Proteus

Part 1

PROTEUS

TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW SERIES

DÆDALUS, or Science and the Future By J. B. S. Haldane

ICARUS, or The Future of Science By the Hon. Bertrand Russell, F.R.S.

THE MONGOL IN OUR MIDST By F. G. Crookshank, M.D. Fully Illustrated

WIRELESS POSSIBILITIES By Prof. A. M. Low. With four Diagrams

NARCISSUS, or An Anatomy of Clothes By Gerald Heard. Illustrated

TANTALUS, or The Future of Man By F. C. S. Schiller

THE PASSING OF THE PHANTOMS By Prof. C. J. Patten, M.A., M.D., Sc.D., F.R.A.I.

CALLINICUS, A Defense of Chemical Warfare By J. B. S. Haldane

QUO VADIMUS? Some Glimpses of the Future By E. E. Fournier d’Albe, D.Sc., F.Inst.P.

THE CONQUEST OF CANCER By H. W. S. Wright, M.S., F.R.C.S.

HYPATIA, or Woman and Knowledge By Dora Russell (The Hon. Mrs. Bertrand Russell)

LYSISTRATA, or Woman’s Future and Future Woman By A. M. Ludovici

WHAT I BELIEVE By the Hon. Bertrand Russell, F.R.S.

PERSEUS, or Of Dragons By H. F. Scott Stokes, M.A.

THE FUTURE OF SEX By Rebecca West

THE EVOCATION OF GENIUS By Alan Porter

AESCULAPIUS, or Disease and The Man By F. G. Crookshank, M.D.

PROTEUS, or The Future of Intelligence By Vernon Lee

Other Volumes in Preparation

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

PROTEUS OR THE FUTURE OF INTELLIGENCE

BY VERNON LEE, LITT.D.

Author of Vital Lies, Satan the Waster, The Handling of Words, etc.

New York E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 681 Fifth Avenue

Copyright 1925 By E. P. Dutton & Company

All Rights Reserved

Part 2

Printed in the United States of America

To my dear friend BELLA DUFFY with thanks for a lifetime of intelligent talk. 1880–1925

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I INTELLIGENCE AND PROTEUS 1

II PROTEUS AND ETHICS 25

III PROTEUS AND ÆSTHETICS 38

IV PROTEUS AND INTELLECTUAL MANNERS 42

V USES AND ABUSES 50

PROTEUS OR THE FUTURE OF INTELLIGENCE

INTELLIGENCE AND PROTEUS

There seems not to exist a word――for words are old while meanings may be new――which answers exactly to what I shall speak of as Intelligence. But space being short for what has to be said, I will not waste any in preliminary definitions. That which I mean by Intelligence will become evident by what I expect from its presence and attribute to its absence. I start from the assumption that it already exists, however insufficiently; and I deduce from what it has done that its nature is to intensify and extend. Whether this will be witnessed in the near future, or whether it may be checked by adverse circumstances, is no concern of mine. Writers of this series, and several others besides, have enlarged on the political and economic contingencies to which Intelligence, or persons presumed to have it, seem likely to be exposed. Whether Intelligence may become the weapon of a dominant caste, as was the hope of Comte, of Renan, and, at one moment, of Mr. H. G. Wells; or whether, as proposed by M. Charles Maurras, Intelligence shall be honoured with a subordinate function in some sort of Fascist State, I am inadequate to judge. Nor do I even feel certain that history has shown, or economic theory demonstrated, that Intelligence can be bullied or starved out of existence. Meanwhile let me confess that what I have to say about the Future of Intelligence is the expression as much of my hopes as of my convictions, both, however, arising from a longish experience of changes already brought about, and changes beginning to be brought about, by the particular, and perhaps rather modern, something I mean by Intelligence. What I mean, and what, under restriction to that meaning, appears to me likely or desirable. By underlining these personal pronouns, I am able to forestall the mention of one great change which Intelligence is already initiating, namely, the recognition and avowal that what one thinks (as distinguished from what primers, manuals and other authorities have taught one to believe) is――well, just what one does think, and neither the consensus of human opinion nor the revelation of the Deity’s irrefragable truth.

