Triviality

“ There no man has a right to be trivial, or empty, or commonplace. Whatever is recorded must be recorded worthily.
Take a plain example. If I set forth to describe my crossing Waterloo Bridge on a particular day in a particular year, I must not merely on that ground be attacked for triviality. I may be able to show, in the first place, that the crossing by that bridge and not, let us say, by using Hungerford Bridge or Blackfriars Bridge, affected my life. I may also be able to describe my walk or drive in such a way that it will make a deep impress upon the reader's mind. ”

“ It was only a trifle, you will say, that produced this inauspicious result; but need I repeat that trifles make up the sum of human life? Were we all to look back upon some of the most important incidents of our lives, I think—could we all be strictly honest with ourselves—we should be willing to allow that what seemed a mere “nothing” at the time was not without its influence, not only on our conduct, but on that{167} which goes by the name (for want of a better) of our destinies. ”

“ What the first triunity is to evolving personalities, the second triunity is to the evolving universes. Pattern and personality are two of the great manifestations of the acts of the First Source and Center; and no matter how difficult it may be to comprehend, it is nonetheless true that the power-pattern and the loving person are one and the same universal reality; the Paradise Isle and the Eternal Son are co-ordinate but antipodal revelations of the unfathomable nature of the Universal Father-Force.
The Third Triunity—the spirit-evolutional triunity. ”

“ And if any one seeks to turn against my own doctrine the argument which I have stated above, let me at least remind him of one great difference. For me every kind of process between the Many is a state of the Whole in and through which the Many subsist. The process of the Many, and the total being of the Many themselves, are mere aspects of the one Reality which moves and knows itself within them, and apart from which all things and their changes and every knower and every known is all absolutely nothing. ”

“ It is, perhaps, the character of the English to despise trifles; and that art may surely be accounted a trifle which is at once useless and ostentatious, which can seldom be practised with propriety, and which, as the mind is more cultivated, is less powerful. Yet as all innocent means are to be used for the propagation of truth, I would not deter those who are employed in preaching to common congregations from any practice which they may find persuasive: for, compared with the conversion of sinners, propriety and elegance are less than nothing. ”

“ It is not many of us who come to be told by the doctor: “For the rest of your existence you must give up eyesight,” or, “For the remainder of life you must go halt.” But these are trifles. Everything is a trifle, if we would only believe it. Riches and poverty, peace and war, fame and obscurity, town and country, England and the backwoods—all these are trifles compared with that other life which makes our own a living completeness. ”

“ If the nature of our reals is the diversity found at a stage below relations, how are we to dispose of the mass of relational appearance? For that exists, and existing it must somehow qualify the world, a world the reality of which is discovered only at a level other than its own. ”

“ That there are grades of reality; that "substance is more real than quality and subject is more real than substance," that "the most real of all is the concrete totality, the all-inclusive universal"—the Ens determinatissimum, is not a modern discovery, but a re-discovery. That our own personality is the highest unity of which we have any proper non-analogous notion; that it is the measure by which we spontaneously try to explain to ourselves other unities, higher or lower, by means of extensions or limitations ”

“ In spite of these differences, however, we discover fundamental similarities in human nature, some impulses being common to all mankind, and observe, under like conditions, a regularity of action. And this is all that is meant by embracing phenomena under general terms, and referring to the uniformity of nature. When the writer denies the reign of law in the universe, and in the same breath speaks of the inexorable law of personality, it is difficult to know whether to take him seriously or not. ”

“ And if he should but stop to consider this cloak-and-suit-model repetition of himself previously suggested, this system or pattern after which he and all the endless decillions which have preceded and will follow him are made, do you suppose he{249} could exact anything which suggested individuality or personal persistence as a spirit or thought—self-generated thought—out of it? Is one button wiser or much more important than any other, or at all more likely to outlast another spiritually? ”

“ And since, as we have remarked, the lapse by which an individual falls away from his position is characterized by great diversity, according to the movements of the mind and will, one man falling with greater ease, another with more difficulty, into a lower condition; in this is to be seen the just judgment of the providence of God, that it should happen to every one according to the diversity of his conduct, in proportion to the desert of his declension and defection. ”

“ But it looks as though even savages have but the remains of this magical state of mind inherited from ancestors of yet lower culture, and that they have begun to outgrow it, as the civilized world has more fully done. The early fusion of objective and subjective relations in the mind, of the effects of which in superstitious practices handed down from age to age so much has been said in this book, may perhaps not be fully or exactly represented in the mental state of any living tribe of men. ”

“ Common sense and science, however, go about the matter more concretely than the philosophers have usually done. In ordinary life we recognize the problem of the presence of One in a pair of discriminated objects only by proceeding at once to look for still another instance of the same kind of likeness and difference. Baffled by the so formal triad just named, viz. the triad of the One nature and the two expressions, we help ourselves by searching out a more concrete triad. ”

“ Had I considered this little volume, as having no purpose beyond that of teaching a game, I should, indeed, have left it to take its fate without a patron. Triflers may find or make any thing a trifle; but, since it is the great characteristick of a wise man to see events in their causes, to obviate consequences, and ascertain contingencies, your lordship will think nothing a trifle, by which the mind is inured to caution, foresight, and circumspection. The same skill, and often the same degree of skill, is exerted in great and little things ”

“ But remember, too, that the supreme importance of so-called trivial actions is seen in this, that there may be every bit as much of the noblest things that belong to humanity condensed in, and brought to bear upon, the veriest trifle that a man can do, as on the greatest things that he can perform. ”

