The Weekly Machen
The following item is not an Arthur Machen article in its own right. Rather, it represents a contribution to a “symposium” in the pages of the Evening News. Machen’s answer may not be what one would expect, but it is perhaps more true today than a hundred and ten years ago.
Are We Too Busy To Think
Contribution by
Arthur Machen
January 18, 1913
Mr. Arthur Machen, the well-known author and critic, who frequently contributes to this page, writes:—
It is always well, I take it, to begin by defining our terms. The “thinking” that is being discussed in this symposium is qualified and defined, I presume, by Mr. Birrell’s dictum, that “sublime speculations” are more important than great events. So the question is: Are we too busy to meditate sublime speculations?
Then, “busy” calls for an explanation; and here again the references to material progress, the City, and the links define the word for us: busy means busy in earning an income or busy in amusement. And so we get to the full meaning of the problem proposed: Are we too much occupied in wage-earning or in amusing ourselves to devote sufficient time to sublime speculation and systematic thought?
Well, I think that Mr. Philip Snowden puts the real state of the case when he says: “Serious thinking is to-day, and I suppose always was, confined to a comparatively few people.”
I doubt whether tubes or aeroplanes or express trains have anything to do with the matter. I don’t believe that A., who goes to the City daily by motor-bus, and fails to speculate sublimely, would have been a metaphysician if he had lived in the age of horse-buses or horses, or even if he had trudged his way on his simple feet. The thinker is a born thinker, and he will still take refuge in pure thought though the sky grew black with aeroplanes. Mechanism and hurry and rush and material progress do not exist and will never exist for the man who is accustomed to ponder on eternal truth.
I must make one reservation. I do think that the study of the technique of logic—in “Whateley” for choice—would do nine men out of ten a great deal of good.
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I am not sure how bad a logician I am (I fear, pretty bad…) – and Archbishop Whateley’s Elements of Logic as you link it looks dauntingly long – but it seems a good, practical piece of advice by Machen – a likely aid and buffer against being bustled around too much or too easily by “Mechanism and hurry and rush” – and advertising and sensationalism and propaganda, and so on: as you well say, “perhaps more true today than a hundred and ten years ago.” That Wikipedia article about Philip Snowden is intriguing – and I find a lot of his books scanned in the Internet Archive, and a couple of his wife’s, as well. Her Through Bolshevik Russia (1920) looks particularly interesting (on the basis of the discussion in her Wikipedia article), and her A Political Pilgrim in Europe (1921) seems (as far as I’ve sampled) well-read for LibriVox, to boot.
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When I visit the nearby college campus — no great beauty spot, I admit — I don’t see students looking at the so-often-beautiful sky, nor do I see boys and girls strolling as they hold hands. I see young men, especially — more than young women — sloping along, their heads bowed over handheld devices.
They will be thus young only once, although our culture “protracts” the years of youth — of course this is not really what’s happening.
Their parents (if they were raised by their parents), their “daycare providers,” and their teachers have something to answer for.
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