Sale of Creeds (21-25)

Regard me as your purchaser, good fellow, and tell me all about yourself. I dare say you think it rather hard to be sold for a slave?

Not at all. These things are beyond our control. And what is beyond our control is indifferent.

I don’t see how you make that out.

What! Have you yet to learn that of indifferentia some are praepostta and others rejecta?

Still I don’t quite see.

No; how should you? You are not familiar with our terms. You lack the comprebensio vist. The earnest student of logic knows this and more than this. He understands the nature of subject, predicate, and contingent, and the distinctions between them.

Now in Wisdom’s name, tell me, pray, what is a predicate? what is a contingent? ‘There is a ring about those words that takes my fancy.

With all my heart. A man lame in one foot knocks that foot accidentally against a stone, and gets a cut. Now the man is subject to lameness; which is the predicate. And the cut is a contingency.

Oh, subtle! What else can you tell me?

I have verbal involutions, for the better hampering, crippling, and muzzling of my antagonists. This is performed by the use of the far-famed syllogism.

Syllogism! I warrant him a tough customer.

Take a case. You have a child?

Well, and what if I have?

A crocodile catches him as he wanders along the bank of a river, and promises to restore him to you, if you will first

A difficult question. I don’t know which way I should get him back soonest. In Heaven’s hame, answer for me, and save the child before he is eaten up.

Ha, ha. I will teach you far other things than that.

For instance?

There is the ‘Reaper.’ There is the ‘Rightful Owner.’ Better still, there is the ‘Electra’ and the ‘Man in the Hood.’

Who was he? and who was Electra?

She was the Electra, the daughter of Agamemnon, to whom the same thing was known and unknown at the same time. She knew that Orestes was her brother: yet when he stood before her she did not know (until he revealed himself) that her brother was Orestes. As to the Man in the Hood, he will surprise you considerably. Answer me now: do you know your own father?

Yes.

Well now, if I present to you a man in a hood, shall you know him? eh?

Of course not.

Well, but the Man in the Hood is your father. You don’t know the Man in the Hood. Therefore you don’t know your own father.

Why, no. But if I take his hood off, I shall get at the facts. Now tell me, what is the end of your philosophy? What happens when you reach the goal of virtue?

In regard to things external, health, wealth, and the like, I am then all that Nature intended me to be. But there is much previous toil to be undergone. You will first sharpen your eyes on minute manuscripts, amass commentaries, and get your bellyful of outlandish terms. Last but not least, it is forbidden to be wise without repeated doses of hellebore.

All this is exalted and magnanimous to a degree. But what am I to think when I find that you are also the creed of cent-per-cent, the creed of the usurer? Has be swallowed his hellebore? is be made perfect in virtue?

Assuredly. On none but the wise man does usury sit well, Consider. His is the art of putting two and two together, and usury is the art of putting interest together. The two are evidently connected, and one as much as the other is the prerogative of the true believer; who, not content, like common men, with simple interest, will also take interest upon interest. For interest, as you are probably aware, is of two kinds. There is simple interest, and there is its offspring, compound interest. Hear Syllogism on the subject. ‘If I take simple interest, I shall also take compound. But I shall take simple interest: therefore I shall take compound.’

And the same applies to the fees you take from your youthful pupils? None but the true believer sells virtue for a fee?

Quite right. I take the fee in my pupil’s interest, not because I want it. The world is made up of diffusion and accumulation. I accordingly practise my pupil in the former, and myself in the latter.

But it ought to be the other way. The pupil ought to accumulate, and you, ‘sole millionaire,’ ought to diffuse.

Ha! you jest with me? Beware of the shaft of insoluble syllogism.

What harm can that do?

It cripples; it ties the tongue, and turns the brain.

It cripples; it ties the tongue, and turns the brain. Nay, I have but to will it, and you are stone this instant.

Stone! You are no Perseus, friend?

See here. A stone is a body?

Yes.

Well, and an animal is a body?

Yes.

And you are an animal?

I suppose I am.

‘Therefore you are a body. Therefore a stone.

Mercy, in Heaven’s name! Unstone me, and let me be flesh as heretofore.

That is soon done. Back with you into flesh! Thus: Is every body animate?

No.

Is a stone animate?

No.

Now, you are a body?

Yes.

And an animate body?

Yes.

Then being animate, you cannot be a stone.

Ah! thank you, thank you. I was beginning to feel my limbs growing numb and solidifying like Niobe’s. Oh, I must have you. What’s to pay?

Fifty pounds.

Here it is.

Are you sole purchaser?

Not I. All these gentlemen here are going shares.

A fine strapping lot of fellows, and will do the ‘Reaper’ credit.