PROLOGUE Refreshing Metaphors
In this book, I tell a story—a long story consisting of a tightly linked sequence of discrete parts. Each part, or chapter, is more or less sufficient in itself, yet each finds me constantly picking up and playing out distinct variations on a few overarching themes. As the book’s subtitle suggests, it tells a story about modernity and its epochs. Readers will quickly notice that this story is studded with a number of terms, such as frame, epoch, period, transition, and rupture, giving the story its shape, texture, and momentum. I suggest the reason for this is that each of these terms (story, frame, gift, texture, and so on) is a metaphor signaling a distinctive range of associations. A standard definition tells us that a metaphor is a “figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness” (MerriamWebster Online Dictionary). As Aristotle taught, we use figures of speech not just to represent states of affairs but to persuade others to accept our representations—to use them as we do. In short, representation is always for a purpose, to an end.
Aristotle insisted that a good, effective metaphor must be fitting and it must be fresh (Rhetoric, 1410b13, 1410b32–33). An empirical realist, he meant that a metaphor must approximate some state of affairs as it really is. I suggest that a metaphor can only represent a state of affairs as it has already been represented, for persuasive purposes, through other, familiar metaphors. In other words, metaphors are all that we (as a metaphorical community of speakers) have to make sense of the “world” as it appears to us (individually). There are no “literal” representations. Good metaphors fit our received understanding of the way the world is well enough to persuade others to “see” that world differently. Bad metaphors fail to do so. A fresh metaphor is one that alters the way we see the world in some way that we are receptive to. As a general matter, we are not receptive to
drastic shifts of understanding; fit and freshness stand in close relation. Over time, fit, fresh metaphors are put to use so often that they make the world fit them even as they lose their freshness. They become abstract terms, or concepts. While they may appear to be as “natural” as the state of affairs they represent, I would say instead that every concept started off, and remains salient or useful, as a metaphor that finds a place among a large number of related metaphors.
Speaking metaphorically, metaphors wear down or fade away unless they are continuously refreshed. Let me speculate briefly on how this process works. Take the word rupture. I cannot myself use this term without conjuring up images of broken bones, torn flesh, blood and gore, grievous wounds that may, or may not, lead to death. There is nothing fresh about these images as such. Nevertheless, in their concrete specificity, they refresh the abstraction—they make it fresh without apparently affecting its fit.
Rupture is a favored metaphor in Michel Foucault’s writings, where it conveys an awful sense of violence—the violation of bodily integrity. Foucault’s metaphorical preferences figure prominently in this book. Thus I might have used puncture instead of rupture. After all, its cognate, punctuation, is refreshed by continuous association with language use. Less often, Foucault and I have both used the metaphor period, refreshed as it is by association with the craft of writing: a sentence ends, full stop, the next sentence begins, and yet the story flows from sentence to sentence.
Nevertheless, puncture and rupture produce contrary images, at least for me: piercing versus bursting, in versus out; clean versus messy. Rupture better fits my sense of what goes in social relations, as I think it did for Foucault. But do not look for consistency. Both Foucault and I use the less vivid metaphors transition and transformation. In The Order of Things (1970), Foucault favored transformation. I prefer transition, an even blander metaphor for going from one place (Latin, situs) to another. Both terms convey a sense that ruptures in social relations have an aftermath; society goes on, if not as before.
If we did not refresh concepts in the way I have just described, they would lose their place in any system of metaphors, all of which are subject to refreshing in the same way. It should be obvious that we all refresh concepts—recharge them metaphorically—with different images reflecting a large variety of life experiences, and that we do it all the time. As far as I know, the concept of metaphorical refreshment is new. There is, however, nothing new about the fabric of concepts in which this claim is lodged.
We all have a stock of words, names, or signs that we have been accumulating ever since we learned to speak; for most practical purposes, all of us take for granted that these signs refer to the world in its many aspects—they mean more or less the same thing to the people using them. While I do not endorse Henri Bergson’s vitalist metaphysics, I cannot resist quoting him here.
The generative idea of a poem is developed in thousands of imaginations which are materialized in phrases that spread themselves out in words. And the more we descend from the motionless idea, wound on itself, to the words that unwind it, the more room is left for contingency and choice. Other metaphors, expressed by other words, might have arisen; an image is called up by an image, a word by a word. All these words run now one after another, seeking in vain, by themselves, to give back the simplicity of the generative idea. Our ear only hears the words: it therefore perceives only accidents. But our mind, by successive bounds, leaps from the words to the images, from the images to the original idea, and so gets back, from the perception of words—accidents called up by accidents—to the conception of the Idea that posits its own being. (1911, 338)
An “image” arises from an individual’s perceptual-cognitive faculties; it is uniquely mine, or yours. As such, it resembles John Locke’s “idea” but not Bergson’s. For the latter, “idea” is eidos or form—“at bottom, the design (in the sense of drawing) of the act supposed accomplished” (1911, 332, emphasis in translation). In Chapter 1, I say more about form. In that chapter, I also suggest that David Hume’s “impression” is a better metaphor than “image” for my purposes.
For the moment, I stay with image only because it is such a familiar metaphor in this context. By contrast, a concept is associated with an image that seems to be held in common to the point that it has acquired a name or sign linking it to other concepts. It acquires form. Images are private, direct, and concrete; concepts are public, mediated by and through other concepts, and abstract. “Our idea of what belongs to the realm of reality is given for us in the language that we use. The concepts we have settle for us the form of the experience we have of the world” (Winch 1990, 15).
The process by which images are made public and become concepts depends on finding names or signs that point to similarities in images that, from one person to the next, can never be identical. Life experiences, registered and recalled as images, are subject to public articulation through metaphors. That our metaphorical choices converge and overlap so
extensively grant us a shared sense, however rough at the edges, of being members of a community (a concept subject to constant refreshment)— a community of speakers. That same sense explains why metaphors are contagious in the first instance and why they continue to function as concepts. It also points to problems of translation and commensurability across communities and over time. It would seem then that most concepts are refreshed at the edges (here again I take advantage of a potent, constantly refreshed metaphor). As conceptual historians emphasize, this process offers well-placed speakers an ever-changing palette of opportunities to contest and adjudicate abstractly framed assertions of fact, cause, and principle.
What then is a community of speakers? Every community is a world; each of us lives in many worlds, which each of us experiences as a single world of our own. I suggest that a community of speakers, a world, exists when its members put a common store of concepts to use for similar purposes, the most general of which is to tell a story about themselves as a community. Every such story extols the moral and political purpose that the members of the community are collectively committed to; every telling of the story affirms their commitment. That members of a community of speakers can use apparently abstract concepts for this most general of purposes is only possible because they refresh these concepts more or less the same way—that is, by drawing on images that come to mind as they speak. We assume that other people are working with the same images we are. Only occasionally do we feel that we need to “clarify” a concept by invoking an image or remind each other what we have “in mind.”
