However the price you pay, if my theory of consciousness is correct, is that your outlook gets progressively narrower; you get locked not into a single frame of mind, but into a single family of frames of mind. You cease to have the adaptability which evolution seems to have, or which any God must undoubtedly have, or which is essential in an army commander. General Rawlinson, who was the army commander both at the Battle of the Somme, when things went badly wrong, and also at the titanic tank battle at Amiens, which brought Germany to her knees, is reported to have been in the habit of saying, “What sort of a war are we going to have today?” In other words, every day might bring in a different sort; and at Amiens he certainly brought a new form of warfare to the Germans. Similarly in Court, I was always prepared to improvise and develop new skills. This narrowing of outlook may not matter; you may get to the top of the greasy pole with only a limited imagination. It may only be when you have to accept, in advanced old age, that you are staring death in the face, that you find time to regret your limited imagination; because you will not have the faintest idea what to do about it. Narrowing your view of life down to success does have its drawbacks.
It is at this stage that my Theory of Consciousness comes into the picture. The assumptions you make at the threshold of life, in your early 30s, underlie and probably soon unconsciously underlie your conduct from then on. The pressure of life probably prevents any fundamental reassessment, until retirement. And so these unspoken and probably unconscious assumptions mould all your thoughts and actions from then on. There is nothing wrong with this. If you are to achieve anything in life of significance, the pattern of your career must be set in early manhood, when with a fair amount of experience behind you, you are on the threshold of your career. But it might be objected that if there is any truth in my symbolism that every attitude of mind has its own logic, it reduces life to a shambles, because we all believe whatever we want to believe? And certainly it is quite easy to get into the attitude of St. Thomas Aquinas, of assuming that God exists and then proving that he does exist. But as Sir Edmund Whittaker says in his excellent book “Space and Spirit”, these are only persuasive proofs, not rigorous proofs; and probably St. Thomas was fully aware of this. However it is equally easy for the biological evolutionist to assume that God does not exist, and then prove, to his own satisfaction if to no-one else’s, that God does not exist. But again this is only persuasive proof, because he has forgotten that Complexity changes the Rules, and has indulged in the wildest induction in thinking that the Rules of primitive beginnings apply to situations of near-infinite complexity. He should remember that David Hume proved conclusively that induction is logically indefensible; and is legitimate only when common-sense says it is legitimate.