Page:The Viaduct Murder (1926).pdf/168

"Go on," said Reeves. "I shouldn't have thought Carmichael was typical of anything. What's it all about?"

"Well, the truth is that in this diary I don't merely record what's happened; I've got into the way of philosophizing over it a bit. As you know, Reeves, I've got a bad habit of writing for the papers, and I find writing down my impressions every day often helps me to find subjects."

"It would be a privilege to hear what you made of all this," said Carmichael dryly.

"'But of course it is very typical,'" Gordon read on, "'of all these modern philosophies. They are always for explaining something in terms of something else, just as Carmichael wants to explain Davenant in terms of Brotherhood. In plain English it means mixing up two things that are entirely different. The moderns, for example, will have it that punishment is only another name for correction. And once you have said that, the whole idea of punishment drops out of sight altogether. Or they will tell you that a concept is the same as a mental picture, or that Truth is the same as beauty, or as intellectual convenience, or that matter is a form of motion. The root of error is always one of those false identifications, saying that A is B when it isn't.

"'The cause of them is a rage for the simplification of experience, the result is a paralysis of thought. There is a sense of neatness and efficiency about identifying Davenant with Brotherhood; it explains such a lot⁠—you always can explain a lot by