For the most part, the process of refreshing concepts is barely visible as we tell our stories. Commonly held images are basic, that is, rooted in the long, dense histories of the words/metaphors/concepts—histories of refreshment—that we rely on to tell our stories. Once we look for the conspicuous or (to switch metaphors) key concepts for a community of speakers, we have the keys to the story they tell about the world as it appears to them. The metaphors they choose give their story away because they give the story its large and abiding themes.
To give a pertinent example, the metaphors story and history have a common history until the Renaissance, when it began to matter whether the events in a narration of the past actually took place. Previously, events were what people said they had seen or heard about something that had been seen. In effect, the Latin verb videre, to see, refreshed story and history as interchangeable terms. Afterward, history was refreshed by association with veracity or truth (Latin, verus), and story by association with
imaginative (re)telling. As scholars, many historians adopted the conceptual strategies, methodological mandates, and discursive conventions of positivist science. Facts were to be documented, large claims qualified, the historian’s values suppressed, and ringing rhetoric resisted.
In recent decades, however, scholars dispensing with positivist science have begun to see themselves as story tellers. Historians have found renewed respect for their narrative skills. In my field of study, International Relations, most scholars hew to the canons of positivist science, but some of us readily acknowledge that we tell stories. We do so with an appreciation for documentation, an enforced modesty in making large claims, recognition that values suffuse every story, but perhaps less awareness than we should have that metaphors rule our thematic choices. We judge these stories on plausibility and coherence before locating them in the large economy of power and knowledge.
Here I tell a big story. Its subject is the modern world; the story takes place over several centuries. I take the advent of this world to have been a transformative event, and not merely a transition. I go on to tell this story with unearned authority and uneven documentation; I indulge in largely unsubstantiated conjectures. I do so in full recognition that it is the story of a large community of speakers to which I belong and whose values I have assimilated. Many readers will justly accuse me of Eurocentrism, for I make less effort than many of my peers to tell the story as if I were an outsider, an observer from afar. I do not postulate “multiple modernities” (Eisenstadt 2000), dwell on colonial barbarities, recapitulate theories of imperialism, or apologize for the modern world’s ingrained racism and ritualized hypocrisies. Insofar as I stand in judgment, and in this book issue a verdict ( Chapter 11), I do so with great sadness for what this community of mine has wrought.
Obviously this book is not a history of the modern world, much less a “global history” such as Jürgen Osterhammel’s (2014)—it does not select among a vast number of recorded items in order to tell its story over a thousand or more pages. If it is less than history, it is more than just a story. I might have styled it a grand theory but for the pretensions of this turn of phrase. The book does present a theoretical framework, although it is theoretical only in the loosest sense of the term—a sense befitting the field of International Relations, in which I have labored as a “theorist” for fifty years. Rather, it is a report on a project, long pursued, written in fits and starts, ever shifting in form and thrust. Perhaps I should say: the second half of a decades-long project, the first half of which took form as World of Our Making (1989).
In that book, I endeavored to frame the workings of any society in general terms nevertheless directly applicable to the study of international relations. Looking back, I see how much I favored space and structure over time and change. In this book, I do not reverse the order of priority. Instead I add a fourth dimension to the framework that I put forward those many years ago. More precisely, I spatialize time for the purpose of completing the framework. I do so by limiting myself to the experience of modernity and sketching five successive epochs (a term I often use) or ages (Foucault’s term, and one I also use) to frame my project. Each epoch is stylized as a unit of space-time, but only for expository purposes. Because I do not treat epochal transitions as sharp breaks, they too are stylized space-time units.
The first of the five epochs is the Renaissance as the age of similitudes. In its wake is the classical epoch as the age of tables, which I could just as well call the age of the frame. On both, I follow Foucault closely. Next is the modern epoch—an age of exponential growth and changing scales. Then follows the modernist age, which Foucault failed to identify as such but I would call the modern epoch turned inside-out. Last comes the epoch at hand, Foucault’s “end of man,” more generally known as the postmodern age. This is an epoch as yet unnamed, an age about which all must be conjectured. It may not happen at all, the so-called modern world collapsing instead. While Foucault seems not to have countenanced this possibility, I give it some consideration as this book comes to a close.
Writing together, my brother (who is a historian) and I have styled such a project conjectural history (see Onuf and Onuf 2006). Anne-RobertJacques Turgot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith, among others of their time, undertook similar projects in a time of transition from the world transposed to a table to a world transformed in scale. Kant and Smith did so within frameworks to which I give due consideration in later chapters. At the limits of science, contemporary cosmologists offer competing conjectures about “the historical character of the universe,” sometimes framing them in philosophical terms (see, for example, Unger and Smollin 2015, quoting p. xiii). On a less grandiose scale, anticipating a time of transition, Foucault’s extraordinary book The Order of Things is also best thought of as conjectural history as well as an inspiration for this book.
The Order of Things is philosophically aware but evasive. This is, in my view, a shortcoming that I have tried to avoid for myself; Chapter 1 sketches a philosophical backdrop for the framework that I develop from chapter to chapter. Its function is to position the story of a community of
speakers in relation to the teller as a member of that community. In effect, I reformulate Foucault’s question, “What can we know?” to ask, What do I, here and now, think I can know, and why do I think this? I am obliged to say that my answer is not one that most of my peers find congenial. It reinforces my decision not to start with a set of theoretical claims about the way the world works. At various points in the story, I repeat claims of this sort that I have made at other times. I ask readers who may be familiar with these claims to see them now in a context that I had myself not fully appreciated.
The next ten chapters tell the story of modernity and its epochs in recognizably Foucauldian terms. For all of Foucault’s influence, few scholars still pay much attention to the “young” Foucault and his “archeology of the human sciences” (the subtitle of The Order of Things). They are too deferential to say outright what they think: his book is an oldfashioned, discredited exercise in “stagist” history—in short, a reversion to historicism. According to the influential postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, historicists give “an underlying structural unity (if not an expressive totality) to historical process and time that makes it possible to identify certain elements in the present as ‘anachronistic’ ” (2000, quoting 14, 12; for an airbrushed assessment of Foucault, see p. 6). In this view, anachronisms reveal the direction of change; they constitute an inversely calibrated measure of progress. In my view (and I think Foucault’s), talking about ages, stages, periods, or epochs does not imply that history—not anyone’s story but, as we so often say, the flow of events—is going anywhere in particular.
Foucault failed to say clearly enough that no age fully displaces the age preceding. The charge of anachronism assumes that one sees the continued presence of the past as a matter of “survivals” and “remnants” (Chakrabarty 2000, 12; his scare marks). I do not. With Foucault, I do think that history is a viscous fluid (1972, 172; see also Chapter 2). It moves through time in irregular waves or pulses, each constituting its own conditions of possibility—cognitively and thus materially. Conditions of possibility compound and commingle. Earlier conditions seem to diminish in importance as new ones commandeer attention, but none disappears unless the flow of events comes to an abrupt end. So conceived, history has the structure of any observer’s construction of events but no unity. It is an “expressive totality” because every story is an expressive totality by definition, even Chakrabarty’s story about “postcolonial thought and historical difference” (the subtitle of his Provincializing Europe).
