How My Inquiry Began
An extract from The Morgan Papers
My interest in human conduct arose not in books, but from an event in the village of my childhood.
A boy of my own age was accused of taking money from the chapel collection. No proof was ever established, yet within a remarkably short time suspicion acquired the force of certainty. Each conversation appeared to strengthen the next until the question of whether the accusation was true simply ceased to be asked.
The adults involved were not cruel people. Most were decent by any ordinary measure. Yet decency alone proved insufficient protection against error.
The boy and his family left the village. Some months later I learned that he had been found drowned.
I was too young to understand what had happened, and I possess no greater certainty now concerning the circumstances of his death than I did then. What remained with me was a question I could not yet properly express: how does something merely believed acquire the authority of something known?
Years later, I came to recognise a process that had been invisible to me as a child. A possibility becomes a suspicion. Suspicion becomes belief. Belief, repeated and shared, gradually acquires the authority of fact.
Human beings are not persuaded by evidence alone. We are influenced by confidence, reputation, prejudice, repetition and, perhaps most powerfully, the reassurance of discovering that others believe as we do. Once sufficient agreement has been reached, the question of whether the belief itself is justified may cease to be asked.
That observation has remained with me ever since.
My education gave me the means to examine questions that had first arisen through experience. At Christ College, Brecon, I encountered the classical disciplines of language, logic and moral argument, and began to understand that apparently simple questions of conduct became considerably less simple when motive and intention were taken into account.
The study of languages taught me something else. Words that appear equivalent may carry different assumptions, and meaning rarely survives translation entirely unchanged. I came to suspect that the same was true of people. What a man says and what another understands him to have said are not necessarily the same thing.
Sport provided a rather different education. Competition has an unusual capacity to expose qualities that remain concealed under more comfortable circumstances. Patience, vanity, generosity, resentment, courage and fear may all become visible when something is at stake. I did not think of this as the study of conduct at the time, but I came gradually to appreciate that human beings reveal themselves as readily through action as through words.
* * *
At Oxford, the questions of childhood acquired philosophical form. I went up to read Literae Humaniores, and encountered thinkers who had approached questions of truth, justice, responsibility, virtue and character from very different directions. The more I read, however, the less persuaded I became that any single system could account for the variety of human behaviour. People appeared more complicated than the theories intended to explain them.
Henry Sidgwick particularly impressed me, not because he offered certainty, but because he demonstrated that intellectual honesty required difficult questions to be pursued wherever they might lead. Sincerity, I began to understand, could never by itself guarantee truth. A man might believe himself entirely sincere and nevertheless be mistaken, not only about the world, but about himself.
During those years I also came under the influence of Dr Elias Markham, a scholar of uncommon intellect and generosity. Markham seldom answered a question directly. Instead, he examined the assumptions concealed within it. From him I learned that the quality of an inquiry depends less upon the answers obtained than upon the questions one is prepared to ask.
It was through Markham that I encountered a number of writers whose influence extended well beyond my years at Oxford. William Blake proved particularly persistent. I found much of his work perplexing, yet returned to it repeatedly. What interested me was his refusal to divide human nature into simple categories. Opposing impulses might coexist within the same individual; contradiction was not necessarily evidence of confusion, but part of human nature itself.
This troubled the simpler moral assumptions of my childhood. Increasingly, I found myself wondering whether an action could ever be adequately explained by a single motive. Men might love and resent the same person, desire an outcome and fear its consequences, believe themselves honourable while acting from motives they would be reluctant to acknowledge.
Contradiction, rather than consistency, began to seem one of the more revealing characteristics of human nature.
After Oxford, I travelled north to Edinburgh to continue my studies…