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Berkeley, the Lewis Carroll of Metaphysics, demonstrated that our bodies are in our minds, and Kant, the W. S. Gilbert of Philosophy, showed that space and time live in us. In Literature it is the same story. To credit the scholars, Homer is no longer a man, nor the Bible a book. As for Zechariah, it was written before Genesis. This topsy-turveydom is a valuable organon of scientific discovery.
Belmont, a little wizened fellow who understood nothing of this topsy-turveydom, hastened forward, deposited his armful on the table, and selected a finely embroidered waistcoat, which he proceeded to hold for his master. Wriggling into it, Feversham rapped out his orders. "Captain Wentwort', you will go to your regimen at once. But first, ah wait. Take t'ose six men and Mistaire Wilding.
When Barry Pain says that sometimes the glowing fire in the grate stares at you from behind its bars, as if it could read pictures in you, you cannot help laughing. If he had given you the protasis, "You gaze into the fire as if you could read pictures in it," even you could have invented the inversion. Topsy-turveydom is, I repeat, no laughing matter. It is an art and must be studied.
A motor car near by would seem to lose its solidity and dissolve into a few filmy lines. The mirage of water is everywhere. An Arab might lie in the open and no one would see him. A post might look like a horseman at full gallop. It was a country of topsy-turveydom as regards the subjective estimate of the eyes. But what puzzled the wireless man was this.
My friends, topsy-turveydom is not so easy as it looks. The trouble is not in inverting, but in finding what to invert. Our language is full of ancient saws, but it takes wit to discover which to turn upside down. Anybody can stand anything on its head, but it is only the real humourist who knows which thing can stand on its head without falling or looking foolish.
Topsy-turveydom unfolds our musty ideas to the sun and spreads them out the other way. The man who reverses the Fifth Commandment and says that parents should honour their children is not a flippant jester, but a philosophic thinker. This is the true inwardness of the topsy-turvey humourist. Topsy-turveydom has played a prodigious part in the progress of thought.
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