Such, in any event, is the story I tell in these pages. The last chapter goes back to the first chapter’s concern with positioning the story in
relation to its teller. Asking “What can we know?” leads to a second question: “How should we act?” If Chapter 1 is a philosophical memoir, then the last chapter is a complementary memoir on the ethical and political implications of the story I tell and, in its background, my sense of what I can know, here in this community, in an epoch whose character and fate are open to conjecture. Colleagues who find my philosophical stance uncongenial are also likely to find my conclusions about ethics and finally about politics unappealing and perhaps even inexplicable. So will most lay readers. While I espouse an ethics oriented to duty, I feel no duty to alter my conclusions so that others might plausibly act on them.
The first and last chapters anchor the story in place and time—they situate the story within its mighty frame even as they have me standing outside the frame, inside the story. The intervening ten chapters do not summarize what happened within and between epochs. To call them overviews calls on an ill-fitting metaphor. While I have been using the imagery of images, any such simile downplays the subjective, obviously selective yet carefully structured character (in Greek, kharaktēr, or engraved mark) of each chapter. They are impressions of a particular sort, graphic illustrations, copies of an impression (cf. Derrida 1996, 26–28) rather like images chiseled in wood, slathered with ink and pressed upon the page. These I have arranged in an extended series of thirty-six panes. In sequence, they call to mind a graphic novel in which deliberately crude drawings tell the story.
Graphic artists do not burden their work with scholarly paraphernalia, and I have followed their practice to the extent possible. There are no distracting footnotes or endnotes. To give my story coherence, I point readers to relevant discussion elsewhere in the text. To enhance the story’s plausibility, I provide in-text references for all quotations and scholarship that has directly influenced what I am trying to say. I do not pretend to have cited all relevant materials; to do so would burden the story unduly. I cite my own work when I have developed themes or arguments elsewhere in greater detail. My aim: keep the book short, link and support its conjectures in a sturdy frame, let the story take off.
Each chapter has a short introduction framing its panes, and I pause twice, after Chapters 4 and 8, to give my framework some additional support. I wrote the first and last chapters first, so as to contain and enfold my story, and then proceeded to write chapters more or less in sequence, with various delays and interruptions (and notice the metaphorical presence of ruptures that impede, not terminate). Many of those chapters assemble and rework writings of mine that, in some instances, go back for decades.
Reflecting as they do my diverse and evolving interests, these materials do not always seem to go together; cumulatively they make the story altogether unlike any other story told of modernity’s half-millennium.
Nevertheless I believe readers will have little difficulty in picking out the large themes that give the book its framework and, switching metaphors, its momentum. The framing conceit is the “mighty frame” simultaneously fixing the limits of possible knowledge for modern minds and the conditions of rule in the modern world. (Chapter 1 explores the context for the passage from John Milton’s Paradise Lost that serves as this book’s epigraph and prompting its title.) From epoch to epoch, the mighty frame has added features that continue to function even as they recede from view. As a metaphor, frame is highly suggestive: a form (eidos), but much more, an idea given a set form for some use. Typically frames are geometrically configured, built from the ground up, stood upon a flat surface or hung from a wall, created to enclose, contain or house some things in the world, and seen as if the observer is standing in front of a picture.
Frame is also a verb, now always transitive, conveying a sense of deliberate and sustained activity involving skill or craft. Martin Heidegger held that craft (technē) informs Western thought from the time of the Greeks and eventuates in the distinctively modern disposition to see the world as a picture (1977, essay 4). In this context, Heidegger introduced the neologism enframing (Ge-stell), which I would adopt were it not so burdened with Heidegger’s philosophical preoccupations (essay 1). I would like to say that enframing is what we do, and then ask, who is this we? Humans? Inheritors of Greek metaphysics? Denizens of the modern world? While this question intrudes periodically in my story, a different question, a puzzle, motivated me to tell the story as I do. How have we who are modern managed to enframe our world? If this book is something like a graphic novel, or perhaps a guided tour through a museum, the experience of modernity is not, after all, just a succession of familiar pictures, their frames lined up in a row.
With this puzzle in mind, I made the chapters devoted to the transition from epoch to epoch roughly twice the length of chapters describing the state of the modern world between its great ruptures. Longer chapters tilt toward limits on how we moderns have come to think as we do, shorter chapters toward the ways in which we rule ourselves. As we approach our own time, ruptures are harder to date. They seem to take longer—more like a gradual transition than a sudden burst. I want to emphasize that none of these great events is complete, that ruptures are not terminal. Significant
elements of each epoch persist, perhaps attenuated, often entangled with elements of later epochs, and sometimes even amplifying them.
Throughout I quote from what I take to be indicative texts, sometime at length, to capture the moment as framed. While their choice inevitably reflects the direction and limits of my own interests as a scholar, I have also ventured into discursive worlds with which I had little prior familiarity— as specialists would no doubt immediately surmise. While I could have engaged more extensively in the literature of my own field of study, I have chosen not to for several reasons. As I have already emphasized, this is a story; it is not an effort to add to or revise some cumulative store of reliable knowledge. The every effort to document the current state of knowledge in my field would all too clearly reveal how ill informed I am about the scholarship on many of the topics that I bring to attention. More important, dealing in any greater depth with the scholarship in my field would vitiate my large claim that this is a story about the modern world writ large, and not simply a story about the changing features of international relations in a changing world. As it is, I cannot squelch the scholarly impulse to speak more or less directly to my colleagues on sundry occasions.
Chapter by chapter, the story becomes more complicated. To keep things manageable, I leave a great deal unsaid—without explanation or apology. Thus one might wonder why I ignore the Reformation as a central event of the Renaissance with vast implications for the onset of the classical age. Indeed I largely ignore articles of faith as a species of knowledge. There are two reasons for my doing so.
As the Reformation illustrates, faith is not immune to change in its own terms. Yet such changes do not correlate closely with the epochal changes that my story is about. Sometimes faith-dependent knowledge functions as a brake on other changes and sometimes as a distant engine; the relevant causal sequences resist untangling, the putative mechanism is indiscernible. To give faith and the faithful the attention that some readers may think they deserve would slow down my story, disrupt the economy of its telling. Moreover, conditions of faith and conditions of rule are related in ways that constitute an altogether different story, one with its own tempo and contemporary significance. The Reformation’s impact on the royal houses of Europe, and on their relations, is a story unto itself, an important story about faith and rule (Nexon 2009 tells it well). Aside from its bearing on the Westphalian settlement (Chapter 5), it is not my story.
Or one might ask why I spend several pages on phenomenology in Chapter 8 and do not even mention pragmatism. Again there are two reasons. Pragmatism is a late, expedient effort to save modern positivism
from itself; phenomenology is modernist in its functionalist underpinnings and, as a bonus, more relevant to the philosophical stance that I develop over the course of the book. More generally, my strong claim that modernism is an epochal rupture in the way we think and in the way we live together will strike many readers as implausible. This is just how two excellent scholars in my field of study—Ned Lebow and Jens Steffek— have reacted to this claim. Conversely, I believe that they have erased the differences between what is merely modern and what is modernist in their work (Lebow 2009, Steffek forthcoming). While I think a functionalist stance unites developments in the arts, philosophy, and social theory, both incline to the view that these developments are not linked in a global causal sequence.
