IT is a common lament that arguments end by leaving the disputants with the same opinions they had at the beginning; and since all the books that are written and printed are really arguments, conducted on a calmer, broader, and less personal scale, it has even been doubted whether books have much influence on the ideas and feelings of the people who read them. Whoever wishes to see the case for the uselessness of books brilliantly, skilfully, and forcefully presented can do nothing better than turn to the two poetic epistles which Goethe devotes with such elegant irony to that subject. In reality, however, if one thinks of it, the very fact that so much breath is spent on arguments and so much sweat on the making of books would seem to prove that people do not find them wholly useless. It is hardly probable that the human being, so canny in so many ways, would waste so much labour to no purpose. It might seem more in point, therefore, to ask a different question. Is there not something wrong with that—shall I say mechanical or chemical?—conception of the human mind which sees the thought of one person making its way into another’s thought, to tear the latter down, and then rebuild it, or to purify it or change it in other ways? This conception, at any rate, has no resemblance to the truth; but it is the notion that leads so many of us to accuse books and arguments of fruitlessness and fatuity.

Action of one mind on another in the manner here conceived does not occur between two debaters, or even between teacher and pupil, or governess and child—make the child as young and helpless as you please. For the pupil, as many writers have pointed out, is never a tabula rasa. No matter at what age you take him in hand, he is already somewhat formed, with ideas and inclinations of his own; or, to use terms more exact, he has problems of his own which are not the problems of the teacher; and the teacher in his turn can have no problems but his own, and the answers he gives are answers to his own problems only.

The pupil accordingly takes from the teacher what he finds a use for, whatever, that is, corresponds to his own ideas and inclinations. All the rest he does not touch. To be sure, he may not refuse it altogether. If he is a faithful and obedient pupil he may memorise a great deal; but what he thus acquires he does not work into the substance, so to speak, of his intellect and character. His memory becomes a sort of temporary store-house. Of the little or much he leaves there a large part will go astray; but the remainder, in due time, he will find useful. As the years go by, the new problems of the pupil become increasingly similar to those which the teacher was answering long before. Words which had no meaning then now suddenly begin to say something—though now they are words of the pupil’s own.

Shall we conclude that all the teaching has been wasted? It seems rather that we must say the opposite, that indeed it has been twice useful: the first time in nourishing the pupil’s personality in a negative and in a positive way; the second time in giving him actual help. It will seem useless only to the person who has asked the pupil to become a duplicate of the teacher—who has looked, that is, for a supremely perfect inutility.

But going back to the question of discussion in general; why on earth should I accept the opinions—let us grant that they are sound ones—of my adversary or interlocutor? I have my problems and he has his; and our problems are not the same, even when we seem to be debating the same question. For each of us states the question in his own way. Each of us relates it to experiences of his own and connects it with meditations of his own. In reality, therefore, each of us is churning over a different problem. As we wrangle on, my opponent will think it very important that I should understand what he is saying; while I, to tell the truth, will be interested only in understanding myself a little better. It is only natural, accordingly, that I should leave the argument better satisfied with myself than I was before.

But he may happen to corner me, catch me short of arguments, throw me into confusion. In this case, he is not disturbing me in my problem; he has furnished me with the incentive to create other problems which for the first time are beginning to trouble me (hence my confusion); but these new problems, in any event, will be my problems and not his.

All that I have been saying of myself in relation to him applies just as well to him in relation to me. And that is only a fair exchange. We must assume, of course, that we are each arguing for truth’s sake, and not, as often happens, out of vanity or some other passion, petty or serious as it may be—we must assume that we are each saying “things” and not just “words.” On this hypothesis, I must recognise his rights, as he should mine. So true is this, that we can all remember unsatisfactory arguments where our opponents, after exchanging a thrust or two, have suddenly laid down their arms and agreed with us. In such cases we are left with a suspicion that an adversary so easily vanquished has not deeply grasped the matter in dispute. If he had, he would fight back. Even if he should come eventually to agree with us, if, that is, he should come to a problem so nearly like our own as to admit of a more or less similar solution, he could be expected to do this only after considerable time, after a period of solitary meditation and with the help of new experiences and new stimuli. What we said above of teaching applies to this situation also. It is not that the argument has been useless, or useful only in so far as it has compelled us to think more clearly on a certain subject and to formulate and state the questions it raises more accurately to ourselves. Its utility will be for the future, not for the present. It will help us in meeting problems still to come, not in solving those already solved. It serves, in other words, for our individual development, not for an impossible accord with other individuals, which assumes as possible a uniformity among all individuals that is certainly impossible.

