A Mind Awake

by C. S. Lewis

  There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. His parents called him Eustace Clarence and his school-masters called him Scrubb. I can’t tell you how his friends spoke to him, for he had none. He didn’t call his father and mother ‘Father’ and ‘Mother’, but Harold and Alberta. They were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotallers and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on the beds, and the windows were always open.

  Eustace Clarence liked animals, especially beetles, if they were dead and pinned on a card. He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.

  The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’, ch. 1

  The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the rôles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defence for being the god who permits war, poverty and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God’s acquittal. But the important thing is that Man is on the Bench and God in the Dock.

  God in the Dock

  The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. . . .

  Will the ethos [of a classless society] be a synthesis of what was best in all the classes or a mere ‘pool’ with the sediment of all and the virtues of none?

  ‘The Necessity of Chivalry’, Present Concerns

  There is a crowd of busybodies, self-appointed masters of ceremonies, whose life is devoted to destroying solitude wherever solitude still exists. . . . If an Augustine, a Vaughan, a Traherne, or a Wordsworth should be born in the modern world, the leaders of a Youth Organisation would soon cure him. . . . We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

  ‘Membership’, The Weight of Glory

  Nowadays it seems to be so forgotten that people think they have somehow discredited Our Lord if they can show that some pre-Christian document (or what they take to be pre-Christian) such as the Dead Sea Scrolls has ‘anticipated’ Him. As if we supposed Him to be a cheapjack like Nietzsche inventing a new ethics! Every good teacher, within Judaism as without, has anticipated Him. The whole religious history of the pre-Christian world, on its better side, anticipates Him. It could not be otherwise. The Light which has lightened every man from the beginning may shine more clearly but cannot change. The Origin cannot suddenly start being, in the popular sense of the word, ‘original’.

  Reflections on the Psalms, ch. 3

  Christians and their opponents again and again expect that some new discovery will either turn matters of faith into matters of knowledge or else reduce them to patent absurdities. But it has never happened.

  The World’s Last Night, ch. 6

  ‘In our world’, said Eustace, ‘a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.’

  ‘Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.’

  The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’, ch. 14

  Atoms dead could never thus

  Stir the human heart of us

  Unless the beauty that we see

  The veil of endless beauty be,

  Filled full of spirits that have trod

  Far hence along the heavenly sod

  And see the bright footprints of God.

  ‘Song’, Spirits in Bondage

  Mere is always a dangerous word.

  The Four Loves, ch. 1

  The strength of such a [naturalistic] critic lies in the words ‘merely’ or ‘nothing but’. He sees all the facts but not the meaning. Quite truly, therefore, he claims to have seen all the facts. There is nothing else there; except the meaning. He is therefore, as regards the matter in hand, in the position of an animal. You will have noticed that most dogs cannot understand pointing. You point to a bit of food on the floor: the dog, instead of looking at the floor, sniffs at your finger. A finger is a finger to him, and that is all. His world is all fact and no meaning. And in a period when factual realism is dominant we shall find people deliberately inducing upon themselves this doglike mind. A man who has experienced love from within will deliberately go about to inspect it analytically from outside and regard the results of this analysis as truer than his experience. The extreme limit of this self-blinding is seen in those who, like the rest of us, have consciousness, yet go about to study the human organism as if they did not know it was conscious. As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism. The critique of every experience from below, the voluntary ignoring of meaning and concentration on fact, will always have the same plausibility. There will always be evidence, and every month fresh evidence, to show that religion is only psychological, justice only self-protection, politics only economics, love only lust, and thought itself only cerebral biochemistry.