On philosophical grounds, I quite agree with them—there is no objective condition corresponding to what I call an epoch or causal relation explaining a succession of epochs. I offer a working model with functional, not causal, underpinnings (see the first Interlude). Oddly, Lebow’s and Steffek’s objections to this global model are, in my view, modernist; Lebow and Steffek seem to believe that functional differentiation, rampant a century ago and even more today, vitiates my globalizing model. I might even call my model postmodernist in its general contours because it draws inspiration from modernist sources without being constrained by the limits and shortcomings of functionalist thinking. Of course, my model has many other sources, and so do theirs. This deliberate eclecticism may indeed be a large feature of the epochal moment—not yet postmodern in which the three of us are working.
As these two examples suggests, I am not using an off-the-shelf model. The story I am telling is my story. As the story proceeds, its telling is all the more idiosyncratic. However tenuously, reference to frames and framing give the story its frame. At no point do I pretend that this is the whole story or indeed anything remotely resembling the conventional story of modernity’s half-millennium rocket-ride.
CHAPTER 1
What Can We Know?
“Qu’est-il donc impossible de penser, et de quelle impossibilité s’agit il?” Michel Foucault asked this question in the preface to Les mots et les choses (1966). The English translation is perhaps even more arresting: “But what is it impossible to think, and what kind of impossibility are we faced with here?” (Foucault 1970, xv). The question does not concern what is logically possible. Foucault followed it with an exceedingly odd list of things, properties, and relations, thus implying that the impossible is what most people think is laughable or ludicrous. The list itself is a brilliant, much recited confection that Jorge Luis Borges had devised as a taxonomy of animals—absurd in its own terms—and attributed to “a certain Chinese encyclopedia.”
Having thus engaged the reader’s attention, Foucault gave little further attention, in The Order of Things (or anywhere else in his work), to what is impossible to think. We cannot know what we cannot think. His concern was Immanuel Kant’s, his reaction to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason always in the background (see Chapter 6). What is it possible for us, as cognitively competent human beings, to know? For Foucault, this question translated into a question of cognitive limits, of discontinuities in thought: what are the “conditions of possibility of all knowledge” (1970, 167), and do they change?
For Kant it was first of all a question of appearances: how do the faculties of mind account for the way things seem to any one of us? In turn, the question of appearances—phainomena goes back to Aristotle and his realist challenge to Plato’s idealism. Perhaps all roads lead back to Aristotle. In this book, however, the road goes back and forth between Aristotle and Foucault by way of Kant. Its verges are the limits on what I find it possible to think, and say, about epochal change in the modern world.
Appearances
In Nicomachean Ethics (1145b4–7), Aristotle touched on the way he went about his work before turning to akrasia (lack of self-control, to which I return in Chapter 12). “Here, as in all other cases, we must set down the appearances (phainomena), and first working through all the puzzles (diaporēsantas), in this way go on to show, if possible, the truth of all the beliefs we hold . . .” This translation is Martha Nussbaum’s (1986, 240). As for method, this brief passage gives little guidance; Aristotle usually put his puzzles in a checklist (see Chapter 12) and proceeded to consider them one after the other.
This brief passage does, however, direct attention to Aristotle’s philosophical stance. Whether concerned with shellfish or self-control, as Nussbaum remarked, Aristotle was “describing the world as it appears to, as it is experienced by, observers who are members of our kind” (245, her emphasis). Why a third term, appearances, mediating world and observer? Is this world more, or other, than what we experience? What is the sense of this term as Aristotle put it to use?
The verb stem for the Greek noun phainomena is phainein, “to bring to light,” “to show,” deriving from the proto-Indo-European verb *bha-, “to shine.” The Latin verb stem for appearance, apparere, has a different origin but converging sense: “to come into light,” deriving the proto-Indo-European root *per-, “to bring forth.” These barely sketched etymologies prefigure a general question (as does the German verb stem scheinen, to shine, appear). What or who brings the light? There is, on the one hand, an active sense of the world making an appearance, of the world intruding on our attention—the world does the bringing; if we pay attention to the way things seem to be, we can get along in the world. On the other hand, when we make an appearance in the world, we bring it to light; indeed we throw ourselves at the world, knowing from experience that appearances are deceiving, that we can exercise some degree on control over appearances and that we may have good reasons to save appearances.
A conventional empirical realist takes the world to be more or less as it seems when we act on it and see it change. “To save appearances” was a familiar turn of phrase when it appeared in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, first applied to Plato’s project (and Aristotle’s too) of accounting for the circular motion of the stars and the wayward path of the planets, and then the sixteenth-century controversy over Ptolemaic-geocentric and
Copernican-heliocentric models of celestial motion. Thus the passage that gives this book its title and serves as its motto continues:
. . . how gird the Sphear
With Centric and Eccentric scribl’d o’er Cycle and Epicycle, Orb and Orb (Book 8, lines 82–84)
Both models manage to save what observation had long made known (Duhem 1969; Kuhn 1985). Nicolaus Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, published the year he died, 1543, shows him duly cautious about his model’s relation to reality, and for good reason. In the book’s Ad lectorem (Notice to readers), Andreas Osiander, a Protestant theologian who had seen Copernicus’s book to publication, sought to disarm opponents intent on upholding both scriptural and Aristotelian authority against Copernicus’s implicitly realist challenge:
For it is the job of an astronomer to use painstaking and skilled observation in gathering together the history of the celestial movements, and then— since he cannot by any line of reasoning reach the true causes of these movements—to think up or construct whatever causes or hypotheses he pleases such that, by the assumption of these causes, those same movements can be calculated from the principles of geometry for the past and for the future too. This artist is markedly outstanding in both of these respects: for it is not necessary that these hypotheses be true, or even probably; but it is enough if they provide a calculus which fits the observations. (Copernicus 1995, 3)
Centuries later, what it is possible to think has changed dramatically. On the authority of Galilean science, not to mention personal experience such as science makes possible, few of us can doubt that the earth really does revolve around the sun. Nevertheless, I subscribe to Osiander’s point of view. With due thanks to David Hume’s skepticism, I follow Kant’s so-called Copernican revolution to make sense of appearances—of what “skilled observation” allows us to think about. Indeed, I take Osiander, Hume, and Kant where they could not have gone.
Observing the world is never passive or neutral. As agents, observers act on the world they see, just as the world acts on them by changing how it seems to be, if only for them. Aristotle made sense of this relation by granting complementary ends or purposes to the world and its constituents and impelling observers such as himself to look beyond appearances to
the functional relation of parts to wholes. Part and whole perform a necessary function for the other’s appearance—coming into agents’ sight and seeming to be what the agent sees. A functionalist point of view must always acknowledge Aristotle and his subtle conception of appearances. Without assuming the world is a purposive whole (or that the world has any other intrinsic properties), this point of view is integral to the philosophical stance that I develop in this chapter and rely on hereafter.