Deeply tragic might seem the lot of those solitary thinkers who are not understood in their own times and live their lives finding no echo to their words save ridicule and mockery. And it is a hard alternative that seems to confront every man of a vigorous and original genius. To find companionship in his intellectual life, he must either restrain himself and mutilate his conception of things, or, to give free rein to his genius, resign himself to solitude, finding comfort in the hope of recognition from followers in a remote posterity. But, as we think of it, we must see that there is no real alternative, since only the second course is open to him anyway. In general it is true that the farther ahead a man goes, the higher he ascends, the fewer and fewer friends he finds to keep him company. This means that the problems more or less, or almost exactly like the problems he has, will appear for other people later on in history; and that only then will he find very numerous relations of consensus.

But in reality he is no worse off than the rest of us. We are all solitary creatures; for we are all “individuals”—and individuality implies diversity from others. All our mutual agreements are really disagreements, all our mutual understandings, really misunderstandings. So if sadness were to spring from that loneliness in this world which is represented by individuality of thought, the geniuses and the great would not be the only ones entitled to melancholy; that would be the privilege of every one of us, however modest and unpretentious we may be. For the least of us has his own originality which cannot blend with the lives of others nor absorb those lives into itself.

But there is small consolation for this despondency in the thought that we are all in the same boat on the great ocean of Being, and that the best we can do is to seek out the truth each in his own isolated sphere, each aspiring to the good and attaining the good according to his own lights, conditions, and temperament. For our sadness is only deepened by this realisation of our reciprocal loneliness, of the mutual impenetrability of our minds. Here we are walking along beside one another, crowding one against another, interfering with one another, and yet utterly unknown to one another, perfect strangers to one another. Is there then no way to break the barriers down? Is there really no way to penetrate this impermeable impenetrability?

Of course there is, and we avail ourselves of it at every moment of our lives. We simply abandon the attitude of disputation, and adopt the attitude of listening and understanding; and then our adversary ceases to be an adversary—an enemy of our thought—and becomes himself the subject of our thought. Our problem ceases to be the problem we were discussing, but a new one: the problem of understanding him. To state the situation in technical terms, it is no longer a theoretical problem, but an historical problem; or, more exactly, it is no longer the one-sided history of ourselves, but the many-sided history of ourselves and of others—true history, that is, which should be the epilogue of every argument as it is the necessary preface.

History is the great peace-maker and the great consoler. To History the unknown great have always appealed, in the faith that History in its course would not only prove the truth of their conceptions, but award express and conscious recognition of themselves as authors. It is the historical attitude of mind that enables us to offer our hands to our opponents, now as to younger brothers who are dear to us, now as to fathers and grandfathers whom we have put in the wrong but still venerate, now as to children whose childish inexperience must be indulged. (All the more since they are looking at things with eyes that are fresh and unfatigued, and may hit on new truths by very virtue of their inexperience!) To be sure, not even these “historical” judgments we form ever bring us into perfect accord with any one. We never quite escape from our solitude. Indeed the better we understand people, the broader and richer we make our comprehension of others, the more successful we become in putting ourselves in their places—the less willing we are to accept many of them, the fewer and fewer do our real friends become, if any are left at all. And if we could comprehend everything, explain everything, put everything in its proper place, what should we be but God—God who knows everything and is known to no one? But this is impossible, and that is why God—an individual who is not an individual, an individual undifferentiated, unlimited, abstract—is an imaginary Being.

But this solitude, the solitude of the superior man, is not a melancholy thing. It is not even solitude in the sense of lonesomeness. For it is the very definition of what we call spiritual communion, the law of which is a greater and greater detachment from particular and individual things to attain better and better union with them in their universals. And it is tolerance also; not the tolerance of the coward who accepts whatever is laid upon his shoulders because he dare not throw it off; nor of the cynic who lets every opinion pass because he is indifferent to all opinions; but the tolerance which was named from the Latin tolli, and not only “bears,” but “lifts” the barriers between mind and mind and makes them one by arranging them and binding them together in series of progression.