The Complete PG Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

O >> Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist) >> The Complete PG Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.


The folding-doors are wide open to every Protestant to enter all the
privileged precincts and private apartments of the various exclusive
religious organizations. We may demand the credentials of every creed
and catechise all the catechisms. So we may discuss the gravest
questions unblamed over our morning coffee-cups or our evening tea-cups.
There is no rest for the Protestant until he gives up his legendary
anthropology and all its dogmatic dependencies.

It is only incidentally, however, that the Professor at the
Breakfast-Table handles matters which are the subjects of religious
controversy. The reader who is sensitive about having his fixed beliefs
dealt with as if they were open to question had better skip the pages
which look as if they would disturb his complacency. "Faith" is the most
precious of possessions, and it dislikes being meddled with. It means,
of course, self-trust,--that is, a belief in the value of our, own
opinion of a doctrine, of a church, of a religion, of a Being, a belief
quite independent of any evidence that we can bring to convince a jury of
our fellow beings. Its roots are thus inextricably entangled with those
of self-love and bleed as mandrakes were said to, when pulled up as
weeds. Some persons may even at this late day take offence at a few
opinions expressed in the following pages, but most of these passages
will be read without loss of temper by those who disagree with them, and
by-and-by they may be found too timid and conservative for intelligent
readers, if they are still read by any.

BEVERLY FARM, MASS., June 18, 1891.
O. W. H.

THE PROFESSOR

AT THE
BREAKFAST-TABLE.

What he said, what he heard, and what he saw.




I

I intended to have signalized my first appearance by a certain large
statement, which I flatter myself is the nearest approach to a universal
formula, of life yet promulgated at this breakfast-table. It would have
had a grand effect. For this purpose I fixed my eyes on a certain
divinity-student, with the intention of exchanging a few phrases, and
then forcing my court-card, namely, The great end of being.--I will thank
you for the sugar,--I said.--Man is a dependent creature.

It is a small favor to ask,--said the divinity-student,--and passed the
sugar to me.

--Life is a great bundle of little things,--I said.

The divinity-student smiled, as if that were the concluding epigram of
the sugar question.

You smile,--I said.--Perhaps life seems to you a little bundle of great
things?

The divinity-student started a laugh, but suddenly reined it back with a
pull, as one throws a horse on his haunches.--Life is a great bundle of
great things,--he said.

(NOW, THEN!) The great end of being, after all, is....

Hold on!--said my neighbor, a young fellow whose name seems to be John,
and nothing else,--for that is what they all call him,--hold on! the
Sculpin is go'n' to say somethin'.

Now the Sculpin (Cottus Virginianus) is a little water-beast which
pretends to consider itself a fish, and, under that pretext, hangs about
the piles upon which West-Boston Bridge is built, swallowing the bait and
hook intended for flounders. On being drawn from the water, it exposes
an immense head, a diminutive bony carcass, and a surface so full of
spines, ridges, ruffles, and frills, that the naturalists have not been
able to count them without quarrelling about the number, and that the
colored youth, whose sport they spoil, do not like to touch them, and
especially to tread on them, unless they happen to have shoes on, to
cover the thick white soles of their broad black feet.

When, therefore, I heard the young fellow's exclamation, I looked round
the table with curiosity to see what it meant. At the further end of it
I saw a head, and a--a small portion of a little deformed body, mounted
on a high chair, which brought the occupant up to a fair level enough for
him to get at his food. His whole appearance was so grotesque, I felt
for a minute as if there was a showman behind him who would pull him down
presently and put up Judy, or the hangman, or the Devil, or some other
wooden personage of the famous spectacle. I contrived to lose the first
of his sentence, but what I heard began so:

--by the Frog-Pond, when there were frogs in and the folks used to come
down from the tents on section and Independence days with their pails to
get water to make egg-pop with. Born in Boston; went to school in Boston
as long as the boys would let me.--The little man groaned, turned, as if
to look around, and went on.--Ran away from school one day to see
Phillips hung for killing Denegri with a logger-head. That was in flip
days, when there were always two three loggerheads in the fire. I'm a
Boston boy, I tell you,--born at North End, and mean to be buried on
Copp's Hill, with the good old underground people,--the Worthylakes, and
the rest of 'em. Yes,--up on the old hill, where they buried Captain
Daniel Malcolm in a stone grave, ten feet deep, to keep him safe from the
red-coats, in those old times when the world was frozen up tight and
there was n't but one spot open, and that was right over Faneuil
all,--and black enough it looked, I tell you! There 's where my bones
shall lie, Sir, and rattle away when the big guns go off at the Navy Yard
opposite! You can't make me ashamed of the old place! Full crooked
little streets;--I was born and used to run round in one of 'em--