While Kant viewed the world as a purposive whole in his not very original contributions to social thought (most conspicuously, in “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” 1784, and “Perpetual Peace,” 1795; Kant 1991a, b), the Critique of Pure Reason is notable for the absence of any systematic discussion of the concept of world. This is in contrast to Martin Heidegger’s equally ambitious Being and Time (1927)— strikingly but perhaps predictably, since Kant aimed for a revolution in epistemology and Heidegger in ontology. Kant’s great work does frequently mention the world of the senses ( die Sinnenwelt ); this is the world Heidegger identified with “Being- present- at- hand” (1962, 67). Instead Kant paid strict attention to appearances ( Erscheinungen ).
He started with “objects” (Gegenstände). An object “is given to us,” through our sensory organs, as an “empirical intuition” (empirischen Anschauung). In English at least, this formulation is misleading, since we normally speak of intuition as awareness beyond immediate sensory confirmation. Space and time as “pure intuition” (reine Anschauung) prior to sensory experience may be closer to the ordinary English sense of intuition as a kind of unsupported awareness, but does not, in my opinion, warrant Kant’s starting point. Space and time may, a priori, frame a world for us, but not necessarily a world of objects.
In any event, Kant would seem to have backed away from his starting point when he wrote: “the undetermined object of an empirical intuition is entitled an appearance” (A19–21 [1st ed., 1781]/B33–35 [2nd ed., 1787]; Kant 1965, 65–66, for all quotations in this and the preceding paragraph; emphases in translation). How can an “undetermined object” be an object at all? When he proceeded to say that “the appearance which corresponds to sensation I term its matter; but that which so determines the manifold of appearance that it allows of being ordered in certain relations, I term the form of appearance,” I see him reaffirming the prior existence of objects as objects. Our senses make them available to us: they are as they seem— determined, real, things-in-themselves by virtue of their properties and relations.
“To avoid misapprehension,” Kant offered this recapitulation of his position on “the fundamental constitution of sensible knowledge”:
What we have meant to say is that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance; that the things that we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit them as being, nor their relations so constituted in themselves as they appear to us, and that if the subject . . . be removed, the whole constitution and all the relations of objects in space and time, space and time themselves, would vanish. As appearances they cannot exist in themselves, by only in us. What objects may be in themselves . . . remains completely unknown to us. We know nothing but our mode of perceiving them—a mode which is peculiar to us, and not necessarily shared in by every being, though certainly every human being. (A41–42/B59; 1965, 82)
Kant seems to have thought that he could have it both ways: a world that we cannot know may nonetheless be populated with things. Neither Kant’s text nor a long history of subsequent discussion (see Gardner 1999, ch. 8, for a helpful summary) persuades me that what is possible, even plausible, and perhaps, given the way our minds work, almost impossible not to think—that there is a world of things beyond our sensory grasp—needs to be granted in order to make a coherent case for philosophical idealism. Yet the double meaning of appearance gave Kant an opportunity to fall back on an intuitive realism that he did not need.
In Sebastian Gardner’s formulation, Kant sometimes considered appearances as representations pure and simple; they are products of the mind. At other times he considered appearances as objects in the world subject to mindful representation (Gardner 1999, 278). The two senses of appearance gave Kant two senses of representation, to which, as a central feature of his account of our cognitive powers, I turn in the next section. What’s missing in this formulation is any underlying sense of appearance as activity: of the world acting on us in such a way that it seems to be what it is; of us acting on the world so as make it appear as it does.
Given Aristotle’s teleological worldview, his method of inquiry favors thinking about appearance as activity. Kant’s philosophical system would seem to render appearances passive in order to focus on representation as cognitive activity and perhaps to garner unneeded support for his idealist stance. Heidegger deserves credit for drawing attention to phenomena, and thus appearances, as an active relation between world and mind (as Aristotle the realist might have said) or mind and world (as Kant the
idealist would have it). Against the grain, however, Heidegger insisted that phenomena and appearances are conceptually unrelated.
Reviewing the etymology of the term “phenomenon,” Heidegger found it signifying “that which shows itself in itself, the manifest.” This world that shows itself is a world in action. Secondarily, phenomenon “signifies that which looks like something,” “semblance.” Here the relation of world and mind is rendered passive. While the secondary signification depends on the first or “primordial” one, neither should be confused with appearances. “Appearing is a not-showing-itself” (1962, 51–52; emphases in translation). When appearances are manipulated, as in “art and illusion” (Gombrich 1960), someone manifestly in the world illuminates the world by not showing it as it would show itself by itself. By showing itself to be not showing itself, mere appearance, to which Heidegger only alluded, is analogous to semblance; the world seems not to be what it looks like.
The manifest world that shows itself is not to be confused with the world that is, for anyone of us, present-at-hand. The former shows itself in itself, as a “unitary primordial structure” (Heidegger 1962, 169)—“a structure which is primordially and structurally whole” and must be “elucidated phenomenally as a whole” (225). Here structure means difference: a world of things. Yet this world shows itself only in itself, only as a whole. I detect here a Kantian equivocation. How can we say anything about the whole without saying something about its parts as things-in-themselves?
Heidegger’s answer is to make the world active by calling it phenomenal and then render it passive by turning to its appearance. The world can never actively appear or appear active—it can never show itself except in itself as a whole. Thus the world’s structure simply is; it does nothing besides being there. Indicatively, Heidegger relies on such awkwardly passive terms as falling and throwness to account for the world’s “facticity” (1962, 174, 219–20).
Heidegger would have us thrown into the world, which is thereupon present-at-hand for each of us. As I have already intimated, I see us throwing ourselves at the world, which pushes back, or gives way, in degrees and ways to which we assign the properties and relations of things. There is only a world-at-hand for each of us, and its things must be of our making. The world itself shows itself—can only be manifest—in the resistance it puts up when we act.
Heidegger considered, and rejected, this claim about the world experienced as resistance. He did so in an intriguing section of Being and Time devoted to “the problem of the external world” and the futility of efforts, such as Kant’s, to solve it. The problem with the problem of reality is its formulation, which
is always by reference to “entities within the world (Things and Objects)” (1962, 247). On Heidegger’s account, Kant made this mistake. So did Wilhelm Dilthey, who held that “the Real gets experienced in impulse and will, and that Reality is resistance” (Heidegger 1962, 253; here and below, emphasis in translation). Heidegger maintained that resistance must always be resistance to. “Resistance is encountered . . . as a hindrance to willing to come through. With such willing, however, something must already have been disclosed which one’s drive and one’s will are out for” (253).
Dilthey did not pretend to prove that there is, in reality, an external world. As did Kant, and later Heidegger himself, he stipulated a being possessed of will (Wille). For Kant, will is the capacity to act on one’s subjective principles and, for G. W. F. Hegel, it is subjective self-determination (see Chapters 6 and 7). The term is a supple, exceedingly useful metaphor for power over, or control of, one’s many powers; any willed act would then be a concerted, more or less conscious exercise of one’s powers. Rather than engaging Dilthey on his own terms (1890/2010; see Owensby 1994, 69–72, for a sympathetic summary), Heidegger denied Dilthey his focus on “inner life” (Eigenleben) because it takes for granted an outer world that is present-at-hand and thus a world of things. Dilthey’s emphasis on impulse and will makes resistance intransitive in both directions, but it makes no necessary judgment about the sources or properties of the world’s resistance to our needs or wishes. We push, the world pushes, we and the world both push back. This is an active relation, presupposing motion first and not a passive act of perception, of seeing things in the world-at-hand (and foot—the metaphor is telling).