Returning to the word Intelligence, the meaning I attach to it will become sooner obvious by clearing away some misconceptions thereof which may occur to my reader. And first: The Intelligence whose future interests me is not the same thing as the Intelligentsia. Those of us who belong to that class presumably possess Intelligence, since we live, or try to live, by its exercise. But it is no monopoly of ours, nor do we always employ it in the manner which answers to my meaning. For living on or by its employment may, as is often seen among men of science and philosophers, result in their capital of natural Intelligence being sunk in a few enterprises of especial value, leaving them, as in the notorious case of Dr. Faust, but a scanty balance for current use and pleasure. I have brought in the word pleasure because the pleasantness of its varied exercise is one of the chief characteristics of what I mean by Intelligence, fostering that nimbleness, elasticity, hence also pervasiveness, which makes it a chief factor of human progress, as well as one of progressive mankind’s indisputable marks and unalienable rewards. Now these same pleasant properties, so often sacrificed by very studious persons, turn Intelligence into the stock-in-trade (eked out with plentiful surrogates) of that other branch of the Intelligentsia, those who make a livelihood by living down to their readers, relieving their boredom, lapping their thick skins in sentimentality, and keeping up the sooty flame of their collective passions; for alas, the Man of Letters is tempted to serve his public not merely as an unconsidered jester but as a respected moral guide.

Thus it comes about that we of the Intelligentsia cannot stand as faultless specimens of Intelligence. Besides, our facility for self-expression and our habit of holding forth unchecked combine to exaggerate, stereotype and warp our best ideas: only think of Carlyle and Ruskin, let alone Tolstoy and Nietzsche!

Having so far established what I do not mean by Intelligence, and before entering on discussion of Intelligence’s future achievements, it seems fitting to say a word or two about Proteus, to whom this little treatise is consecrated. It is so, I confess, partly because I am attracted by the classical titles, Dædalus, Icarus, Tantalus, of my predecessors, and then because, as described by Virgil, Proteus is to me one of the most engaging figures of mythology: ... “Ille, suae contra non immemor artis, omnia transformat sese in miracula rerum, ignemque, horribilem feram, fluviumque liquentem....”

But here again I must forestall another wrong identification likely to jump into the reader’s mind: to wit, of Proteus with Intelligence. On the contrary: Proteus, multiform and ever-elusive, represents that which Intelligence (lighter equipped than specialized Intellect for such rapid hunts) can sometimes catch sight of and, for however brief a contact, sometimes even clutch. Proteus, in my mythology, is the mysterious whole which we know must exist, but know not how to descry: Reality. For, whatever else we may believe it to be, Reality when thus partially revealed, is never twice the same. Nor merely because of what we call waxing and waning, growth and decay, and whatever other phases of individual and racial transformation biology has made us superficially familiar with. There may well be some πάντα ῤεῖ outside and irrespective of our thoughts; indeed, it may have been in miming the universal flux that our thoughts themselves have grown protean. Look, for instance, at that strange (well named auxiliary) verb whereby we testify belief in reality, esse, to be; which holds in its emptiness the possibility of all qualities and happenings and implies in its assertion of mere blank existence the assurance of continual change: a future and past. For, whenever we speak of what we call a thing, its mere name, like the name of Virgil’s Proteus, is a spell making us witness aspect after aspect, take stock of relation after relation, admit likelihood after likelihood. And our belief in that thing’s reality, in its being that thing and no other, means that it has had a certain, however unknown; past, and will have a more or less certain future. In this sense Reality, the fact of aspects perceived, remembered and expected in regularly connected sequences and combinations, that is what I mean by Proteus. Maybe that Proteus does not change at all except in our narrow, and shifting, field of vision. Maybe that the multiform Virgilian Proteus might turn out to undergo but one first and last transformation, into that great auxiliary esse, to be, holding in its stark emptiness all that, for us, is things and happenings.... Such a transcendent and sole real Reality I leave to metaphysicians, not without wondering secretly whence, save from occasional experience of this (to them) unreal Proteus, they ever got to think about Reality at all.

So, dealing in this shallow treatise solely with such (even if spurious) Reality as Proteus represents, I need now only justify my outrageous claim that mere Intelligence can have any privileged intercourse therewith. My ground for saying so is that specialized intellect screws its marvellous lenses down on only a single, and singled out, aspect of Reality; employs subtle reagents revealing only the properties for which they have been devised. Moreover, that the world of regular, foretellable sequences which science constructs is a map teaching us why to turn to the right or the left, but not a moving slice of the landscape we are moving in. Instead of which mere Intelligence, with its rule-of-thumb logic and well-nigh automatic movements, may be fairly fitted, not indeed to inventory and schedule separate items of Proteus’ multifold embodiments, but to keep us aware that Proteus is there at that eternal game of his: changing his aspects perpetually, whether you watch him or not, nay, changing aspect by the very fact of your watching him.

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