--I should think so,--said that young man whom I hear them call
"John,"--softly, not meaning to be heard, nor to be cruel, but thinking
in a half-whisper, evidently.--I should think so; and got kinked up,
turnin' so many corners.--The little man did not hear what was said, but
went on,--

--full of crooked little streets; but I tell you Boston has opened, and
kept open, more turnpikes that lead straight to free thought and free
speech and free deeds than any other city of live men or dead men,--I
don't care how broad their streets are, nor how high their steeples!

--How high is Bosting meet'n'-house?--said a person with black whiskers
and imperial, a velvet waistcoat, a guard-chain rather too massive, and a
diamond pin so very large that the most trusting nature might confess an
inward suggestion,--of course, nothing amounting to a suspicion. For
this is a gentleman from a great city, and sits next to the landlady's
daughter, who evidently believes in him, and is the object of his
especial attention.

How high?--said the little man.--As high as the first step of the stairs
that lead to the New Jerusalem. Is n't that high enough?

It is,--I said.--The great end of being is to harmonize man with the
order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may be so
still. But who shall tune the pitch-pipe? Quis cus-(On the whole, as
this quotation was not entirely new, and, being in a foreign language,
might not be familiar to all the boarders, I thought I would not finish
it.)

--Go to the Bible!--said a sharp voice from a sharp-faced, sharp-eyed,
sharp-elbowed, strenuous-looking woman in a black dress, appearing as if
it began as a piece of mourning and perpetuated itself as a bit of
economy.

You speak well, Madam,--I said;--yet there is room for a gloss or
commentary on what you say. "He who would bring back the wealth of the
Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies." What you bring away
from the Bible depends to some extent on what you carry to it.--Benjamin
Franklin! Be so good as to step up to my chamber and bring me down the
small uncovered pamphlet of twenty pages which you will find lying under
the "Cruden's Concordance." [The boy took a large bite, which left a very
perfect crescent in the slice of bread-and-butter he held, and departed
on his errand, with the portable fraction of his breakfast to sustain him
on the way.]

--Here it is. "Go to the Bible. A Dissertation, etc., etc. By J. J.
Flournoy. Athens, Georgia, 1858."

Mr. Flournoy, Madam, has obeyed the precept which you have judiciously
delivered. You may be interested, Madam, to know what are the
conclusions at which Mr. J. J. Flournoy of Athens, Georgia, has arrived.
You shall hear, Madam. He has gone to the Bible, and he has come back
from the Bible, bringing a remedy for existing social evils, which, if it
is the real specific, as it professes to be, is of great interest to
humanity, and to the female part of humanity in particular. It is what
he calls TRIGAMY, Madam, or the marrying of three wives, so that "good
old men" may be solaced at once by the companionship of the wisdom of
maturity, and of those less perfected but hardly less engaging qualities
which are found at an earlier period of life. He has followed your
precept, Madam; I hope you accept his conclusions.

The female boarder in black attire looked so puzzled, and, in fact, "all
abroad," after the delivery of this "counter" of mine, that I left her to
recover her wits, and went on with the conversation, which I was
beginning to get pretty well in hand.

But in the mean time I kept my eye on the female boarder to see what
effect I had produced. First, she was a little stunned at having her
argument knocked over. Secondly, she was a little shocked at the
tremendous character of the triple matrimonial suggestion. Thirdly.--I
don't like to say what I thought. Something seemed to have pleased her
fancy. Whether it was, that, if trigamy should come into fashion, there
would be three times as many chances to enjoy the luxury of saying, "No!"
is more than I, can tell you. I may as well mention that B. F. came to
me after breakfast to borrow the pamphlet for "a lady,"--one of the
boarders, he said,--looking as if he had a secret he wished to be
relieved of.

