He was clever--brilliantly clever--but his
cleverness worked the wrong way. Instead of keeping to the study of the
vernaculars, he had read some books written by a man called Comte, I think,
and a man called Spencer, and a Professor Clifford. [You will find these books
in the Library.] They deal with people's insides from the point of view of men
who have no stomachs. There was no order against his reading them; but his
Mamma should have smacked him.
They fermented in his head, and he came out to India with a rarefied religion
over and above his work. It was not much of a creed. It only proved that men
had no souls, and there was no God and no hereafter, and that you must worry
along somehow for the good of Humanity.
One of its minor tenets seemed to be that the one thing more sinful than
giving an order was obeying it. At least, that was what McGoggin said; but I
suspect he had misread his primers.
I do not say a word against this creed. It was made up in Town, where there is
nothing but machinery and asphalt and building--all shut in by the fog.
Naturally, a man grows to think that there is no one higher than himself, and
that the Metropolitan Board of Works made everything. But in this country,
where you really see humanity--raw, brown, naked humanity--with nothing
between it and the blazing sky, and only the used-up, over-handled earth
underfoot, the notion somehow dies away, and most folk come back to simpler
theories.
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