CHAPTER II
[Philosophy and the Daemon]
Philosophy, it has been said, is the art of bearing other people's troubles. The truest philosopher I ever heard of was a woman. She was brought into the London Hospital suffering from a poisoned leg. The house surgeon made a hurried examination. He was a man of blunt speech.
"It will have to come off," he told her. "What, not all of it?"
"The whole of it, I am sorry to say," growled the house surgeon. "Nothing else for it?"
"No other chance for you whatever," explained the house surgeon. "Ah, well, thank Gawd it's not my 'ead," observed the lady.
The poor have a great advantage over us better-off folk. Providence provides them with many opportunities for the practice of philosophy. I was present at a "high tea" given last winter by charitable folk to a party of char-women. After the tables were cleared we sought to amuse them. One young lady, who was proud of herself as a palmist, set out to study their "lines." At sight of the first toil-worn hand she took hold of her sympathetic face grew sad.
"There is a great trouble coming to you," she informed the ancient dame. The placid-featured dame looked up and smiled:
"What, only one, my dear?"
"Yes, only one," asserted the kind fortune-teller, much pleased, "after that all goes smoothly."
"Ah," murmured the old dame, quite cheerfully, "we was all of us a short-lived family." Our skins harden to the blows of Fate. I was lunching one Wednesday with a friend in the country. His son and heir, aged twelve, entered and took his seat at the table.
"Well," said his father, "and how did we get on at school today?"
"Oh, all right," answered the youngster, settling himself down to his dinner with evident appetite.
"Nobody caned?" demanded his father, with--as I noticed--a sly twinkle in his eye.
"No," replied young hopeful, after reflection; "no, I don't think so," adding as an afterthought, as he tucked into beef and potatoes, "'cepting, o' course, me."
[When the Daemon will not work]
It is a simple science, philosophy. The idea is that it never matters what happens to you provided you don't mind it. The weak point in the argument is that nine times out of ten you can't help minding it.
"No misfortune can harm me," says Marcus Aurelius, "without the consent of the daemon within me."
The trouble is our daemon cannot always be relied upon. So often he does not seem up to his work.
"You've been a naughty boy, and I'm going to whip you," said nurse to a four-year-old criminal.
"You tant," retorted the young ruffian, gripping with both hands the chair that he was occupying, "I'se sittin' on it."
His daemon was, no doubt, resolved that misfortune, as personified by nurse, should not hurt him. The misfortune, alas! proved stronger than the daemon, and misfortune, he found did hurt him.
The toothache cannot hurt us so long as the daemon within us (that is to say, our will power) holds on to the chair and says it can't. But, sooner or later, the daemon lets go, and then we howl. One sees the idea: in theory it is excellent. One makes believe. Your bank has suddenly stopped payment. You say to yourself.
"This does not really matter."
Your butcher and your baker say it does, and insist on making a row in the passage.
You fill yourself up with gooseberry wine. You tell yourself it is seasoned champagne. Your liver next morning says it is not.
The daemon within us means well, but forgets it is not the only thing there. A man I knew was an enthusiast on vegetarianism. He argued that if the poor would adopt a vegetarian diet the problem of existence would be simpler for them, and maybe he was right. So one day he assembled some twenty poor lads for the purpose of introducing to them a vegetarian lunch. He begged them to believe that lentil beans were steaks, that cauliflowers were chops. As a third course he placed before them a mixture of carrots and savoury herbs, and urged them to imagine they were eating saveloys.
"Now, you all like saveloys," he said, addressing them, "and the palate is but the creature of the imagination. Say to yourselves, 'I am eating saveloys,' and for all practical purposes these things will be saveloys."
Some of the lads professed to have done it, but one disappointed- looking youth confessed to failure.
"But how can you be sure it was not a saveloy?" the host persisted. "Because," explained the boy, "I haven't got the stomach-ache."
It appeared that saveloys, although a dish of which he was fond, invariably and immediately disagreed with him. If only we were all daemon and nothing else philosophy would be easier. Unfortunately, there is more of us.
Another argument much approved by philosophy is that nothing matters, because a hundred years hence, say, at the outside, we shall be dead. What we really want is a philosophy that will enable us to get along while we are still alive. I am not worrying about my centenary; I am worrying about next quarter-day. I feel that if other people would only go away, and leave me--income-tax collectors, critics, men who come round about the gas, all those sort of people--I could be a philosopher myself. I am willing enough to make believe that nothing matters, but they are not. They say it is going to be cut off, and talk about judgment summonses. I tell them it won't trouble any of us a hundred years hence. They answer they are not talking of a hundred years hence, but of this thing that was due last April twelvemonth. They won't listen to my daemon. He does not interest them. Nor, to be candid, does it comfort myself very much, this philosophical reflection that a hundred years later on I'll be sure to be dead--that is, with ordinary luck. What bucks me up much more is the hope that they will be dead. Besides, in a hundred years things may have improved. I may not want to be dead. If I were sure of being dead next morning, before their threat of cutting off that water or that gas could by any possibility be carried out, before that judgment summons they are bragging about could be made returnable, I might--I don't say I should--be amused, thinking how I was going to dish them. The wife of a very wicked man visited him one