soldier?

SPIRITUALISM.

I Have received a letter from a gentleman who is very indignant at what
he considers my flippancy in disregarding or degrading Spiritualism. I
thought I was defending Spiritualism; but I am rather used to being
accused of mocking the thing that I set out to justify. My fate in most
controversies is rather pathetic. It is an almost invariable rule that
the man with whom I don't agree thinks I am making a fool of myself, and
the man with whom I do agree thinks I am making a fool of him. There
seems to be some sort of idea that you are not treating a subject
properly if you eulogise it with fantastic terms or defend it by
grotesque examples. Yet a truth is equally solemn whatever figure or
example its exponent adopts. It is an equally awful truth that four and
four make eight, whether you reckon the thing out in eight onions or
eight angels, or eight bricks or eight bishops, or eight minor poets or
eight pigs. Similarly, if it be true that God made all things, that
grave fact can be asserted by pointing at a star or by waving an
umbrella. But the case is stronger than this. There is a distinct
philosophical advantage in using grotesque terms in a serious
discussion.

I think seriously, on the whole, that the more serious is the discussion
the more grotesque should be the terms. For this, as I say, there is an
evident reason. For a subject is really solemn and important in so far
as it applies to the whole cosmos, or to some great spheres and cycles
of experience at least. So far as a thing is universal it is serious.
And so far as a thing is universal it is full of comic things. If you
take a small thing, it may be entirely serious: Napoleon, for instance,
was a small thing, and he was serious: the same applies to microbes. If
you isolate a thing, you may get the pure essence of gravity. But if you
take a large thing (such as the Solar System) it _must_ be comic, at
least in parts. The germs are serious, because they kill you. But the
stars are funny, because they give birth to life, and life gives birth
to fun. If you have, let us say, a theory about man, and if you can only
prove it by talking about Plato and George Washington, your theory may
be a quite frivolous thing. But if you can prove it by talking about the
butler or the postman, then it is serious, because it is universal. So
far from it being irreverent to use silly metaphors on serious
questions, it is one's duty to use silly