In short, Heidegger dismissed Dilthey for not realizing that there is, behind the world of things, a world that can disclose itself only as a whole. Heidegger’s two-worlds ontology forsakes the simple virtue of Dilthey’s scheme: It avoids any preliminary judgment on what is out there in the world, if indeed any thing at all, and yet it sets that world in motion, which we experience as resistance all the greater when we launch ourselves into motion. Furthermore, by putting us actively in the world, Dilthey’s scheme denies the bias that perception is first of all a matter of seeing—of seeing things. Instead it makes perception first of all the sensation of pressure, the experience of immediate, palpable, conscious engagement with the world “itself.” Finally, it acknowledges that we use many physical, cognitive, and affective faculties or powers in all sorts of combinations to deal with a variably resistant world—one that affords us opportunities to follow paths of least resistance (cf. James Gibson 1979, ch. 8, on “affordances,” and Andrew Pickering 1995, 63–67, on the “dialectic of resistance and accommodation”).
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the old house looked very pretty, and were glad that some one had come to live in it.
"Will he live by himself, Stephen, do you think?" said Audrey.
But before Stephen had time to answer, Aunt Cordelia's voice was heard calling—
"Now, Audrey, tea-time! What about your pinafore?"
The pinafore was quite clean this time, and Audrey went in with a light heart; and as a reward for keeping clear of dirt, she was allowed to play with Stephen again after tea. She was eager to get out, that she might catch another glimpse of her old man, as she called him; but she found the shutters closed, and she and Stephen could only watch the flickering of the bright light inside.
"He's got a fire," said Stephen; "look at the smoke coming up out of the chimney."
"And he's got a lamp, too," said Audrey. "Look, you can see it through the crack in this shutter."
"THERE'S SOME ONE SITTING IN THE WINDOW!" HE SAID.
"Listen—" said Stephen. "What is he doing?"
The sound of hammering came again and again from the room, the window of which looked into the churchyard.
"He's putting up his pictures," said Audrey. "How pretty it will look in the morning!"
There was, however, no time for her to peep at it before school; but when she came home at twelve o'clock, she found Stephen full of excitement.
"There's some one sitting in the window, and I can't make out who it is," he said. "I can see something white, and it moves, but it isn't the old man's head; it's too white for that."
"Why don't you go and look?" said Audrey.
"I daren't," said Stephen; "I waited for you, Audrey."
The little girl went on tip-toe and peeped in.
"It's an old woman, Stephen," she reported, when she came back to him. "Such a pretty old woman, and she is sitting in that arm-chair, knitting, and she is smiling to herself as she knits. I wonder what she is thinking about that makes her smile. Come and look, Stephie."
Very, very quietly the two children crept to the window and peeped in.
"Is any one there?" said a pleasant voice.
But the children were so startled when she spoke, that they ran away and hid behind the bushes, and it was some time before they dared to venture again near the window.
"Is any one there?" said the kindly voice of the old woman. "I am sure I hear some little feet outside."
"Yes, ma'am," said Audrey; "it's me and Stephen."
"You and Stephen, is it?" said the old woman. "And what are you and Stephen like?"
Instead of answering, the two children put their heads in at the window.
How pretty it was inside that room! The walls were covered with pictures and photographs and coloured texts, a fire was burning in the grate, and in front of it lay a tortoiseshell cat fast asleep; the chimney-piece was adorned with stuffed birds and vases filled with grass, and on the round table was a large bunch of wallflowers, which filled the whole room with sweetness.
"Now then, what are you and Stephen like?" said the old woman, smiling again.
"Can't you see us, ma'am?" said Audrey.
"No, I can't see you," said the old woman quietly; "I'm blind."
"Oh dear, what a pity!" said little Stephen.
"No, not a pity," said the old woman, "not a pity, because the good Lord sees best; we must never say it's a pity."
"Can't you see anything?" said Audrey.
"Not a glimmer," said the old woman, "it is all dark now; but I can feel the warm sunshine, thank God, and I can smell these sweet flowers, and I can hear your bonny voices."
"I'm so sorry for you," said little Stephen, "so very, very sorry!"
"God bless you, my dear child!" said the old woman, and a tear rolled down her cheek and fell upon her knitting. "And now tell me who you are, and what you are like."
"I'm Audrey, please, ma'am," said the little girl, "and he's Stephen, and he's as good as my brother, only he isn't my brother—are you, Stephie? And he's got shaky legs, and he can't walk far; but he plays with me among the graves— don't you, Stephie?"
"And now, Stephen, what is Audrey like?" asked the old woman.
"She's got yellow hair," said little Stephen, "and she's nice!" And then he turned shy, and would say no more.
"Now," said the old woman, "you must often come and talk to me as I sit in my window, and you must tell me all you are doing. I know what to call you, but you must know what to call me. My name is Mrs. Robin, and you shall call me Granny Robin. I have some little grandchildren, but they live over the sea in America, so you must take their place."
"Thank you, ma'am," said Audrey. "Thank you, Granny Robin, I mean," she added, laughing.
That was the beginning of a great friendship between the two children and the new-comers. Mr. Robin had been a schoolmaster, and for many years had worked hard and lived carefully, so that in his old age he had saved enough to retire, and to take the old house, and make a comfortable home in it for himself and for his wife.
The rent was low, for few liked to take a house the windows of which looked out upon graves, but the schoolmaster made no objection to the churchyard. There were green trees in it, which would remind him of the pretty village where he had lived so long, and he did not mind the graves: he would soon be lying in one himself, and it was well to be reminded of it, he said. And as for his wife, she could not see the graves, but she could hear the twittering of the swallows that built under the eaves of the deserted church, and she could smell the lilac on the bush close to her window, and it would be a quiet and pleasant home for her until the Lord called her.
The only fear that the schoolmaster had had in choosing his new home had been lest his wife would miss the company to which she had been accustomed in the village
where they were so well known. She had a large and loving heart, and there were very few in the village who did not come to her for sympathy both in joy and in sorrow. She knew the history of every one, and, one by one, they dropped in to tell her all that was going on in the village— countless little events which would have been of small interest to others, but which were of great interest to Mrs. Robin.
She sat at her knitting when the neighbours had gone, thinking over what she had heard, and carrying the sorrows of others, as she ever carried her own, to the throne of grace.
But Mr. Robin need not have feared for his wife. She had a happy, contented spirit. It is true she had felt sad at leaving her happy country home, but new interests were already springing up in the one to which she felt the Lord had brought her. Little Stephen with his shaky legs, and Audrey with her motherly care over him, had already won Granny Robin's heart, and the children from that time spent a very large part of their playtime in talking to their new friend, as she sat at her window knitting.