  ‘Transposition’, The Weight of Glory

  Determinism does not deny the existence of human behaviour. It rejects as an illusion our spontaneous conviction that our behaviour has its ultimate origin in ourselves. What I call ‘my act’ is the conduit-pipe through which the torrent of the universal process passes, and was bound to pass, at a particular time and place. The distinction between what we call the ‘voluntary’ and the ‘involuntary’ movements of our own bodies is not obliterated, but turns out (on this view) to be not exactly the sort of difference we supposed. What I call the ‘involuntary’ movements necessarily—and, if we know enough, predictably—result from mechanical causes outside my body or from pathological or organic processes within it. The ‘voluntary’ ones result from conscious psychological factors which themselves result from unconscious psychological factors dependent on my economic situation, my infantile and prenatal experience, my heredity . . . and so on back to the beginnings of organic life and beyond. I am a conductor, not a source. I never make an original contribution to the world-process. I move with that process not even as a floating log moves with the river but as a particular pint of the water itself moves.

  Letters to Malcolm, ch. 7

  If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents—the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else’s. But if their thoughts—i.e., of Materialism and Astronomy—are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It’s like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milk-jug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.

  ‘Answers to Questions on Christianity’, God in the Dock

  The theory that thought is merely a movement in the brain is, in my opinion, nonsense; for if so, that theory itself would be merely a movement, an event among atoms, which may have speed and direction but of which it would be meaningless to use the words ‘true’ or ‘false’.

  ‘Transposition’, The Weight of Glory

  It is widely believed that scientific thought does put us in touch with reality, whereas moral or metaphysical thought does not. . . . The cycle of scientific thought is from experiment to hypothesis and thence to verification and a new hypothesis. Experiment means sense-experiences specially arranged. Verification involve
s inference. ‘If X existed, then, under conditions Y, we should have the experience Z.’ We then produce the conditions Y and Z appears. We thence infer the existence of X. Now it is clear that the only part of this process which assures us of any reality outside ourselves is precisely the inference ‘If X, then Z’, or conversely ‘Since Z, therefore X’. The other parts of the process, namely hypothesis and experiment, cannot by themselves give us any assurance. The hypothesis is, admittedly, a mental construction—something, as they say, ‘inside our own heads’. And the experiment is a state of our own consciousness. . . . The physical sciences, then, depend on the validity of logic just as much as metaphysics or mathematics. . . . We should therefore abandon the distinction between scientific and non-scientific thought.

  ‘De Futilitate’, Christian Reflections

  Granted that Reason is prior to matter and that the light of that primal Reason illuminates finite minds, I can understand how men should come, by observation and inference, to know a lot about the universe they live in. If, on the other hand, I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, then not only can I not fit in Christianity, but I cannot even fit in science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. . . . The waking world is judged more real because it can thus contain the dreaming world; the dreaming world is judged less real because it cannot contain the waking one. For the same reason I am certain that in passing from the scientific point of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.

  ‘Is Theology Poetry?’, The Weight of Glory

  Mechanism, like all materialist systems, breaks down at the problem of knowledge. If thought is the undesigned and irrelevant product of cerebral motions, what reason have we to trust it? As for emergent evolution, if anyone insists on using the word God to mean ‘whatever the universe happens to be going to do next’, of course we cannot prevent him. But nobody would in fact so use it unless he had a secret belief that what is coming next will be an improvement. Such a belief, besides being unwarranted, presents peculiar difficulties to an emergent evolutionist. If things can improve, this means that there must be some absolute standard of good above and outside the cosmic process to which that process can approximate. There is no sense in talking of ‘becoming better’ if better means simply ‘what we are becoming’—it is like congratulating yourself on reaching your destination and defining destination as ‘the place you have reached’. Mellontolatry, or the worship of the future, is a fuddled religion.

  ‘Evil and God’, God in the Dock

  You cannot go on ‘explaining away’ forever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.

  The Abolition of Man, ch. 3

  In so far as [Psychoanalysis] attempts to heal, i.e., to make better, every treatment involves a value-judgement. This could be avoided if the analyst said, ‘Tell me what sort of a chap you want to be and I’ll see how near I can make you’; but of course he really has his own idea of what goodness and happiness consist in and works to that. And his idea is derived, not from his science (it couldn’t) but from his age, sex, class, culture, religion and heredity, and is just as much in need of criticism as the patient’s.

