Chapter LIII

by William Somerset Maugham

　　Taking the paper with him Mr. Carey retired to his study. Philip changedhis chair for that in which his uncle had been sitting (it was the onlycomfortable one in the room), and looked out of the window at the pouringrain. Even in that sad weather there was something restful about the greenfields that stretched to the horizon. There was an intimate charm in thelandscape which he did not remember ever to have noticed before. Two yearsin France had opened his eyes to the beauty of his own countryside.He thought with a smile of his uncle's remark. It was lucky that the turnof his mind tended to flippancy. He had begun to realise what a great losshe had sustained in the death of his father and mother. That was one ofthe differences in his life which prevented him from seeing things in thesame way as other people. The love of parents for their children is theonly emotion which is quite disinterested. Among strangers he had grown upas best he could, but he had seldom been used with patience orforbearance. He prided himself on his self-control. It had been whippedinto him by the mockery of his fellows. Then they called him cynical andcallous. He had acquired calmness of demeanour and under mostcircumstances an unruffled exterior, so that now he could not show hisfeelings. People told him he was unemotional; but he knew that he was atthe mercy of his emotions: an accidental kindness touched him so much thatsometimes he did not venture to speak in order not to betray theunsteadiness of his voice. He remembered the bitterness of his life atschool, the humiliation which he had endured, the banter which had madehim morbidly afraid of making himself ridiculous; and he remembered theloneliness he had felt since, faced with the world, the disillusion andthe disappointment caused by the difference between what it promised tohis active imagination and what it gave. But notwithstanding he was ableto look at himself from the outside and smile with amusement."By Jove, if I weren't flippant, I should hang myself," he thoughtcheerfully.His mind went back to the answer he had given his uncle when he asked himwhat he had learnt in Paris. He had learnt a good deal more than he toldhim. A conversation with Cronshaw had stuck in his memory, and one phrasehe had used, a commonplace one enough, had set his brain working."My dear fellow," Cronshaw said, "there's no such thing as abstractmorality."When Philip ceased to believe in Christianity he felt that a great weightwas taken from his shoulders; casting off the responsibility which weigheddown every action, when every action was infinitely important for thewelfare of his immortal soul, he experienced a vivid sense of liberty. Buthe knew now that this was an illusion. When he put away the religion inwhich he had been brought up, he had kept unimpaired the morality whichwas part and parcel of it. He made up his mind therefore to think thingsout for himself. He determined to be swayed by no prejudices. He sweptaway the virtues and the vices, the established laws of good and evil,with the idea of finding out the rules of life for himself. He did notknow whether rules were necessary at all. That was one of the things hewanted to discover. Clearly much that seemed valid seemed so only becausehe had been taught it from his earliest youth. He had read a number ofbooks, but they did not help him much, for they were based on the moralityof Christianity; and even the writers who emphasised the fact that theydid not believe in it were never satisfied till they had framed a systemof ethics in accordance with that of the Sermon on the Mount. It seemedhardly worth while to read a long volume in order to learn that you oughtto behave exactly like everybody else. Philip wanted to find out how heought to behave, and he thought he could prevent himself from beinginfluenced by the opinions that surrounded him. But meanwhile he had to goon living, and, until he formed a theory of conduct, he made himself aprovisional rule."Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round thecorner."He thought the best thing he had gained in Paris was a complete liberty ofspirit, and he felt himself at last absolutely free. In a desultory way hehad read a good deal of philosophy, and he looked forward with delight tothe leisure of the next few months. He began to read at haphazard. Heentered upon each system with a little thrill of excitement, expecting tofind in each some guide by which he could rule his conduct; he felthimself like a traveller in unknown countries and as he pushed forward theenterprise fascinated him; he read emotionally, as other men read pureliterature, and his heart leaped as he discovered in noble words whathimself had obscurely felt. His mind was concrete and moved withdifficulty in regions of the abstract; but, even when he could not followthe reasoning, it gave him a curious pleasure to follow the tortuositiesof thoughts that threaded their nimble way on the edge of theincomprehensible. Sometimes great philosophers seemed to have nothing tosay to him, but at others he recognised a mind with which he felt himselfat home. He was like the explorer in Central Africa who comes suddenlyupon wide uplands, with great trees in them and stretches of meadow, sothat he might fancy himself in an English park. He delighted in the robustcommon sense of Thomas Hobbes; Spinoza filled him with awe, he had neverbefore come in contact with a mind so noble, so unapproachable andaustere; it reminded him of that statue by Rodin, L'Age d'Airain, whichhe passionately