IX

THE ANALYST

We are all born analysts, and we quickly get to work. The passion for scientific investigation begins in the cradle. A child glories in taking things to pieces. He is always at it. He will take a clock to pieces to find the thing that is for ever ticking. He will take an instrument to pieces to find the music. He will take a flower to pieces to find the fragrance. He will take his mechanical toys to pieces to find what makes them go. He would take his mother to pieces, if he could, to find where all the love and sweetness come from. Those who have no eye for beauty will mutter a lot of common place nonsense about his bump of destructiveness having been abnormally developed. It is not destructiveness at all. When he discovers that his investigation has destroyed the very thing that he was fondly investigating, he will weep over its ruin Nothing was further from his thought. He is not a born iconoclast, but a born analyst. That is all. His most passionate propensity is the scientific yearning to resolve a substance into its original elements, to ascertain its component parts, to reveal its ingredients, to take it to pieces. And, though he should live to be as old as Methuselah, he will never quite escape from that analytical propensity. Indeed, it may grow upon him. And, as in the nursery it often led him to the ruin of his best-loved toys, so, in later life, his insatiable craving for taking things to pieces will beguile him into many sorrows before it has done with him. Let us trace the thing a little.

 But we must not yet say good-bye to the child in his cot. Watch him! He cries and crows and chuckles and squeals. The causes of his antics and grimaces are among the things that are not dreamed of in our philosophy. And yet, what if he is wrestling with some profound analytical problem? What if the young chemist is already in his wonderful laboratory, and is hard at work at his task of taking the universe to pieces? See! He scratches at his cot and he laughs. He pokes at the counterpane and crows in his furious glee. In his delicious merriment he flings his feet into the air and chuckles audibly. And as the pair of pink pillars appear before his delighted gaze, he scratches at them with all his might and main. And then he screams, as if the foundations of the world had been suddenly shaken. You are amazed at his incredible stupidity in scratching himself, and in straightway crying because it hurts. But what if the incredible stupidity be yours, and not his? What if he be absorbed in an analytical experiment? For experiments in a laboratory are never unattended by some risk. See! He has now divided the entire universe into two parts. He has discovered that there is an essential difference between the cot and the counterpane on the one hand, and the pretty pair of chubby pink pillars on the other. He finds, as a result of his elaborate experiments, that certain things make up the ‘I’ of this life, and must on no account be scratched; and that certain other things make up the ‘Not-I,’ and may be scratched without pain. Later on he will pass from this purely physical analysis of ‘I’ and ‘Not-!’ to the purely ethical dissection of the ‘ mine ‘ and the ‘ not-mine.’ And, still later, his hungry mind will invade and dissect a still more wonderful world. He will pick up, let us say, Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma, and, sitting at the feet of the brilliant Oxford Professor, he will learn to make a new analysis. For, says Arnold, all scientific religion amounts in the last resort to a clear distinction between the ‘ourselves’ and the ‘not-our selves.’ For here, dwelling within the very body that we scratched in the cradle, is ‘a power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness,’ And that power is God! God in Us! And when he gets as far as this, our young analyst has begun to take the universe to pieces to some purpose!