  Letters (26 March 1940)

  A great many of those who ‘debunk’ traditional or (as they would say) ‘sentimental’ values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process.

  The Abolition of Man, ch. 2

  The Existentialist feels Angst because he thinks that man’s nature (and therefore his relation to all things) has to be created or invented, without guidance, at each moment of decision. Spenser thought that man’s nature was given, discoverable, and discovered; he did not feel Angst. He was often sad: but not, at bottom, worried.

  English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, bk 3, ch. 1

  To the Materialist things like nations, classes, civilisations must be more important than individuals, because the individuals live only seventy odd years each and the group may last for centuries. But to the Christian, individuals are more important, for they live eternally; and races, civilisations and the like, are in comparison the creatures of a day.

  ‘Man or Rabbit?’, God in the Dock

  The Christian and the Materialist hold different beliefs about the universe. They can’t both be right. The one who is wrong will act in a way which simply doesn’t fit the real universe. Consequently, with the best will in the world, he will be helping his fellow creatures to their destruction.

  ‘Man or Rabbit?’, God in the Dock

  The general rule which we have now pretty well established among them is that in all experiences which can make them happier or better only the physical facts are ‘real’ while the spiritual elements are ‘subjective’. . . . Your patient, properly handled, will have no difficulty in regarding his emotion at the sight of human entrails as a revelation of Reality and his emotion at the sight of happy children or fair weather as mere sentiment.

  The Screwtape Letters, ch. 30

  In vain did Ransom try to remember that he had been in ‘space’ and found it Heaven, tingling with a fulness of life for which infinity itself was not one cubic inch too large. All that seemed like a dream. That opposite mode of thought which he had often mocked and called in mockery The Empirical Bogey, came surging into his mind—the great myth of our century with its gases and galaxies, its light years and evolutions, its nightmare perspectives of simple arithmetic in which everything that can possibly hold significance for the mind becomes the mere by-product of essential disorder.

  Perelandra, ch. 13

  Monarchy can easily be ‘debunked’; but watch the faces, mark well the accents, of the debunkers. These are the men whose tap-root in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach—men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

  ‘Equality’, Present Concerns

  The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it ‘annihilates space’. It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given. It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from travelling ten. Of course if a man hates space and wants it to be annihilated, that is another matter. Why not creep into his coffin at once? There is little enough space there.

  Surprised by Joy, ch. 10

  No moonlit night will ever be the same to me again if, as I look up at that pale disc, I must think ‘Yes: up there to the left is the Russian area, and over there to the right is the American bit. And up at the top is the place which is now threatening to produce a crisis.’ The immemorial Moon—the Moon of the myths, the poets, the lovers—will have been taken from us forever. Part of our mind, a huge mass
of our emotional wealth, will have gone. Artemis, Diana, the silver planet belonged in that fashion to all humanity: he who first reaches it steals something from us all.

  ‘The Seeing Eye’, Christian Reflections

  2. MATERIALISM, DETERMINISM, AND OBJECTIVE VALUE

  Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator. In most modern scientists this belief has died: it will be interesting to see how long their confidence in uniformity survives it. Two significant developments have already appeared—the hypothesis of a lawless sub-nature, and the surrender of the claim that science is true. We may be living nearer than we suppose to the end of the Scientific Age.

  Miracles, ch. 13

  Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like, ‘I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2:20 A.M. on January 15th and saw so-and-so’, or, ‘I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such-and-such a temperature and it did so-and-so’. Do not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is. And the more scientific a man is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me that this is the job of science—and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes—something of a different kind—this is not a scientific question. If there is ‘Something Behind’, then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way. The statement that there is any such thing, and the statement that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can make. . . . Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that the questions, ‘Why is there a universe?’ ‘Why does it go on as it does?’ ‘Has it any meaning?’ would remain just as they were?

  Mere Christianity, bk 1, ch. 4

  John was silent for a few minutes. Then he began again: