At the moment, I’m working on a production of George Bernard Shaw’s “Farfetched Fables”. Here is an excerpt from the last Fable:
“TEACHER. Order, order! Let us have no more whys. They only set you chasing your own tails, like cats. Let us get to work. I call for questions beginning with how.
MAIDEN 5. How do thoughts come into our heads? I don’t have a lot of thoughts like Number Four here. She is a highbrow; but I was born quite empty headed. Yet I get thoughts that nobody ever suggested to me. Where did they come from?
TEACHER. As to that, there are many theories. Have you none of your own, any of you?
YOUTH 2. My grandfather lectured about the theory of the Disembodied Thoughts. I picked it up from him when I was a kid. Of course the old man is now out-of-date: I don’t take him seriously; but the theory sticks in my head because I’ve never thought of anything better.
YOUTH 1. Our biology professor in the fifth swore by it. But I cannot quite stomach it.
TEACHER. Can you give me a reason for that?
YOUTH 1. Well, I was brought up to consider that we are the vanguard of civilization, the last step in creative evolution. But according to the theory we are only a survival of the sort of mankind that existed in the twentieth century, no better than black beetles compared to the super- men who evolved into the disembodied. I am not a black beetle.
YOUTH 3. Rot! If we were black beetles, the supermen would have tramped on us and killed us, or poisoned us with phosphorus.
YOUTH 1. They may be keeping us for their amusement, as we keep our pets. I told you the universe is a joke. That is my theory.
MAIDEN 5. But where do our thoughts come from? They must be flying about in the air. My father never said “I think.” He always said “It strikes me.” When I was a child I thought that something in the air had hit him.
YOUTH 1 What is the use of talking such utter nonsense? How could people get rid of their bodies?
TEACHER. People actually did get rid of their bodies. They got rid of their tails, of their fur, of their teeth. They acquired thumbs and enlarged their brains. They seem to have done what they liked with their bodies.
YOUTH 2. Anyhow, they had to eat and drink. They couldn’t have done so without stomachs and bowels.
TEACHER. Yes they could: at least so the histories say. They found they could live on air, and that eating and drinking caused diseases of which their bodies died.
YOUTH 2. You believe that!!!
TEACHER. I believe nothing. But there is the same evidence for it as for anything else that happened millions of years before we were born. It is so written and recorded. As I can neither witness the past nor foresee the future I must take such history as there is as part of my framework of thought. Without such a framework I cannot think any more than a carpenter can cut wood without a saw.
YOUTH 2. Now you are getting beyond me, Teacher. I don’t understand.
TEACHER. Do not try to understand. You must be content with such brains as you have until more understanding comes to you. Your question is where our thoughts come from and how they strike us, as Number Five’s father put it. The theory is that the Disembodied Thoughts still exist as Vortexes, and are penetrating our thick skulls in their continual pursuit of knowledge and power, since they need our hands and brains as tools in that pursuit.
MAIDEN 4. Some of our thoughts are damnably mischievous. We slaughter one another and destroy the cities we build. What puts that into our heads? Not the pursuit of knowledge and power.
TEACHER. Yes; for the pursuit of knowledge and power involves the slaughter and destruction of everything that opposes it. The disembodied must inspire the soldier and the hunter as well as the pacifist and philanthropist.
YOUTH 1. But why should anybody oppose it if all thoughts come from well meaning vortexes?
TEACHER. Because even the vortexes have to do their work by trial and error. They have to learn by mistakes as well as by successes. We have to destroy the locust and the hook worm and the Colorado beetle because, if we did not, they would destroy us. We have to execute criminals who have no conscience and are incorrigible. They are old experiments of the Life Force. They were well intentioned and perhaps necessary at the time. But they are no longer either useful or necessary, and must now be exterminated. They cannot be exterminated by disembodied thought. The mongoose must be inspired to kill the cobra, the chemist to distill poisons, the physicist to make nuclear bombs, others to be big game hunters, judges, executioners, and killers of all sorts, often the most amiable of mortals outside their specific functions as destroyers of vermin. The ruthless fox hunter loves dogs: the physicists and chemists adore their children and keep animals as pets.
YOUTH 2. Look here, Teacher. Talk sense. Do these disembodied thoughts die when their number is up, as we do? If not, there can hardly be room for them in the universe after all these millions of centuries.
MAIDEN 5. Yes: that is what I want to know. How old is the world?
TEACHER. We do not know. We lost count in the dark ages that followed the twentieth century. There are traces of many civilizations that followed; and we may yet discover traces of many more. Some of them were atavistic.
MAIDEN 5. At a what?
TEACHER. Atavistic. Not an advance on the civilization before it, but a throw-back to an earlier one. Like those children of ours who cannot get beyond the First Form, and grow up to be idiots or savages. We kill them. But we are ourselves a throw-back to the twentieth century, and may be killed as idiots and savages if we meet a later and higher civilization.
YOUTH 1. I don’t believe it. We are the highest form of life and the most advanced civilization yet evolved.
YOUTH 2. Same here. Who can believe this fairy tale about disembodied thoughts? There is not a scrap of evidence for it. Nobody can believe it.
MAIDEN 4. Steady, Number Two: steady. Lots of us can believe it and do believe it. Our schoolfellows who have never got beyond the third or fourth form believe in what they call the immortality of the soul.
YOUTH 1 [contemptuously] Yes, because they are afraid to die.
TEACHER. That makes no difference. What is an Immortal soul but a disembodied thought?”
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