 And yet, at this very point, his knowledge will lead him into mischief. Knowledge always does. Knowledge is like a lie. A lie requires another lie to cover it. And my knowledge requires still more knowledge to teach me how to use it. It is of no use teaching a child how to handle a knife and how to wield a pen. If you leave it at this, you will find him celebrating his knowledge of cutlery and calligraphy by carving his name on the dining-room table. You must teach him how to use the knowledge you have already given him. In the same way, the inborn faculty of analysis must be educated, or it will play some cruel pranks with him. History affords a shocking example. About three hundred years before Christ a young analyst sprang into existence at Alexandria, Euclid by name. Most school children have heard of him. He spent a good deal of his time in taking things to pieces — triangles, squares, and curves. And at last he actually committed himself to this amazing fallacy: ‘The whole,’ he said, ‘is equal to the sum of all its parts.’ It is a fearful thing when the passion for analysis leads a man into so grave a heresy as this. ‘The whole is equal to the sum of all its parts.’ Could anything be more absurd? Take Paradise Lost or Hamlet or In Memoriam to pieces on this principle, and you will find that the great classic simply consists of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet in an endless variety of juxtaposition. And would Euclid have us believe that the whole of Hamlet is only equal to the twenty-six letters of the alphabet? It has often been pointed out that in Gray’s Elegy there is scarcely a thought that rises above mediocrity, and yet the combination and sequence and rhythm of the whole are such that we have all recognized it as one of the choicest gems of our literature. The entire poem is infinitely greater than the sum of all its parts. Or think of Tennyson’s brook, with its deeps and its shallows, its whirls and its eddies, its song and its chatter, its foamy flake and its silvery flash, its graceful windings among ferns and forget-me-nots, its haunts of trout and of grayling. Now, the analyst who has not been warned of the peril of dissection will take all this to pieces. And he will tell you that it consists of two parts of hydrogen to sixteen parts of oxygen! If you hear the wildest statement often enough, you will come at last to believe it. And this young analyst has read Euclid’s axiom so frequently that he has really come at last to fancy that it is true! The whole of the brook equal to the sum of all its parts! The whole equal to hydrogen and oxygen! Let our analyst read the poem and see! Does a lovely tune consist merely of so many notes? We are irresistibly reminded of Balthazar, the infatuated chemist in Balzac’s Quest for the Absolute. His poor wife is in an agony of apprehension on his account, and she frets and worries about his perilous experiments. She seeks with passionate entreaty to dissuade him. As he looks into her face he notices that her beautiful eyes are swimming in tears. ‘Ah!’ exclaimed the analyst, ‘tears! tears! Well, I have decomposed them. They contain a little phosphate of lime, a little chloride of sodium, a little mucus, and a little water!’ Now, I happen to know for certain that neither Euclid, nor Balzac’s chemist, nor all the cold-blooded philosophers in the universe, could ever persuade any husband or lover in the wide, wide world that a woman’ s tears contain nothing more than these constituent elements! It is another of those common cases in which the whole is greater, beyond all calculation, than the sum of all its parts. I wonder that it never occurs to such analysts as these to ask themselves this pertinent question: If a whole contains no more than the sum of all its parts, why should either God or man take the trouble to transform the parts into a whole ? It would be love’s labour lost, with a vengeance.

 But, after all, the analyst will not do very much harm in the world unless he starts to take himself to pieces. If he confines his attention to poems, and books, and tunes, and tears, he may miss a vast amount of beauty and pathos and music and romance; but he may survive that. The wreck will not be total. But when he begins to take himself to pieces, he will make a tragic mess of things unless he knows exactly how to go about it. Here, for example, is an extract from the Practical Druggist. It tells us that an average man is made up of so much iron, so much phosphate, so much salt, so much gas, so much water, and so on. Now, does any one feel that this is quite satisfactory? Is this Man? Is the whole only equal to the sum of all its parts? Where does consciousness come in, and conscience, and passion, and love, and hate, and everything that makes me Me? And is your analyst much nearer to the truth when he dissects himself another way, and says that he consists of spirit and soul and body? I think not. I have noticed something about the body which is wonderfully spiritual, and something about the spirit which is woefully carnal. The analysis is very crude. I prefer to take myself as I am — a whole which is very much greater than the sum of all its parts — and to cry with Behmen, the mystic: ‘Only when I know God shall I know Myself!’

 Here, then, we have a most extraordinary phenomenon. We are analysts from our cradles, yet we never excel at it. It is the one thing we begin to do as soon as we are born ; and we are still doing it very clumsily and very badly when the time comes to die. We look around us, and we divide things in general into things sacred and things secular. What could be more stilted, more unnatural, more artificial? As though to a secular mind anything could be sacred! As though to a saintly soul anything could be secular ! We divide our fellow mortals up into saints and sinners. But we often suspect our own analysis. We find our- selves gazing in admiration at the saintliness of some sinners; and we find ourselves in grief at the sinfulness of some saints.

 We turn from things around to things within, and soon find ourselves in the same confusion. Chesterton says that the battle of the future is the battle between the telescope and the microscope. He is mistaken. The battle of the future is between the telescope and the stethoscope. And in that fight the telescope must win. It was fashionable, once upon a time, for most excellent and devout people to spend half their time with the stethoscope in awful introspection and analysis. Such self-examination has its place; but it has been sadly over-done. I prefer to lay down the stethoscope and take up the telescope. ‘Looking off unto Jesus,’ says a wonderful writer who points out this more excellent way. It is so very difficult to analyse the soul and to dissect the good from the bad I like to think of that great and gracious Covenanter, David Dickson, Professor of Theology in Glasgow University. When he lay dying, he attempted to analyse his inmost self; but he soon abandoned the attempt. Then, turning to his bosom friend, John Livingstone, who sat beside his death-bed, he said: ‘I have taken them all — all my good deeds and all my bad deeds — and have cast them all together in a heap before the Lord! I have fled from both of them to Jesus; and in Him I have sweet peace!’ It was beautifully and bravely spoken. That is the last word in analytical science.

​F.W. Boreham, 1914.