The man who thinks backwards is a very powerful person to-day:indeed,if he is not omnipotent,he is at least omnipresent.It is he who writes nearly all the learned books and articles,especially of the scientific or skeptical sort;all the articles on Eugenics and Social Evolution and Prison Reform and the Higher Criticism and all the rest of it.But especially it is this strange and tortuous being who does most of the writing about female emancipation and the reconsidering of marriage.For the man who thinks backwards is very frequently a woman.
Thinking backwards is not quite easy to define abstractedly;and,perhaps,the simplest method is to take some object,as plain as possible,and from it illustrate the two modes of thought:the right mode in which all real results have been rooted;the wrong mode,which is confusing all our current discussions,especially our discussions about the relations of the sexes.Casting my eye round the room,I notice an object which is often mentioned in the higher and subtler of these debates about the sexes:I mean a poker.I will take a poker and think about it;first forwards and then backwards;and so,perhaps,show what I mean.
The sage desiring to think well and wisely about a poker will begin somewhat as follows:Among the live creatures that crawl about this star the queerest is the thing called Man.This plucked and plumeless bird,comic and forlorn,is the butt of all the philosophies.He is the only naked animal;and this quality,once,it is said,his glory,is now his shame.He has to go outside himself for everything that he wants.He might almost be considered as an absent-minded person who had gone bathing and left his clothes everywhere,so that he has hung his hat upon the beaver and his coat upon the sheep.The rabbit has white warmth for a waistcoat,and the glow-worm has a lantern for a head.But man has no heat in his hide,and the light in his body is darkness;and he must look for light and warmth in the wild,cold universe in which he is cast.
This is equally true of his soul and of his body;he is the one creature that has lost his heart as much as he has lost his hide.In a spiritual sense he has taken leave of his senses;and even in a literal sense he has been unable to keep his hair on.And just as this external need of his has lit in his dark brain the dreadful star called religion,so it has lit in his hand the only adequate symbol of it:I mean the red flower called Fire.Fire,the most magic and startling of all material things,is a thing known only to man and the expression of his sublime externalism.It embodies all that is human in his hearths and all that is divine on his altars.It is the most,human thing in the world;seen across wastes of marsh or medleys of forest,it is veritably the purple and golden flag of the sons of Eve.But there is about this generous and rejoicing thing an alien and awful quality:the quality of torture.Its presence is life;its touch is death.Therefore,it is always necessary to have an intermediary between ourselves and this dreadful deity;to have a priest to intercede for us with the god of life and death;to send an ambassador to the fire.That priest is the poker.Made of a material more merciless and warlike than the other instruments of domesticity,hammered on the anvil and born itself in the flame,the poker is strong enough to enter the burning fiery furnace,and,like the holy children,not be consumed.In this heroic service it is often battered and twisted,but is the more honourable for it,like any other soldier who has been under fire.
Now all this may sound very fanciful and mystical,but it is the right view of pokers,and no one who takes it will ever go in for any wrong view of pokers,such as using them to beat one's wife or torture one's children,or even (though that is more excusable)to make a policeman jump,as the clown does in the pantomime.He who has thus gone back to the beginning,and seen everything as quaint and new,will always see things in their right order,the one depending on the other in degree of purpose and importance:the poker for the fire and the fire for the man and the man for the glory of God.
