Iain Pears - An Instance of the Fingerpost

Self-interest there was, as I shall reveal; in fact I later wondered at the mystery of Providence which led me to him, for my distress led me to my salvation, and turned the curse under which I labored into the agent of my success. It is remarkable how the Lord can take evil and turn it into good, can use a creature like Blundy to reveal a hidden purpose quite the opposite to the intended hurt. In such things, I believe, are the true miracles of the world, now that the age of prodigies is past.

For Grove was teaching me again, in the best disputational fashion, and I never had a better lesson. Had my real tutors been so skilled, I might even have taken to my legal studies with more of a will, for in his hands I understood, if only fleetingly, the heady brew that argument can be; in the past he had confined his instruction to fact, and drilled us ceaselessly in the rules of grammar and suchlike. Now that I was a man and entered into that age when rational thought is possible (a sublime state, given to man alone, and denied by God’s will to children, animals and women), he treated me as such in matter of education. Wisely, he used the dialectic of the rhetor to examine the argument; he ignored the facts, which were too tender in my mind, and concentrated on my presentation to make me think anew.

He pointed out (his arguments were too close for me to remember the precise stages of his reasoning, so I present here only an outline of what he said) that I had presented an argumentum in tres partes; formally correct, he said, but lacking the necessary resolution and thus incomplete in evolution and hence in logic. (As I write this, I realize I must have paid more attention to my lessons than I knew, for the nomenclature of the scholar comes back to me surprisingly easily.) Thus the primum partum was my father’s disgrace. The secundum was my penury through being disinherited. The tertium was the curse I had fallen under. The task of the logician, he pointed out, was to resolve the problem, and unify the parts into a single proposal, which could then be advanced and subjected to examination.

So, he said, consider afresh. Take the first and the second parts of your argument. What are the common threads which link them together?

“There is my father,” I said. “Who is accused and who lost his land.”

Grove nodded, pleased that I could remember the basics of logic, at least, and was prepared to lay out the elements in the correct fashion.

‘ “There is myself, who suffers as a son. There is Sir William Compton, who was executor of the estate and comrade of my father in the Sealed Knot. That is all I can think of at present.”

Grove inclined his head. “Good enough,” he said. “But you must take it further, for you maintained that without the accusation, the first part, your land would not have been lost, the second part. Is that not the case?”

“Yes.”

“Now, was this an indirect, or a direct causation?”

“I don’t know that I understand.”

“You posit a minor accident; that the second was an indirect consequence of the first, without examining the possibility that perhaps the link was the inverse. You cannot argue, of course, that the loss of your land caused your father’s disgrace, for that would be temporally impossible and thus absurd. But you might perhaps argue that the prospect of losing the land led to the accusation, and that in turn led to the actual loss; the idea of alienation generated the reality through the medium of accusation.”

I stared at him in bewilderment as the words hit home, for he had spoken the suspicion that had nagged at me ever since that night I spent in my uncle’s office. Could this possibly be the case? Could the accusation that destroyed my father have been prompted by nothing more than greed?

“Are you saying… ?”

“I am not saying anything at all,” Dr. Grove said. “Except to suggest that you think through your arguments with greater care.”

“You are deceiving me,” I said. “Because you know something of this matter which I do not. You would not direct me to think in this direction if you had not good reason to do so. I know you well, doctor. And your way of argument would also suggest that I must consider the other obvious form of accident.”

“Which is?”

“Which is that the link connecting the two states of accusation and alienation is the fact that my father was indeed guilty.”

Grove beamed. “Excellent, young man. I am pleased with you indeed; you are thinking with the detachment of the true logician. Mow, can you see any other? We may, I think, leave out random misfortune, which is the argument of the atheist.”

I thought long and hard, as I was pleased that I had pleased, and wished to win more praise; I had rarely done so in lessons and I found it a strange and warming experience.

“No,” I said eventually. “Those are the two main categories which must be considered. Everything else must be a sub-class of the two alternative propositions.” I paused for a moment. “I do not wish to diminish this conversation, but even the best of arguments requires some matter of fact to give it ballast. And I have no doubt that at some stage you will indicate that in crucial areas this is lacking.”

“You are beginning to talk like a lawyer, sir,” Grove said. “Not like a philosopher.”

“This is surely a question where law is applicable. Logic can only advance you so far. There must be some way of distinguishing between the two propositions, which are either that my father is guilty or that he is not. And that cannot be accomplished by metaphysics alone. So tell me. You know something of the circumstances.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “There I must disabuse you entirely. I only met your father the once, and while I found him a handsome, robust man I can hardly offer any judgment or even assessment of him. And I heard of his disgrace only incidentally when I overheard—quite by chance—Sir William telling his wife that he felt obliged to tell what he knew.”

“What?” I said, lurching forward in my seat with such violence that I believe I frightened the man. “You heard what?”

Grove queried me with an air of genuine bafflement. “But you must know this, surely?” he said. “That Sir William was the person who made public the accusations? You were in the house at the time. Surely you heard something of what was happening?”

“Not a word. When was this?”

He shook his head. “Early in 1660, I believe. I cannot really remember with any exactness.”

“What happened?”

“I was in the library, searching out a volume, for Sir William gave me free run of his books for as long as I was there. It is not the best of libraries, but it was a small oasis in the desert for me, and I drank there frequently. You remember the room, no doubt; it faces east for the most part, but turns a corner toward the end, and off there is the office in which Sir William conducted all the domestic business of the estate. I never disturbed him in it, because he always got into a fearsome temper when he had anything to do with money; it brought home his reduced state too painfully. Everyone knew to steer clear of him for many hours afterward.

“On this occasion his wife did not, and that is why I know to tell you this. I saw little, and did not hear all, but through a crack in the door as it stood ajar, I saw that good lady on her knees before her husband, imploring him to think carefully about what he was to do.

“My mind is decided,” he said, not unkindly, even though he was unused to having his actions queried. “My trust has been betrayed, and my life sold. That a man could act in such a way is difficult to imagine, that a friend could do so intolerable. It cannot go unpunished.”

“But are you sure?” my lady asked him. “To level such an accusation against a man like Sir James, who has been your friend twenty years, and whose son you have brought up almost as your own, cannot be done in error. And you must bear in mind that he will—he must—challenge you. And such a contest you would lose.”