transformation through the mere effect of
number, a certain magic in number having some inherent power to affect
the modes of what we call ‘matter.’
But as the former concept—that of the atom—is mechanical, and easy to
picture, while the latter is highly mysterious, escapes measurement,
and involves qualities which we do not to-day associate with any
inherent power of number, we accept the first hypothesis. We assume—we
do not prove—that matter consists thus of atoms.
Granted that hypothesis, we can give the measurement of the supposed
atom, and investigate its qualities. But having begun with an
hypothesis, each new stage of investigation depends on a further
hypothesis: a second built on the first, a third on the second, and so
on—till you get to the exceedingly hypothetical electron. Strictly
speaking, pure science stops at the first phenomenon ascertainable by
the senses—the change of two into a third and of the third back into
the two. All the rest is but a scaffolding of _presumptions_ built upon
the _supposed_ nature of that change. It has not attaching to it proof
so conclusive that the possibility of an opposite cannot be imagined.
It is not science.
It is, further, true that with each stage in hypothesis the element of
probability, however high, is less than it was in the last stage; the
tenth of ten successive guesses, each reposing on the last, is less
secure than the ninth; the ninth than the eighth.
But the academies do not grasp this evident truth; they live by
imaginaries, which they affirm to be things; and that is why one of the
wisest of the moderns launched that decisive phrase, ‘the bankruptcy
of science’: that is the bankruptcy of the promises advanced by false
modern science.
The great Ferrero quarrels with that famous phrase. Yet he himself has
written one more damning; for he writes: ‘The men of the nineteenth
century thought they knew everything, and they knew nothing.’
The harbours of that coast between Torbay and Portland I do not
sufficiently know. I have never entered Teignmouth, in spite of the
lyrical invitation to its beauties which is set like a gem in the
‘Channel Pilot.’ I have never attempted the shallow bar of Exmouth.
Bridport Haven I only entered once, with several companions in a
crowded boat. Never was I more fascinated by any little haven, for it
has the delightful qualities of a model.
I had been running for Portland Bill in a fairly fresh wind, which
rose more than I liked. It was blowing from a little west of south,
so that she would just point at the smooth water which usually lies
between the Race and the land. We were far outside, and had about ten
miles to go, but the wind rose more and more, until it threatened
us, and also backed a little southerly. We turned round and ran for
Bridport, which was about seven miles away to the north of us and a
little east. It was near high water, so we had no fears for getting in,
and we ran through the long, narrow bottle-neck of an entrance, more
like a canal than a harbour, to find ourselves in a basin about the
size of a large drawing-room, but with everything complete—a Lloyd’s
office, a harbour master, and a signal station, a hotel, and all on
the scale of the place. It was above here, in Bridport town, that
Monmouth, who had landed at Lyme (and I must say it did great credit to
his shipmaster, for he came with three craft, if I remember right, and
seems to have found room for all of them) met his first check. But the
name Monmouth starts me off again—I cannot hold the mount when that
hunt of history is up: and I don’t want to.
The more you read of those expeditions—as of William’s two years
later—the more difficult you will find it to estimate what measure
of support the invaders had. What may be called the legend—the
sort of rodomontade you get in the clear, if obvious, rhetoric of
Macaulay—may be left aside with contempt. It is not historical, and it
is not intended to be historical; it is pamphleteering for a prepared
audience; a flattery of ignorant complacency: written not to examine
or to inform, but to sell. The picture of a whole England, ardently
opposed to James, desiring nothing more than his dethronement, is as
false as would be to-day a picture of an England ardently desiring
prohibition. But there were elements present which made it worth while
to risk the throw; and (as we know) with the aid of a group of very
wealthy men, and of plenty of hypocrisy and foreign subvention, the
second invasion, the Dutch invasion, succeeded.
I think the real reason we find it difficult to-day to estimate the
forces of that society, is that we have a false way of thinking in
terms of exact measurement; a habit we have borrowed from the more
advanced physical science of our time, but one not applicable to
political factors. We think in terms of majorities, and ask ourselves
how many men were on one side and how many men on the other.
Now things did not stand like that at all in 1686, or in 1688, and
they hardly ever so stand in any national crisis. The bulk of men will
accept an event, unless it be quite outrageously opposed to their daily
habits. Further, the bulk of men are moved by tradition and custom and
nearly always incline, very vaguely, to a continuance of what they have
known. And at the same time, paradoxically, all men have an appetite
for _something_ new and are more or less adventurous for a change. In
the main issue of the Revolution of 1688, we can be pretty clear on two
large majorities, not dividing men into groups, but dividing the mind
of each man within himself.
There was a very large majority in general sympathetic with the
Protestant culture which had gradually triumphed since the pivot-date
of the Gunpowder Plot. What proportion of this was ardent, and in what
degree, no one can establish; but you may safely say that throughout
England as a whole, there was, by the last quarter of the seventeenth
century, not more than about one seventh definitely Catholic in
confession and open adherence, and hardly as many again indifferent,
or slightly sympathetic with that one seventh. But, on the other hand,
the number of people who believed that James II was attempting the