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Updated: May 28, 2025
If we insist upon perfect intelligibility and complete declaration in every moral subject, we shall instantly fall into misery of unbelief.
This was a feat for the wit and the poet, to jump from China to Peru, by virtue of some spark of likeness that might flash out between them. Much natural history has been written and studied with the idea of finding curious facts. The demand has not been for constant laws or intelligibility, but for any circumstance that could arrest attention or divert the fancy.
Even when we think of Christ as our representative, and have the courage to say we died with Him, we have still to reckon ourselves to be dead to sin, and to put to death our members which are upon the earth; and to go past this, and speak of a mystical union with Christ in which we are lifted above the region of reflection and motive, of gratitude and moral responsibility, into some kind of metaphysical identity with the Lord, does not promote intelligibility, to say the least.
The bas-reliefs of the Arc d'Orange are small, and would be confused, though in bold relief, if they depended for intelligibility on the relief only; but each figure is outlined by a strong incision at its edge into the background, and all the ornaments on the armor are simply drawn with incised lines, and not cut out at all.
It is not to be supposed that anyone was to be found who denied the general intelligibility of Nature. To have done this would have been to reduce science to an absurdity. Science is bound to proceed upon the assumption that there are "reasons" for things. Moreover, there is mind in man, who is part of the order of Nature. It follows that what is in the part cannot be denied to the whole.
The situation may therefore always be new, though produced from the preceding situation by rules which are invariable, since the preceding situation was itself novel. Mechanism might be called the dialectic of the irrational. It is such a measure of intelligibility as is compatible with flux and with existence.
Its transience, then, cannot matter, except in so far as it loses intelligibility through changes of time, place, and custom, and becomes a dead language.
Others might lose the scent of what it was all about in the tropical jungle of an indictment eleven pages long, but not he. Like the old dog in Masefield's "Reynard the Fox," Mr. Magnus would work through ditches full of legal slime, nose through thorn thickets of confusion, dash through copses and spinneys of words and phrases, until he snapped close at the heels of intelligibility.
Nor did he perceive or describe visible things, visible effects, in their own unmetaphorical shapes and colours: not a line of description, not an adjective can be found in his works except such as may be absolutely indispensable for topographical or similar intelligibility; Alfieri obviously cared as little for beautiful sights as for beautiful sound.
The free act is incommensurable with the idea, and its "rationality" must be defined by this very incommensurability, which admits the discovery of as much intelligibility within it as we will. Such is the character of our own evolution; and such also, without doubt, that of the evolution of life.
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