that our very talk in the greenhouse was to that synthetic over-brain like a child’s first intimations of the idea of “me.” “It’s a fantastic notion,” said Dodd, shaking his head.
But Boon was fairly launched now upon his topic, and from the first, I will confess, it took hold of me.
“You mustn’t push the analogy of Dodd’s mind too far,” said Boon. “These great Over-minds——”
“So there are several!” said Dodd.
“They fuse, they divide. These great Over-minds, these race minds, share nothing of the cyclic fate of the individual life; there is no birth for them, no pairing and breeding, no inevitable death. That is the lot of such intermediate experimental creatures as ourselves. The creatures below us, like the creatures above us, are free from beginnings and ends. The Amoeba never dies; it divides at times, parts of it die here and there, it has no sex, no begetting. (Existence without a love interest. My God! how it sets a novelist craving!) Neither has the germ plasm. These Over-minds, which for the most part clothe themselves in separate languages and maintain a sort of distinction, stand to us as we stand to the amœbæ or the germ cells we carry; they are the next higher order of being; they emerge above the intense, intensely defined struggle of individuals which is the more obvious substance of lives at the rank of ours; they grow, they divide, they feed upon one another, they coalesce and rejuvenate. So far they are like amœbæ. But they think, they accumulate experiences, they manifest a collective will.”
“Nonsense!” said Dodd, shaking his head from side to side.
“But the thing is manifest!”
“I’ve never met it.”
“You met it, my dear Dodd, the moment you were born. Who taught you to talk? Your mother, you say. But whence the language? Who made the language that gives a bias to all your thoughts? And who taught you to think, Dodd? Whence came your habits of conduct? Your mother, your schoolmaster were but mouthpieces, the books you read the mere forefront of that great being of Voices! There it is—your antagonist to-day. You are struggling against it with tracts and arguments. …”
But now Boon was fairly going. Physically, perhaps, we were the children of our ancestors, but mentally we were the offspring of the race mind. It was clear as daylight. How could Dodd dare to argue? We emerged into a brief independence of will, made our personal innovation, became, as it were, new thoughts in that great intelligence, new elements of effort and purpose, and were presently incorporated or forgotten or both in its immortal growth. Would the Race Mind incorporate Dodd or dismiss him? Dodd sat on his flowerpot, shaking his head and saying “Pooh!” to the cinerarias; and I listened, never doubting that Boon felt the truth he told so well. He came near making the Race soul incarnate. One felt it about us, receptive and responsive to Boon’s words. He achieved personification. He spoke of wars that peoples have made, of the roads and cities that grow and the routes that develop, no man planning them. He mentioned styles of architecture and styles of living; the gothic cathedral, I remember, he dwelt upon, a beauty, that arose like an exhalation out of scattered multitudes of men. He instanced the secular abolition of slavery and the establishment of monogamy as a development of Christian teaching, as things untraceable to any individual’s purpose. He passed to the mysterious consecutiveness of scientific research, the sudden determination of the European race mind to know more than chance thoughts could tell it. …
“Francis Bacon?” said Dodd.
“Men like Bacon are no more than bright moments, happy thoughts, the discovery of the inevitable word; the race mind it was took it up, the race mind it was carried it on.”
“Mysticism!” said Dodd. “Give me the Rock of Fact!” He shook his head so violently that suddenly his balance was disturbed; clap went his feet, the flowerpot broke beneath him, and our talk was lost in the consequent solicitudes.
Dodd the Agnostic just before the flowerpot broke.
§ 3
Now that I have been searching my memory, I incline rather more than I did to the opinion that the bare suggestion at any rate of this particular Book did come from me. I probably went to Boon soon after this talk with Dodd and said a fine book might be written about the Mind of Humanity, and in all likelihood I gave some outline—I have forgotten what. I wanted a larger picture of that great Being his imagination had struck out. I remember at any, rate Boon taking me into his study, picking out Goldsmith’s “Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning,” turning it over and reading from it. “Something in this line?” he said, and read:
“ ‘Complaints of our degeneracy in literature as well as in morals I own have been frequently exhibited of late. … The dullest critic who strives at a reputation for delicacy, by showing he cannot be pleased …’
“The old, old thing, you see! The weak protest of the living.”
He turned over the pages. “He shows a proper feeling, but he’s a little thin. … He says some good things. But—‘The age of Louis XIV, notwithstanding these respectable names, is still vastly, superior.’ Is it? Guess the respectable names that age of Louis XIV could override!—Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, D’Alembert! And now tell me the respectable names of the age of Louis XIV. And the conclusion of the whole matter—
“ ‘Thus the man who, under the patronage of the great might have done honour to humanity, when only patronized by the bookseller becomes a thing a little superior to the fellow who works at the press.’
“ ‘The patronage of the great’! ‘Fellow who works at the press’! Goldsmith was a damnably genteel person at times in spite of the ‘Vicar’! It’s printed with the long ‘s,’ you see. It all helps to remind one that times have changed.” …
I followed his careless footsteps into the garden; he went gesticulating before me, repeating, “ ‘An Inquiry into the State of Polite Learning’! That’s what your ‘Mind of the Race’ means. Suppose one did it now, we should do it differently in every way, from that.”
“Yes, but how should we do it?” said I.
The project had laid hold upon me. I wanted a broad outline of the whole apparatus of thinking and determination in the modern State; something that should bring together all its various activities, which go on now in a sort of deliberate ignorance of one another, which would synthesize research, education, philosophical discussion, moral training, public policy. “There is,” I said, “a disorganized abundance now.”
“It’s a sort of subconscious mind,” said Boon, seeming to take me quite seriously, “with a half instinctive will. …”
We discussed what would come into the book. One got an impression of the enormous range and volume of intellectual activity that pours along now, in comparison with the jejune trickle of Goldsmith’s days. Then the world had—what? A few English writers, a few men in France, the Royal Society, the new Berlin Academy (conducting its transactions in French), all resting more or less upon the insecure patronage of the “Great”; a few schools, public and private, a couple of dozen of universities in all the world, a press of which The Gentleman’s Magazine was the brightest ornament. Now——
It is a curious thing that it came to us both as a new effect, this enormously greater size of the intellectual world of to-day. We didn’t at first grasp the implications of that difference, we simply found it necessitated an enlargement of our conception. “And then a man’s thoughts lived too in a world that had been created, lock, stock, and barrel, a trifle under six thousand years ago! …”
We fell to discussing the range and divisions of our subject. The main stream, we settled, was all that one calls “literature”