CHAPTER IV
ONE day, as the children stood by Granny Robin's side, they talked about the old graves in the churchyard. It was a
Forgotten Graves
bright spring evening, and the golden sunshine was streaming through the branches of the ragged, untidy trees, which nearly hid the old church from sight. Granny Robin could not see the sunshine, but Stephen could see it, and he told her about it, and said he was sure the swallows liked it as much as he did, for they were flying round and round in long circles, twittering as they flew.
It had become quite a regular thing for Stephen to tell the old woman all he saw, and he loved to hear her say that she was now no longer blind, for she had found a pair of new eyes.
One day she called him her "little Hobab," and when he laughed and asked her why she gave him such a funny name, she said it was because, long, long ago, when Moses was travelling through the wilderness with the children of Israel, he said to his brother-in-law, Hobab:
"Thou mayest be to us instead of eyes." And she said that God had sent little Stephen to her, in her old age, that he might be instead of eyes to her.
"I am so sorry for those poor graves," said Stephen on that spring evening, when he had been telling Granny Robin about the sunlight and the swallows.
"Why are you sorry for them?" asked the old woman.
"They look so sad and lonely," said Stephen.
"What are they like?" asked Granny Robin.
"Oh, all green and dirty," said Audrey, "and the trees are fallen against them, and when the wind blows, their branches go beat, beat, beat, against the stones, till Aunt
Cordelia says she can't bear to hear them when she's in bed at night."
"Does nobody bring flowers to put on them?" asked the old woman.
"No, never," said little Stephen.
"Nor wreaths?"
"Oh no, never."
"Does no one ever come to look at them?"
"No, never once, Granny Robin," said Audrey.
"And they do look so sad," said Stephen.
"Yes," said the little girl, "I went with Aunt Cordelia to the cemetery one day, and it's lovely there, just like a garden; the flowers are beautiful, and there were heaps of people watering graves, and raking them and pulling off the dead flowers, and some of them were crying."
"But no one cries over these graves," said Granny Robin.
"No, not one person," said Stephen. "My father says all the people that loved them are dead and buried themselves."
"Poor forgotten graves!" said the old woman. "And my grave will be like one of them in fifty years' time—a forgotten grave."
She was talking to herself more than to the children, but little Stephen answered her.
"Will no one remember it, Granny Robin?"
"Yes, some one will," she said brightly; "my Lord will never forget. He will know where it is, and whose body lies inside, and it will be safe in His care till the great Resurrection Day."
"Will the angels know too?" said Stephen.
"I think they will," she said.
"Do they know who are buried in these poor old graves?" asked the child.
"Yes, I believe they do," said the old woman.
"In every one?"
"Yes, in every one."
"Even when the names are worn off?" asked the little boy.
"Yes, I believe they do," said Granny Robin softly.
"I'm so glad," said Stephen. "Then maybe the angels do come and look at them sometimes. I expect they come at night, when Audrey and me are in bed. I'll get out and look some night, Granny Robin; maybe I shall see them; my window looks out this way."
The forgotten graves weighed heavily on Stephen's mind after this talk with the old woman. When Audrey was at school, he used to wander up and down amongst them, pitying them with all the pity of his loving little heart. And he would try to put aside some of the branches that kept blowing against the stones, and which were so fast wearing
them away, and he would pull up some of the long grass, which in some places hid the stones completely from sight.
"Audrey—" he said one afternoon when Aunt Cordelia had given her leave to have a long play with him, "Audrey, couldn't we make these poor old graves look nice?"
"We couldn't do them all," said Audrey. "Why, Stephen, there must be a hundred or more!"
"No, we couldn't do them all; we might begin with two— one for you and one for me, Audrey."
"Well, let's choose," said the little girl. "We'll walk round and have a look at them all."
"We'll have one with some reading on," said Stephen, "and then we shall know what to call it."
"Here's a poor old stone against the wall," said Audrey; "I'll read you what it says."
"'SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF CHARLES HOLDEN, WHOSE REMAINS LIE HERE INTERRED. HE WAS OF HUMANE DISPOSITION, A SOCIAL COMPANION, A FAITHFUL SERVANT, AND A SINCERE FRIEND. HE DEPARTED THIS LIFE
THE 23RD OF DECEMBER,
1781.
AGED 38.'"
"I don't like that one bit," said Stephen; "it has got too many hard words in it."
"Well, here's another."
"'IN MEMORY OF JOHN POWELL. DIED IN 1781. ALSO MARY, RELICT OF THE ABOVE, WHO DIED JANUARY 20, 1827, AGED 87.
ALSO TWO GRANDCHILDREN, WHO DIED YOUNG.'"
"That's much nicer," said Stephen. "I like those two grandchildren who died young. I wonder how old they were; do you think they were as old as you and me, Audrey?"
"I don't know," said Audrey; "it doesn't say, and it doesn't tell if they were girls or boys."
"Never mind," said Stephen, "we can guess. I think one was a girl and one was a boy. And are their bodies really down under here, Audrey?"
"Yes, what there is of them," said Audrey; "Aunt Cordelia says they turn to dust."
"Oh," said little Stephen, in an awestruck voice, "I wish we could see the dust of the two grandchildren who died young! I'll have this grave, Audrey, and take care of them. Is there any one else inside it?"
"Yes, there's John Powell, died in 1781; also Mary, relict of the above," read Audrey.
"What does relict mean?" asked Stephen.
"Aunt Cordelia has a relict," said Audrey, "and she keeps it in a box."
"Is it a woman?" asked Stephen.
"No, it's a bit of grey hair; she cut it off her mother's head when she was dead, and she says it's a relict. I don't know what she means, but she keeps it locked up ever so safe."
"I hope John Powell didn't lock Mary up," said Stephen.
"She must have got out if he did," said Audrey, "for she lived a long, long, long time after him. He died in 1781, and she didn't die not until 1827; let me count up, it's quite a long sum. Why, it's forty-six years, Stephen!"
"Oh dear," said Stephen, "that is a long time! Let's tell Granny Robin about it, and I'll ask her if she would have that one if she was me."
Granny Robin quite approved of their plan, and of Stephen's choice of the two grandchildren who died young. She told them that relict meant the wife left behind, and tears came into the old woman's sightless eyes, as she sat at her knitting and thought of the poor widow left behind for forty-six years. She pictured her living on and on, year after
year, coming doubtless often to that grave to look at the place where her John lay, but still kept waiting for forty-six years for the glad day when she should see him again.
Granny Robin thought it must have seemed a longs dreary time to poor Mary. And then, maybe, those two grandchildren were a cheer and comfort to her. Yet they were taken, they died young, but old Mary still lived on. Till at last, on that winter's day, January 20, 1827, the call, so long waited for, came, and she and her John were together again. Then, too, the old grandmother saw once more the faces of the two grandchildren who died young.
So Granny Robin mused as she sat at her work; and she wondered whether the waiting-time seemed as long to old Mary, as she looked back to it from the brightness and the joy of the Home above, or did it seem short as a troubled dream seems when we wake from sleep?
"Our light affliction, which is but for a moment."