“ Whether from a strange but not unusual philosophy, he thought the trifles of every day life more important to man's happiness, from their frequent occurrence, than the weighty things of the heart and mind, or whether the mocking persiflage of the court in which he had been brought up, had sunk, as it were, into his spirit, and made him look upon all things equally as trifles, I cannot tell ”

“ What pursuits, too, had this one-eyed philosopher?
"You have a definite pursuit, sir?"
"I—alas! when a man moralizes, it is a sign that he has known error: it is because I have been a trifler that I rail against triflers. ”

“ It would seem as though the physical substance of life—this apparition of form which the eye detects and calls real were shot through with some vast subtlety that loves order, that is order. The atoms of our so-called being, in spite of our so-called reason—the dreams of a mood—know where to go and what to do. They represent an order, a wisdom, a willing that is not of us. They build orderly in spite of us. So the subconscious spirit of a jury. ”

“ But in what way does that, or can it, add to the comfort or bliss of the particular individual? Endlessly repeated, an oyster-like copy of every other man that has ever been, a mere minute portion of some{245}thing the significance or import of which he can not even surmise. And within the race itself one need only think of the various types—preacher, actor, lawyer, doctor, merchant, thief, writer, poetic, artist, prize-fighter, all very much alike and all repeated and repeated ad infinitum—to see how impossible the idea of individuality is. ”

“ And if we reflect upon the distinctive form of unity thus exhibited by each department of being—upon the dominant character pervading the differences within it and their cohesion—we may formulate certain 'Axioms', condensing once more into isolated judgements truth for which the evidence is overwhelming. Such 'truths' are stable, not because they, as judgements, hang together of themselves, but because they are but the concentrated expression of a whole of knowledge. ”

“ But it is not to the conception of the Divine personality and separateness that we are to look for the missing bond by which the head and members are to be knit together, and the essential disconnection of these "spheres of experience" overcome. The ultimate unity is a mystery; in a word, philosophy, as a quest of that unity, breaks down. ”

“ But if, on the other hand, it be said that our character is not the mere fruit of our antecedents and surroundings, the law of uniformity is clearly broken. A new element has come into the world, namely, my character, which has not come out of the antecedents and surroundings according to any fixed law. ”

“ The more diverse and multiform this adaptability, the fuller and higher is the life; and thus our ordinary common-sense classifications are justified. Each new manifestation of life means some new correspondence with surrounding reality as we piss from mere vegetation, and then add local movement, and one sense after another, till we come finally to intelligence and the life of reason and right-doing, which again, consists in self-conformation to things as they really are. ”

“ As she grew better, this emphasizing of trivialities decreased, but, of course, might have returned with any over-fatigue, unless it had been recognized, taken at its worth, and simply dropped. Any one can think of example after example in his own individual experience, when he has suffered unnecessary tortures through the regarding of trifling things, either by himself or by some one near him. With many, the first instance will probably be to insist, with emphasis and some feeling, that they are not trivialities. ”

“ But are not the members of one mind, one will, and one judgment in matters relating to the family and church of God? There can’t be a falser reasoning than to Conclude discord from diversity, contrariety from variety. ”

“ Everybody is aware that to be material is the very opposite of being trivial. What is 'material' in a chain of evidence, or in an argument, can never be trifling. Now, therefore, if you can find a word that will flatly contradict this word material, then you have a capital term for expressing what is trivial. ”

“ Yet there remains one further aspect of this whole situation of our judging thought, — an aspect upon which sufficient stress has not been laid. We have said, as against this Third Conception of Being, that at best it leaves Reality too much a bare abstract universal, and does not assert the individuality of Being. ”

“ It seems, in short, to imply a diversity of nature in each of the persons, over and above the principle of personal distinctness. Indeed, while it offers a plausible solution of some minor perplexities, it rather weakens the value of the general argument. For the notion of a superpersonal unity is needed chiefly as suggesting a mode in which many mutually exclusive personalities or "spheres of experience" or lives, may be welded together into a coherent whole. ”

“ Try the experiment, as you will some day, of following a course of action which you feel fairly confident is right, but which all your neighbors think is foolish and wrong. See if you do not feel twinges within you which you must examine very closely to distinguish from twinges of conscience. If you do not, I see but one explanation—you are conscious that God is with you, and content with this majority. But in the case of primitive man God was always on the side of one's tribe. ”

“ Such questions of chance influence of trifles upon the greater events of life is a constant theme of speculation among the pragmatics; no petty detail is overlooked in the possibility of its portentous consequences. ”

“ To me the doctrine of the Trinity is something more than a mathematical absurdity, as the men of one party say; and, on the other hand, something more than an inscrutable mystery to be accepted without deep philosophic study, as the men of the other party hold. ”

“ To him nowhere in nature was there any serene and directive and thoughtful conception which brought about, and was still bringing about continually, all the marvels of structure and form and movement that so arrest and startle our intelligence at every turn. ”

“ It may be said in concluding the subject of Images and Names, that the effect of an inability to separate, so clearly as we do, the external object from the mere thought or idea of it in the mind, shows itself very fully and clearly in the superstitious beliefs and practices of the untaught man, but its results are by no means confined to such matters. ”

“ They are parts of the person we value, and consequently connected with these trifles; which are also supposed to be parts of him. These trifles are connected with the resembling qualities in us; and these qualities in us, being parts, are connected with the whole; and by that means form a chain of several links of the person we resemble. ”