According to a curious, subtle, now largely forgotten writer: "Any event in this world - any human being for that matter - that seems to wear even the faintest cast or warp of strangeness, is apt to leave a disproportionately sharp impression on one's senses." In contrast, he goes on, "Life's mere ordinary day-to-day - its thoughts, talk, doings - wither and die out of the mind like leaves from a tree. Year after year a similar crop recurs, and that goes too. It is mere debris, it perishes. But these other anomalies survive, even through the cold of age." These lines come at the beginning of a story by Walter de la Mare, published in 1924, which deals with one of these anomalous experiences. During the later decades of his long life - he was born in 1873 and died in 1956 - de la Mare was a familiar feature of the English literary landscape, a poet and anthologist whose poems were learnt by heart by successive generations of schoolchildren and whose books were widely available in public libraries. So why is he so little known today? It may be because his work conveys a sense of the insubstantial quality of everyday things, a point of view that runs counter to the prevailing creed of scientific materialism. At his peak of public recognition, de Le Mare was most celebrated as a writer for children, but in nearly everything he wrote he explored experiences of the uncanny. The story from which I've quoted - which is definitely meant for grownups - communicates this in an especially intense and concentrated way.
John Gray is a political philosopher and author of False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism
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Entitled winter, the story describes a few moments in a churchyard late on a cold January afternoon in which nothing very definite seems to happen. The church wasn't particularly striking. The traveler who tells the tale describes pausing after long hours of walking in "a mere half-acre of gravestones huddling under their tower, in the bare glare of a winter's day". With the sky above a bright blue void, the church stood on a hill surrounded by brilliant fields of newly fallen snow. Nothing moved, and no sound broke the frozen hush. "In surroundings like these, in any vast vacant quiet," the traveller wrote, "the senses play uncommonly queer tricks with their possessor."
Suddenly, after wandering about reading the epitaphs on the graves, the traveller looked up and realizes he wasn't alone. On the outskirts of the graveyard he glimpsed a figure, dressed in rich colours, watching him with a gaze that met his own. The traveller wasn't afraid. What startled him were the arrestingly beautiful, honey-coloured face of the figure that had suddenly appeared - and the look of disbelief in its almost colourless eyes. Looking at him intently, as if the crystalline air of the graveyard was too dense for clear vision, the figure regarded the tired traveller with an expression of astonishment and distaste. The figure asked the traveller the way, and was directed to the gate that led to the human road. At this point the figure recoiled in horror, and then it was gone. Even in the glittering winter twilight, the human world was too dim and murky a place for the mysterious figure to want to stay.
Walter de la Mare
Born in Charlton (now south-east London) in 1873
Began writing while working in the statistics office of Anglo-American Oil, a job he started aged 16
First poetry collection published in 1907 - he turned to writing full-time a year later
Wrote for both adults and children - his anthology of verse for children was awarded the Carnegie Medal in 1947
Died in 1956, ashes interred in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral
De La Mare has been described as a writer of supernatural tales, but what is so satisfying about this story is that it leaves the reader in suspense as to what the traveller has seen. When he encounters the visitor, the traveller realises that "this being, in human likeness, was not of my kind, nor of my reality". The figure was "no illusion of the senses". Rather, what the traveller has experienced leaves him with the suspicion the world that's normally given us through the senses may itself be an illusion. No assurances are given him regarding any other world. Graham Greene - a long-standing admirer and a religious believer - wrote that churches feature in de La Mare's stories as stone memorials of a dead religion. The traveller's epiphany occurs in "a mere half-acre of gravestones", not on sacred ground. The emotion the experience leaves in him is certainly not one of joyous uplift. Instead he feels diminished and bereft, seeing himself - as the visitor may have seen him - as little more than a shadow.
De la Mare has no interest in explaining experiences of the kind his traveller describes. If anything he is suggesting that that they may be finally inexplicable. Of course this goes against the view of things that tells us the universe operates according to fixed and discoverable laws. But it may be worth asking whether this view is as solid as it seems to be. Materialism - the philosophy, not the perennial human tendency to pursue and accumulate material things - sees the universe as a physical system. Everything that exists in it must be some sort of matter, or something that emerges from matter. In a fully scientific view of the world, only material things are real. Everything else is just a phantom. Materialists would see the ghost in Hamlet as a figment of the imagination
In this view, science is a project of exorcism, which aims to rid the mind of anything that can't be understood in terms of physical laws. But perhaps it's the dogma of materialism that should be exorcised from our minds. Science is a method of inquiry, whose results can't be known in advance. If scientific inquiry is the most powerful tool for increasing human knowledge, it's because science is continuously changing our view of the world. The prevailing creed of scientific materialism is actually a contradiction, for science isn't a fixed view of things, still less a dogmatic faith.