So long, when we are passing through it; but for a moment, as we look back to it from God's eternity. CHAPTER V
The Collection
STEPHEN had now quite settled upon the grave which he was to make his especial care, but he promised not to begin his work until Audrey had chosen hers. She was very undecided for a long time, but at length she chose one, sacred to the memory of another John.
"It will be nice for us each to have a John," she said.
"'BENEATH IS DEPOSITED ALL THAT WAS MORTAL OF JOHN HUTTON, WHO DIED
THE 12TH OF APRIL, 1793, AGED 47.'"
"'Go home, dear wife, and shed no tear, I must ly here till Christ appear; And at His coming hope to have A joyful rising from the grave.'"
"How do you spell lie, Granny Robin?" said Audrey, when she had finished reading it to her.
"L-i-e," said the old woman.
"Well, it's l-y here," said the child.
"That's the old-fashioned way," said Granny Robin.
"Well, now, we'll set to work," said Audrey; "we must wash them first, Stephen. Do you think your father would
give us some water in a basin? I daren't ask Aunt Cordelia; she would say I should dirty my pinafore."
"If Stephen's father will give him a basin, I will give you one, Audrey," said Granny Robin.
"And I'll get you both an old sponge," said Mr. Robin, who was smoking his pipe in the window.
What a scrubbing went on after that! Stephen's father, who was always pleased to do anything his poor little boy asked him, brought out soap and two scrubbing brushes, and the children worked away diligently for more than an hour.
At the end of it, they were far from satisfied with their work.
"The two grandchildren who died young won't come clean, Granny Robin," said little Stephen mournfully.
"They're quite as nice as my John is," said Audrey. "Anyhow," she added more hopefully, "they're a deal cleaner than they were before. Now what's the next thing to be done?"
"We must cut the long grass behind them," said Stephen, "and then we must dig up the grave in front of the stone. I'll get father's big scissors and my little spade."
Father's big scissors cut the grass down very successfully, but Stephen's little spade refused to go into the hard ground. It had been trodden underfoot for many years, and it lay hard and dry and stony over the heads of the two grandchildren who died young.
But at this point old Mr. Robin came to the rescue. He brought a large spade out of his house and dug the grave over for little Stephen, and then, after he had rested a little, he did the same for Audrey's John, as she called him.
AT THIS POINT OLD MR. ROBIN CAME TO THE RESCUE.
"Wouldn't the wife be pleased if she saw we were doing it?" she said.
"What wife?" asked Stephen.
"This wife it says about in the hymn—" "'Go home, dear wife, and shed no tear.'"
"I wonder if she did shed any," said Stephen.
"I expect she did," said Audrey; "I wonder what has become of her. Do you think she will ever come to see how nice we have made her John's grave, Granny Robin?"
"When did John die?" asked the old woman.
"In 1793," said Audrey.
"1793—a hundred years ago!" said Granny Robin. "Why, Audrey, the wife must have been dead long since!"
"And she never sheds any more tears now," said Stephen, "because she's in heaven."
"I hope so," said Granny Robin.
"Does everybody go to heaven when they die?" asked the child.
"No, my dear boy, not every one."
"Shall I go there when I die, Granny Robin? I do hope I shall," said little Stephen.
"I hope so too, my little man. The Lord wants to have you there," she said.
"What is it like, Granny Robin?" asked Stephen.
"We know very little about it, Stephen," said the old woman, "but we can't help thinking about it, and dreaming about it; and I always think of it as a beautiful garden, where the King walks with His friends. I may be wrong, Stephie, but that's what I always see in my mind when I think of it."
"The two grandchildren who died young will like being in the garden," said Stephen. "Do you think they're glad they died young, Granny Robin?"
"I think they are, Stephie," she said; "they did not have to tread far on life's rough ways; their little feet reached the garden long, long years ago."
"And there will be soft grass for them to walk on there," said Stephen, "Maybe I'll see them when I get there. Do you think I'll know them, Granny Robin?"
"I think you will, Stephie; I feel almost sure you will," she said.
"If I see any very dear little children playing under the trees of the garden," said little Stephen, "I might ask them, 'Are you the two grandchildren who died young?' And then they could tell me, couldn't they?"
"God bless you, my dear little lad!" was all the answer Granny Robin gave him.
The next day was Saturday, which was market-day in the old city. It was Audrey's holiday, and the happiest day in the week to Stephen and to herself. Aunt Cordelia was always busy cleaning from morning till night, and sent Audrey into the churchyard, that she might be out of the way of her sweeping-brush and dust-pan.
On this particular Saturday, Audrey and Stephen were whispering together under the lilac tree for a very long time; and about ten minutes afterwards, Mr. Robin, who was smoking his pipe in the window, saw a sight which made him laugh so much, that for a long time he could not tell Granny Robin at what he was laughing.
As he looked across the churchyard, he saw Audrey and Stephen coming towards the window arm in arm. Stephen was dressed in the tall hat which his father wore when he went to chapel on Sunday night, and in an old greatcoat, which was fastened round his neck, and dragged like a long tail behind him, whilst the sleeves were turned up so far that there was far more lining than cloth to be seen. Audrey had a red shawl thrown over her head, and her pinafore was tied round her waist like an apron. Each child carried a tin, on which old Mr. Robin distinctly read the words "Colman's Mustard."
As soon as they came up to the window both children made a low bow, but neither of them spoke.
"Well, what do you want?" said Mr. Robin, as gravely as he could. "Are you going round begging this fine spring morning?"
"Please, sir, we're making a collection," said Audrey.
"Yes, it's a collection," echoed little Stephen.
"What's it for, my little dears?" said Granny Robin, as she laid down her knitting, and began to put her hand into her pocket.
"Mine's for the TWO GRANDCHILDREN WHO DIED YOUNG," said little Stephen.
"And mine's for ALL THAT WAS MORTAL OF JOHN HUTTON," said Audrey.
"Oh, I see," said the old woman; "you want to go and get some roots in the market for your graves—is that it?"
That is it, and Granny Robin's hand must go in the pocket again. It goes in empty, but it comes out well filled. Three pennies for the grandchildren go into Stephen's tin, and three more for John Hutton go rattling to the bottom of Audrey's.
Now it is Mr. Robin's turn, and his pocket seems to be full of pennies too; and the tins make such a noise when they are shaken that Granny Robin pretends to stop her ears, that she may not hear the din.
Then the two children go on to the next window, where Stephen's father sits busy with his work. But the boot is laid down, that the collection may have due attention, and it is silver this time which goes into the tins, two quiet silver threepences, which make no noise, but which the two children admire greatly as they slip in amongst the copper.
"Now for Aunt Cordelia," says Audrey. "You must go first, Stephen; she won't say 'No' to you."
Aunt Cordelia makes a dive at Audrey's pinafore, the bottom of which she declares is collecting all the dust in the churchyard, but she is not angry when she hears why they have come. And when Stephen pleads for something for his two grandchildren, she goes to her till and brings out several pence for each tin, and willingly gives Audrey leave to go that afternoon to the market with Mr. Robin to make her purchases.
CHAPTER VI
