A poem for all those who, sometimes, fear that it is not just politicians whose lives or careers end in failure, that Reason leads us to the wrong conclusion ‘fifty times for one’ while we spend most of our time lost in ‘error’s fenny bogs & thorny brakes.’
There is always the reassurance that books will bear you up & a reminder that, aeons before the age of rubber rings or plastic water wings or arm bands, bladders were always there to give service as buoyancy aids to the unconfident swimmer.
Was Charles Babbage familiar with the image of Man (or his mind) as a ‘reasoning engine’?
Homo Sapiens
Were I (who to my cost already am
One of those strange, prodigious creatures, man)
A spirit free to choose, for my own share,
What case of flesh & blood I pleased to wear,
I’d be a dog, a monkey, or a bear,
Or anything but that vain animal
Who is so proud of being rational.
The senses are too gross, & he’ll contrive
A sixth, to contradict the other five,
And before certain instinct, will prefer
Reason, which fifty times for one does err;
Reason, an ignis fatuus in the mind,
Which, leaving light of nature, sense, behind,
Pathless & dangerous wandering ways it takes
Through error’s fenny bogs & thorny brakes;
Whilst the misguided follower climbs with pain
Mountains of whimseys, heaped in his own brain;
Stumbling from thought to thought, falls headlong down
Into doubt’s boundless sea, where, like to drown,
Books bear him up awhile, & make him try
To swim with bladders of philosophy;
In hopes still to o’ertake the escaping light,
The vapour dances in his dazzling sight
Till, spent, it leaves him to eternal night,
Then old age & experience, hand in hand,
Lead him to death, & make him understand,
After a search so painful & so long,
That all his life he has been in the wrong.
Huddled in dirt the reasoning engine lies,
Who was so proud, so witty, & so wise.
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