The world is a far stranger place than humans can possibly imagine� The belief that the world is composed only of physical things operating according to universal laws is metaphysical speculation, not a falsifiable theory. We know that physical things aren't as substantial as they seem to us to be. The idea of matter has shifted and changed. The black holes and quantum leaps studied by scientists today would be inconceivable to the materialist philosophers of the ancient world, with their simple notions of indivisible atoms. Nor can the belief that we live in a universe that's everywhere ruled by the same laws be taken for granted. Perhaps, as cosmologists in ancient India and Renaissance Europe believed and some physicists think today, there isn't only one universe but many, each governed by a different set of laws. Or maybe the world is at bottom chaotic, with what we think are natural laws being only regularities, patterns that appear for a while and then melt away.
The perception we have that the world is governed by fixed laws may have come about because ours is one of the few corners of the universe where conditions are stable enough to have produced observers such as ourselves. Black holes suck in matter
The distinction between what's natural and what's not isn't as straightforward as it seems. The very idea of a law-governed cosmos may be a relic of monotheism, with natural laws serving the role that divine commands once did. Many religions don't distinguish between nature and the supernatural. For animists and polytheists, the natural world is full of spirits. Even if there are such things as laws of nature, there's no reason to think they must be accessible to the human mind. What science suggests is the opposite. If our minds evolved by natural selection as Darwin proposed, shaped more by a struggle for survival than by any search for truth, it's highly unlikely that we'll ever fully understand the universe. Almost certainly the world is a far stranger place than humans can possibly imagine. De la Mare was much too refined and penetrating a mind to imagine that ultimate questions can ever be settled. Instead, he unsettled the reader's view of things while leaving these questions open. His stories suggest that the everyday world contains gaps, anomalies and singularities, which may - or may not - point to a larger reality. The uncanniness of these tales comes from the impression they leave in the reader that our everyday existence is insubstantial and perhaps chimerical. Materialism asserts that anything apart from physical phenomena is a figment of the imagination - a kind of apparition, which must be exorcised from the mind. It's a very simple-minded philosophy. For de la Mare's traveller, it's not the strange visitor he encounters that's the ghost. It's the ordinary world that surrounds every one of us. Send your comments using the form below and we'll publish a selection There are two major problems in the argument here: 1. Science is not a set of beliefs, it is a process. It is a disciplined way of trying to get at the truth and reality, using evidence and reason as the twin pillars of that process. Anything else is just speculation. (And incidentally, our view of matter has changed thanks to the scientific process itself). 2. To suggest that there can be immaterial things would require either some real basis for that view (ie some form of evidence and reason), or else a re-definition of what counts as "material" (are black holes material? They certainly exist, but are they composed of matter? It's semantics, really). Either way, we are still left with a real universe where supernatural events or beings strangely refuse to really show themselves. By all means we should keep an open mind on what the nature of material things is; but there really is no
reason to suppose that the view that some elements of external reality are somehow beyond scientific discovery. Douglas Green, Glasgow, Scotland If there is one thing I would exorcise from people's minds, it is that science is about materialism. By the late 1800s, mathematicians treated time and space as the same. After Rutherford had split the atom and Einstein had written his famous equation, it was game over. Matter was merely a way of organizing energy, it did not exist as a thing in its own right at all. Ok, people believed in particles, objects of virtually no size, interacting with fields. This meant that the table in front of you was not "solid", but contained some nearly insignificant volume of these "particles" with the fields that had no substance providing all the experience of substance you had. By the late 20th century, even that was being questioned, with a number of physicists postulating that only mathematics and the information contained therein are real, that everything else is merely a by product. Even without that, superstring theory leaves us with multiple universes and "things" that can cross between them (including gravity), at least two different types of time, and 11-dimensional objects that protrude as multiple points or particles into our universe (electrons being one example). There may be no room for ghosts or strange roads between the spaces (although, since information can never be lost, it may be possible to manufacture an actual ghost), but there is certainly room for a lot of mysterious things, tales of the unexplained and the wanderings of other somethings beyond our understanding between the universes out there. Will science every explain everything? It cannot. One of the most fundamental laws is that insofar as the model of the universe is correct, it MUST be incomplete, and insofar as it is complete, it MUST not be provably correct. Nothing scientists can do can change that. Jonathan Day, Portland, Oregon, USA Perhaps scientific materialism is some people's default because it offers a place to begin from. As religion before it, materialism offers a structural framework, a model. The trick is to adopt a model that is flexible enough to allow for absorbing and incorporating new information while not being so amorphous it has no shape at all. Dogma, scientific or religious, is usually the enemy of reasonable discourse. Tim McEown, Ottawa Canada What an intriguing article. John Gray's assertions not only champion the sometimes overlooked talents of a very fine English poet but also remind us that our view of the world, by the very nature of our existence, is a particularly subjective one. Whether it is the narrow wavelength of light that we call vision or the frequency of sound that our brains choose to interpret, our place in any great scheme of things is a small one and our point of view just that. Surely an uncertain world and our ability or otherwise to deal with it is what makes us