--I continued.--If a human soul is necessarily to be trained up in the
faith of those from whom it inherits its body, why, there is the end of
all reason. If, sooner or later, every soul is to look for truth with
its own eyes, the first thing is to recognize that no presumption in
favor of any particular belief arises from the fact of our inheriting it.
Otherwise you would not give the Mahometan a fair chance to become a
convert to a better religion.

The second thing would be to depolarize every fixed religious idea in the
mind by changing the word which stands for it.

--I don't know what you mean by "depolarizing" an idea,--said the
divinity-student.

I will tell you,--I said.---When a given symbol which represents a
thought has lain for a certain length of time in the mind, it undergoes a
change like that which rest in a certain position gives to iron. It
becomes magnetic in its relations,--it is traversed by strange forces
which did not belong to it. The word, and consequently the idea it
represents, is polarized.

The religious currency of mankind, in thought, in speech, and in print,
consists entirely of polarized words. Borrow one of these from another
language and religion, and you will find it leaves all its magnetism
behind it. Take that famous word, O'm, of the Hindoo mythology. Even a
priest cannot pronounce it without sin; and a holy Pundit would shut his
ears and run away from you in horror, if you should say it aloud. What
do you care for O'm? If you wanted to get the Pundit to look at his
religion fairly, you must first depolarize this and all similar words for
him. The argument for and against new translations of the Bible really
turns on this. Skepticism is afraid to trust its truths in depolarized
words, and so cries out against a new translation. I think, myself, if
every idea our Book contains could be shelled out of its old symbol and
put into a new, clean, unmagnetic word, we should have some chance of
reading it as philosophers, or wisdom-lovers, ought to read it,--which we
do not and cannot now any more than a Hindoo can read the "Gayatri" as a
fair man and lover of truth should do. When society has once fairly
dissolved the New Testament, which it never has done yet, it will perhaps
crystallize it over again in new forms of language.

I did n't know you was a settled minister over this parish,--said the
young fellow near me.

A sermon by a lay-preacher may be worth listening--I replied, calmly.
--It gives the parallax of thought and feeling as they appear to the
observers from two very different points of view. If you wish to get the
distance of a heavenly body, you know that you must take two observations
from remote points of the earth's orbit,--in midsummer and midwinter, for
instance. To get the parallax of heavenly truths, you must take an
observation from the position of the laity as well as of the clergy.
Teachers and students of theology get a certain look, certain
conventional tones of voice, a clerical gait, a professional neckcloth,
and habits of mind as professional as their externals. They are
scholarly men and read Bacon, and know well enough what the "idols of the
tribe" are. Of course they have their false gods, as all men that follow
one exclusive calling are prone to do.--The clergy have played the part
of the flywheel in our modern civilization. They have never suffered it
to stop. They have often carried on its movement, when other moving
powers failed, by the momentum stored in their vast body. Sometimes,
too, they have kept it back by their vis inertia, when its wheels were
like to grind the bones of some old canonized error into fertilizers for
the soil that yields the bread of life. But the mainspring of the
world's onward religious movement is not in them, nor in any one body of
men, let me tell you. It is the people that makes the clergy, and not
the clergy that makes the people. Of course, the profession reacts on
its source with variable energy.--But there never was a guild of dealers
or a company of craftsmen that did not need sharp looking after.

Our old friend, Dr. Holyoke, whom we gave the dinner to some time since,
must have known many people that saw the great bonfire in Harvard College
yard.

--Bonfire?--shrieked the little man.--The bonfire when Robert Calef's
book was burned?

The same,--I said,--when Robert Calef the Boston merchant's book was
burned in the yard of Harvard College, by order of Increase Mather,
President of the College and Minister of the Gospel. You remember the
old witchcraft revival of '92, and how stout Master Robert Calef, trader
of Boston, had the pluck to tell the ministers and judges what a set of
fools and worse than fools they were--

Remember it?--said the little man.--I don't think I shall forget it, as
long as I can stretch this forefinger to point with, and see what it
wears. There was a ring on it.

May I look at it?--I said.

Where it is,--said the little man;--it will never come off, till it falls
off from the bone in the darkness and in the dust.

He pushed the high chair on which he sat slightly back from the table,
and dropped himself, standing, to the floor,--his head being only a
little above the level of the table, as he stood. With pain and labor,
lifting one foot over the other, as a drummer handles his sticks, he took
a few steps from his place,--his motions and the deadbeat of the
misshapen boots announcing to my practised eye and ear the malformation
which is called in learned language talipes varus, or inverted club-foot.