admired; and then there was Hume: the scepticism of thatcharming philosopher touched a kindred note in Philip; and, revelling inthe lucid style which seemed able to put complicated thought into simplewords, musical and measured, he read as he might have read a novel, asmile of pleasure on his lips. But in none could he find exactly what hewanted. He had read somewhere that every man was born a Platonist, anAristotelian, a Stoic, or an Epicurean; and the history of George HenryLewes (besides telling you that philosophy was all moonshine) was there toshow that the thought of each philospher was inseparably connected withthe man he was. When you knew that you could guess to a great extent thephilosophy he wrote. It looked as though you did not act in a certain waybecause you thought in a certain way, but rather that you thought in acertain way because you were made in a certain way. Truth had nothing todo with it. There was no such thing as truth. Each man was his ownphilosopher, and the elaborate systems which the great men of the past hadcomposed were only valid for the writers.The thing then was to discover what one was and one's system of philosophywould devise itself. It seemed to Philip that there were three things tofind out: man's relation to the world he lives in, man's relation with themen among whom he lives, and finally man's relation to himself. He made anelaborate plan of study.The advantage of living abroad is that, coming in contact with the mannersand customs of the people among whom you live, you observe them from theoutside and see that they have not the necessity which those who practisethem believe. You cannot fail to discover that the beliefs which to youare self-evident to the foreigner are absurd. The year in Germany, thelong stay in Paris, had prepared Philip to receive the sceptical teachingwhich came to him now with such a feeling of relief. He saw that nothingwas good and nothing was evil; things were merely adapted to an end. Heread The Origin of Species. It seemed to offer an explanation of muchthat troubled him. He was like an explorer now who has reasoned thatcertain natural features must present themselves, and, beating up a broadriver, finds here the tributary that he expected, there the fertile,populated plains, and further on the mountains. When some great discoveryis made the world is surprised afterwards that it was not accepted atonce, and even on those who acknowledge its truth the effect isunimportant. The first readers of The Origin of Species accepted it withtheir reason; but their emotions, which are the ground of conduct, wereuntouched. Philip was born a generation after this great book waspublished, and much that horrified its contemporaries had passed into thefeeling of the time, so that he was able to accept it with a joyful heart.He was intensely moved by the grandeur of the struggle for life, and theethical rule which it suggested seemed to fit in with his predispositions.He said to himself that might was right. Society stood on one side, anorganism with its own laws of growth and self-preservation, while theindividual stood on the other. The actions which were to the advantage ofsociety it termed virtuous and those which were not it called vicious.Good and evil meant nothing more than that. Sin was a prejudice from whichthe free man should rid himself. Society had three arms in its contestwith the individual, laws, public opinion, and conscience: the first twocould be met by guile, guile is the only weapon of the weak against thestrong: common opinion put the matter well when it stated that sinconsisted in being found out; but conscience was the traitor within thegates; it fought in each heart the battle of society, and caused theindividual to throw himself, a wanton sacrifice, to the prosperity of hisenemy. For it was clear that the two were irreconcilable, the state andthe individual conscious of himself. That uses the individual for itsown ends, trampling upon him if he thwarts it, rewarding him with medals,pensions, honours, when he serves it faithfully; this, strong only inhis independence, threads his way through the state, for convenience'sake, paying in money or service for certain benefits, but with no senseof obligation; and, indifferent to the rewards, asks only to be leftalone. He is the independent traveller, who uses Cook's tickets becausethey save trouble, but looks with good-humoured contempt on the personallyconducted parties. The free man can do no wrong. He does everything helikes--if he can. His power is the only measure of his morality. Herecognises the laws of the state and he can break them without sense ofsin, but if he is punished he accepts the punishment without rancour.Society has the power.But if for the individual there was no right and no wrong, then it seemedto Philip that conscience lost its power. It was with a cry of triumphthat he seized the knave and flung him from his breast. But he was nonearer to the meaning of life than he had been before. Why the world wasthere and what men had come into existence for at all was as inexplicableas ever. Surely there must be some reason. He thought of Cronshaw'sparable of the Persian carpet. He offered it as a solution of the riddle,and mysteriously he stated that it was no answer at all unless you foundit out for yourself."I wonder what the devil he meant," Philip smiled.And so, on the last day of September, eager to put into practice all thesenew theories of life, Philip, with sixteen hundred pounds and hisclub-foot, set out for the second time to London to make his third startin life.