It remains to take stock of the advantages and the drawbacks of living by rule a little more precisely. Yet Stevenson’s biting phrase ‘infallible credulity’ reminds us that adherence to fixed principles has its weak side. In short, the cave-man, like any other savage, prided himself on being the acme of respectability. Or, again, he was content to take his cue from his tribal elders whereas our manners and even our morals are at the mercy of ‘the younger set’. For he knew the difference between the right and the wrong way of doing things down to the last touch to the edge of a flint-knife whereas our standards are as various as the wares of a toy-shop. Thus a cave-man might well be pardoned for thinking modern America, or even Great Britain, raw and childish. Nay, the immense sluggishness of cultural evolution in its earlier stages would almost seem to justify a Platonic myth to the effect that, racially speaking, Man was born an ancient, but is visibly growing younger every day. It turns out, however, that only on a very long view of the progress of mankind can a case be made out for that innate hopefulness which must have been there all along as a prime mover. On such a theory of the youth of the world, prehistory might be expected to provide us with the spectacle of gay, go-ahead peoples, heroically intent on taking time by the forelock, and not afraid of playing the fool. If, therefore, Stevenson is right in his psychology, undying hope should prove to be its dominant mood, while ‘infallible credulity’ ought as yet to have had no chance to develop. Now savagery is commonly held to bear a certain analogy to the adolescence of the human race. Wherefore Stevenson, the sick man whose body denied him the adventures for which his soul craved, cries out: ‘For God’s sake, give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!’ For, after all, ‘it is better to be a fool than to be dead’-or even dead-alive. Hence human perfectibility would seem to depend more on the experiments of the sons than on the dogmas of the fathers. In fact, ‘all error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete’.
#GUSO MANANOW TRIAL#
Any advance implies a method of trial and error. But thus to claim enlightenment as one’s portion is simply to have given up trying to transform for the better a defective world which includes the existing moral outlook of a man and the present state of his knowledge. He has joined the ranks of those who ‘take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity’-who ‘swallow the universe like a pill’. He provides, indeed, the veriest parody of an angel because he has finally shed his wings. ‘A man finds he has been wrong at every preceding stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right.’ Yet in reality such a dull respectable person is no sage.
Because we have lost the taste for living dangerously, it does not follow that we have reached safety. These settled convictions, however, in which we take such pride, are perhaps not due to growth of experience so much as to decline of animal heat. We merely suffer a change of mood so that what felt at the time like an ‘undying hope’ is replaced by an ‘infallible credulity’ which we proceed to mistake in ourselves for a ripened wisdom. For no revelation, he argues, comes with the passing of the years. IN one of the profoundest, if not the least paradoxical, of his essays, entitled Youth and Crabbed Age, Robert Louis Stevenson does his best to turn the tables on the solemn elder who, in the name of authority, rebukes the rising generation for its irresponsible doings and wild opinions. The cyclical view of life, reflected in the belief in reincarnation, implies a round of duties comprised in a sacred custom, and only faith in its infallibility can supply the moral effort needed to maintain it. Another trait of such a mind being to enjoy repetition by rote, it is on this that the static type of society seizes in order to obtain the rigid system of law that it needs. It is not inconsistent with the hopefulness inherent in primitive religion that it should rest on a faith in tradition, though this might seem to contradict the tendency of the immature mind to indulge in random play.
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