human. Without these ambiguities there would have been no need for Walter de la Mare, and then the world really would have been a poorer place. Simon Cornish, UK What wouldn't I give to go back 70yrs or so and tell Walter de la Mare what the recent scientific theories are about the nature of matter and energy. I think he would be fascinated but not perhaps surprised by string theory, where the heart of matter and energy is theorised as loops of vibrational interactions between seven dimensions beyond the four that we can cope with. He might have been naturally in tune with quantum particles which are not so much particles as places of the probability of a particle; where cause and effect are dead and only probability holds sway and single indivisible photons can pass through two holes at once. His take on all of this would be incomparable. And if I could I would take that other visionary Fritjof Capra (author - The Dao of Physics) with me. Science - that small piece of philosophical discipline that allows us to investigate cause and effect in the natural world, and nothing more, is increasingly chipping away at its own foundation stone of materialism. Rik Middleton, Coventry UK Materialism has a stranglehold on much of our our scientific thinking , despite sub quantum physics; the universe as holograph; evidence that the mind functions in a non local way, etc etc. Writers, film makers, musicians and artists can move beyond the orthodoxy of materialism and enable us to move beyond this limiting theory, that surely will have its day and be replaced by a richer and more complex understanding of the 'real'. Kerry Holmes, Southwold, Suffolk I really enjoy discovering literature from different times and places, it's how I mainly perceive humanity I suppose. De La Mare is one of my favourite writers for exactly the reasons you outline here. While I admire Ezra Pound and the extent of his influence on modern writing (De La Mare despised him) De La Mare's work is closer to the soul. Which is slightly odd as I'm not particularly religious. And what you have said about materialism here cuts to the core of me but to get on in the world (I'm a software developer) I have to appear and be logical and rational. Occasionally I escape by writing bad poetry and short stories and wallow in the non-material for my own amusement but it changes my whole perspective. And pretty soon I'll have a software project that drags me away into modern reality. What you say rings so true from my own experience of both sides of the fence. Some might say this is an effect of age and increasing uncertainty, I am older and more uncertain now than I have ever been. But what you express here I have felt for as long as I remember having first read ghost stories. Do I believe in ghosts? Certainly not most accounts I've read and heard, but I will never know enough to answer that question definitively. However I am a firm
believer in the unexpected:) Sorry all that was really to say that was a most excellent article and I firmly agree with what you are saying. Mark Buchanan, Edmonton London It is rather disingenuous of Mr Gray to talk about the philosophy of materialism, which is as he says, and the scientific method, which is a way of finding out the truth through testing, as though it were the same thing. If the scientific method is an exorcist, it is exorcising not 'anything that can't be understood using physical laws', but rather, any alternate explanations for things that "can" be understood using physical laws. So if we can explain why people see ghosts even when there are no ghosts there, we stop believing in ghosts, in the same way that we don't believe that our reflections are our twins hiding behind mirrors. It is philosophy, surely, which we need to let go of: belief systems created in the minds of dreamers (which is fine) but which are not actually tested in the real world - whether they are philosophies that believe in ghosts or not. Stop believing, and start finding out, Mr Gray! That is the beauty of science. Tony Maggs, London, UK The concept of materialism doesn't exist from a scientific viewpoint. Science is about keeping an open mind and reaching conclusions based on evidence. To date, none of that evidence points to anything outside of the material world. John Gray is wrong to believe that this idea of scientific materialism is a valid one. Gary Jobsey, Watford Thank you for a refreshing change from the usual materialistic commentary so common today. A sensible voice arguing against the extremely reductionist philosophy of materialism. If this piece helps materialists move towards a more humble, open-minded world-view, you have done a great service to the search for truth. A Laughton, Gravesend, UK I feel John Gray is selling science a little short here. Its pursuit is of course limited to perceptual phenomena and indeed we can't enquire scientifically into anything that cannot be made perceivable to us. But apparitions are perceptual phenomena, by definition, and should be within the scope of science. Surely the lack of an accepted 'theory of ghosts' just reflects a general scientific opinion that they are best treated as a psychological manifestation rather than as an externally real thing, given our current state of knowledge? Chris, Bielefeld, Germany As someone with a college degree in biology, I can appreciate the scientific method but in its search for truth any event not repeatable and verifiable is thrown out. I've had a few experiences of an "impossible" nature but if I were to describe them they'd be dismissed as unreliable, perhaps self-delusion or an effort to deceive others. Provable? Definitely not. Real? Absolutely!
Mara Grey, US