Stop! stop!--I said,--let me come to you.

The little man hobbled back, and lifted himself by the left arm, with an
ease approaching to grace which surprised me, into his high chair. I
walked to his side, and he stretched out the forefinger of his right
hand, with the ring upon it. The ring had been put on long ago, and
could not pass the misshapen joint. It was one of those funeral rings
which used to be given to relatives and friends after the decease of
persons of any note or importance. Beneath a round fit of glass was a
death's head. Engraved on one side of this, "L. B. AEt. 22,"--on the
other, "Ob. 1692"

My grandmother's grandmother,--said the little man.--Hanged for a witch.
It does n't seem a great while ago. I knew my grandmother, and loved
her. Her mother was daughter to the witch that Chief Justice Sewall
hanged and Cotton Mather delivered over to the Devil.--That was Salem,
though, and not Boston. No, not Boston. Robert Calef, the Boston
merchant, it was that blew them all to--

Never mind where he blew them to,--I said; for the little man was getting
red in the face, and I did n't know what might come next.

This episode broke me up, as the jockeys say, out of my square
conversational trot; but I settled down to it again.

--A man that knows men, in the street, at their work, human nature in its
shirt-sleeves, who makes bargains with deacons, instead of talking over
texts with them, a man who has found out that there are plenty of praying
rogues and swearing saints in the world,--above all, who has found out,
by living into the pith and core of life, that all of the Deity which can
be folded up between the sheets of any human book is to the Deity of the
firmament, of the strata, of the hot aortic flood of throbbing human
life, of this infinite, instantaneous consciousness in which the soul's
being consists,--an incandescent point in the filament connecting the
negative pole of a past eternity with the positive pole of an eternity
that is to come,--that all of the Deity which any human book can hold is
to this larger Deity of the working battery of the universe only as the
films in a book of gold-leaf are to the broad seams and curdled lumps of
ore that lie in unsunned mines and virgin placers,--Oh!--I was saying
that a man who lives out-of-doors, among live people, gets some things
into his head he might not find in the index of his "Body of Divinity."

I tell you what,--the idea of the professions' digging a moat round their
close corporations, like that Japanese one at Jeddo, on the bottom of
which, if travellers do not lie, you could put Park Street Church and
look over the vane from its side, and try to stretch another such spire
across it without spanning the chasm,--that idea, I say, is pretty nearly
worn out. Now when a civilization or a civilized custom falls into
senile dementia, there is commonly a judgment ripe for it, and it comes
as plagues come, from a breath,--as fires come, from a spark.

Here, look at medicine. Big wigs, gold-headed canes, Latin
prescriptions, shops full of abominations, recipes a yard long, "curing"
patients by drugging as sailors bring a wind by whistling, selling lies
at a guinea apiece,--a routine, in short, of giving unfortunate sick
people a mess of things either too odious to swallow or too acrid to
hold, or, if that were possible, both at once.

--You don't know what I mean, indignant and not unintelligent
country-practitioner? Then you don't know the history of medicine,--and
that is not my fault. But don't expose yourself in any outbreak of
eloquence; for, by the mortar in which Anaxarchus was pounded! I did not
bring home Schenckius and Forestus and Hildanus, and all the old folios
in calf and vellum I will show you, to be bullied by the proprietor, of a
"Wood and Bache," and a shelf of peppered sheepskin reprints by
Philadelphia Editors. Besides, many of the profession and I know a
little something of each other, and you don't think I am such a simpleton
as to lose their good opinion by saying what the better heads among them
would condemn as unfair and untrue? Now mark how the great plague came
on the generation of drugging doctors, and in what form it fell.

A scheming drug-vender, (inventive genius,) an utterly untrustworthy and
incompetent observer, (profound searcher of Nature,) a shallow dabbler in
erudition, (sagacious scholar,) started the monstrous fiction (founded
the immortal system) of Homoeopathy. I am very fair, you see,---you can
help yourself to either of these sets of phrases.

