The "Selections" was the text-book we used in the class. It is sufficient to prove that Berkeley wrote beautiful English. I am not sure that any one has written such English since. We have our own "stylists," but how self-conscious they are after Berkeley! It is seven years since I opened my "Selections," but I see that I was once more of a metaphysician than I have been giving myself credit for. The book is scribbled over with posers in my handwriting about dualism and primary realities. Some of the comments are in short-hand, which I must at one time have been able to read, but all are equally unintelligible now. Here is one of my puzzlers: "Does B here mean impercipient and unperceived subject or conscious and percipient subject?" Observe the friendly B. I dare say further on I shall find myself referring to the professor as F. I wonder if I ever discovered what B meant. I could not now tell what I meant, myself.
As many persons are aware, the "Selections" consist of Berkeley's text with the professor's notes thereon. The notes are explanatory of the text, and the student must find them an immense help. Here, for instance, is a note: "Phenomenal or sense dependent existence can be substantiated and caused only by a self-conscious spirit, for otherwise there could be no propositions about it expressive of what is conceivable; on the other hand, to affirm that phenomenal or sense dependent existence, which alone we know, and which alone is conceivable, is, or even represents, an inconceivable non-phenomenal or abstract existence, would be to affirm a contradiction in terms." There we have it.
As a metaphysician I was something of a disappointment. I began well, standing, if I recollect aright, in the three examinations, first, seventeenth, and seventy-seventh. A man who sat beside me – man was the word we used – gazed at me reverently when I came out first, and I could see by his eye that he was not sure whether I existed properly so called. By the second exam. his doubts had gone, and by the third he was surer of me than of himself. He came out fifty-seventh, this being the grand triumph of his college course. He was the same whose key translated cras donaberis hædo "To-morrow you will be presented with a kid," but who, thinking that a little vulgar, refined it down to "To-morrow you will be presented with a small child."
In the metaphysics class I was like the fountains in the quadrangle, which ran dry toward the middle of the session. While things were still looking hopeful for me, I had an invitation to breakfast with the professor. If the fates had been so propitious as to forward me that invitation, it is possible that I might be a metaphysician to this day, but I had changed my lodgings, and, when I heard of the affair, all was over. The professor asked me to stay behind one day after the lecture, and told me that he had got his note back with "Left: no address" on it. "However," he said, "you may keep this," presenting me with the invitation for the Saturday previously. I mention this to show that even professors have hearts. That letter is preserved with the autographs of three editors, none of which anybody can read.
There was once a medical student who came up to my rooms early in the session, and I proved to him in half an hour that he did not exist. He got quite frightened, and I can still see his white face as he sat staring at me in the gloaming. This shows what metaphysics can do. He has recovered, however, and is sheep-farming now, his examiners never having asked him the right questions.
The last time Fraser ever addressed me was when I was capped. He said, "I congratulate you, Mr. Smith," and one of the other professors said, "I congratulate you, Mr. Fisher." My name is neither Smith nor Fisher, but no doubt the thing was kindly meant. It was then, however, that the professor of metaphysics had his revenge on me. I had once spelt Fraser with a "z."
VII.
PROFESSOR CHRYSTAL
When Chrystal came to Edinburgh, he rooted up the humors of the class-room as a dentist draws teeth. Souls were sold for keys that could be carried in the waistcoat pocket. Ambition fell from heights, and lay with its eye on a certificate. By night was a rush of ghosts, shrieking for passes. Horse-play fled before the Differential Calculus in spectacles.
I had Chrystal's first year, and recall the gloomy student sitting before me who hacked "All hope abandon, ye who enter here" into a desk that may have confined Carlyle. It took him a session, and he was digging his own grave, for he never got through; but it was something to hold by, something he felt sure of. All else was spiders' webs in chalk.
Chrystal was a fine hare for the hounds who could keep up with him. He started off the first day with such a spurt that most of us were left behind mopping our faces, and saying, "Here's a fellow," which is what Mr. Stevenson says Shakespeare would have remarked about Mr. George Meredith. We never saw him again. The men who were on speaking acquaintance with his symbols revelled in him as students love an enthusiast who is eager to lead them into a world toward which they would journey. He was a rare guide for them. The bulk, however, lost him in labyrinths. They could not but admire their brilliant professor; but while their friend the medallist and he kept the conversation to themselves, they felt like eavesdroppers hearkening to a pair of lovers. It is "beautiful," they cried, "but this is no place for us; let us away."
A good many went, but their truancy stuck in their throats like Otway's last roll. The M.A. was before them. They had fancied it in their hands, but it became shy as a maiden from the day they learned Chrystal's heresy that Euclid is not mathematics, but only some riders in it. This snapped the cord that had tied the blind man to his dog, and the M.A. shot down the horizon. When Rutherford delivered his first lecture in the chair of institutes of medicine, boisterous students drowned his voice, and he flung out of the room. At the door he paused to say, "Gentleman, we shall meet again at Philippi." A dire bomb was this in the midst of them, warranted to go off, none able to cast it overboard. We too had our Philippi before us. Chrystal could not be left to his own devices.
I had never a passion for knowing that when circles or triangles attempt impossibilities it is absurd; and x was an unknown quantity I was ever content to walk round about. To admit to Chrystal that we understood x was only a way he had of leading you on to y and z. I gave him his chance, however, by contributing a paper of answers to his first weekly set of exercises. When the hour for returning the slips came round, I was there to accept fame – if so it was to be – with modesty; and if it was to be humiliation, still to smile. The professor said there was one paper, with an owner's name on it, which he could not read, and it was handed along the class to be deciphered. My presentiment that it was mine became a certainty when it reached my hand; but I passed it on pleasantly, and it returned to Chrystal, a Japhet that never found its father. Feeling that the powers were against me, I then retired from the conflict, sanguine that the teaching of my mathematical schoolmaster, the best that could be, would pull me through. The Disowned may be going the round of the class-room still.
The men who did not know when they were beaten returned to their seats, and doggedly took notes, their faces lengthening daily. Their note-books reproduced exactly the hieroglyphics of the blackboard, and, examined at night, were as suggestive as the photographs of persons one has never seen. To overtake Chrystal after giving him a start was the presumption that is an offshoot from despair. There was once an elderly gentleman who for years read the Times every day from the first page to the last. For a fortnight he was ill of a fever; but, on recovering, he began at the copy of the Times where he had left off. He struggled magnificently to make up on the Times, but it was in vain. This is an allegory for the way these students panted after Chrystal.