All the reason in the world would not have had so rapid and general an
effect on the public mind to disabuse it of the idea that a drug is a
good thing in itself, instead of being, as it is, a bad thing, as was
produced by the trick (system) of this German charlatan (theorist). Not
that the wiser part of the profession needed him to teach them; but the
routinists and their employers, the "general practitioners," who lived by
selling pills and mixtures, and their drug-consuming customers, had to
recognize that people could get well, unpoisoned. These dumb cattle
would not learn it of themselves, and so the murrain of Homoeopathy fell
on them.

--You don't know what plague has fallen on the practitioners of theology?
I will tell you, then. It is Spiritualism. While some are crying out
against it as a delusion of the Devil, and some are laughing at it as an
hysteric folly, and some are getting angry with it as a mere trick of
interested or mischievous persons, Spiritualism is quietly undermining
the traditional ideas of the future state which have been and are still
accepted,--not merely in those who believe in it, but in the general
sentiment of the community, to a larger extent than most good people seem
to be aware of. It need n't be true, to do this, any more than
Homoeopathy need, to do its work. The Spiritualists have some pretty
strong instincts to pry over, which no doubt have been roughly handled by
theologians at different times. And the Nemesis of the pulpit comes, in
a shape it little thought of, beginning with the snap of a toe-joint, and
ending with such a crack of old beliefs that the roar of it is heard in
all the ministers' studies of Christendom? Sir, you cannot have people
of cultivation, of pure character, sensible enough in common things,
large-hearted women, grave judges, shrewd business-men, men of science,
professing to be in communication with the spiritual world and keeping up
constant intercourse with it, without its gradually reacting on the whole
conception of that other life. It is the folly of the world, constantly,
which confounds its wisdom. Not only out of the mouths of babes and
sucklings, but out of the mouths of fools and cheats, we may often get
our truest lessons. For the fool's judgment is a dog-vane that turns
with a breath, and the cheat watches the clouds and sets his weathercock
by them,--so that one shall often see by their pointing which way the
winds of heaven are blowing, when the slow-wheeling arrows and feathers
of what we call the Temples of Wisdom are turning to all points of the
compass.

--Amen!--said the young fellow called John--Ten minutes by the watch.
Those that are unanimous will please to signify by holding up their left
foot!

I looked this young man steadily in the face for about thirty seconds.
His countenance was as calm as that of a reposing infant. I think it was
simplicity, rather than mischief, with perhaps a youthful playfulness,
that led him to this outbreak. I have often noticed that even quiet
horses, on a sharp November morning, when their coats are beginning to
get the winter roughness, will give little sportive demi-kicks, with
slight sudden elevation of the subsequent region of the body, and a sharp
short whinny,--by no means intending to put their heels through the
dasher, or to address the driver rudely, but feeling, to use a familiar
word, frisky. This, I think, is the physiological condition of the young
person, John. I noticed, however, what I should call a palpebral spasm,
affecting the eyelid and muscles of one side, which, if it were intended
for the facial gesture called a wink, might lead me to suspect a
disposition to be satirical on his part.

--Resuming the conversation, I remarked,--I am, ex officio, as a
Professor, a conservative. For I don't know any fruit that clings to its
tree so faithfully, not even a "froze-'n'-thaw" winter-apple, as a
Professor to the bough of which his chair is made. You can't shake him
off, and it is as much as you can do to pull him off. Hence, by a chain
of induction I need not unwind, he tends to conservatism generally.

But then, you know, if you are sailing the Atlantic, and all at once find
yourself in a current, and the sea covered with weeds, and drop your
Fahrenheit over the side and find it eight or ten degrees higher than in
the ocean generally, there is no use in flying in the face of facts and
swearing there is no such thing as a Gulf-Stream, when you are in it.

You can't keep gas in a bladder, and you can't keep knowledge tight in a
profession. Hydrogen will leak out, and air will leak in, through
India-rubber; and special knowledge will leak out, and general knowledge
will leak in, though a profession were covered with twenty thicknesses of
sheepskin diplomas.

By Jove, Sir, till common sense is well mixed up with medicine, and
common manhood with theology, and common honesty with law, We the people,
Sir, some of us with nut-crackers, and some of us with trip-hammers, and
some of us with pile-drivers, and some of us coming with a whish! like
air-stones out of a lunar volcano, will crash down on the lumps of
nonsense in all of them till we have made powder of them--like Aaron's
calf.