FOR US THE LIVING BY ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

“Of course not.”

“Why not?”

“Why, the mathematical formulas under which it was designed don’t apply to the conditions under which the gun is fired. The more carefully you aimed the more certain you would be of missing.”

“Does that suggest anything to you, Perry?”

“No, not offhand.”

“You remember those words you didn’t define—Weren’t those words the names for things by which a man guides his life?—Honor, love, truth, justice, duty, and so forth?”

A look of dawning comprehension came into his face. “Yes, yes, I think so.”

“Aren’t these things just as powerful to move a man as the hunger of the belly or the stirring of the loins. ”

“Yes, yes indeed. More powerful.”

“Then they aren’t meaningless. But like that gunsight, unless the meaning you attribute to them bears a correct relationship to the world in which you act, you cannot possibly use them as guides to go where you wish to go. Yet without these guides, a man himself is as meaningless as a gun that can’t be aimed.”

“You make it sound very plausible, yet a man is not a shell in a gun and truth and honor are not gunsights.”

“No, they aren’t. Let us drop the analogy before it leads us into absurdities. Nevertheless I think you see that what I said is true, quite independently of the analogy. Men are moved to act by very complicated motivations tagged duty, love, sin, and so forth. You yourself are moved by them and yet you are unable to define what you mean by these terms. You have accepted these concepts more or less unconsciously yet you know so little about them that you cannot possibly know whether they lead where you want to go, or to disaster. If you attempted to pilot a plane with as little knowledge of the controls, you would be sure to wreck it. You are here because you did such faulty piloting of your own life, and smashed another person in the chin in the process.”

“Granting that what you say is true—and I don’t concede yet that I was wrong to hit that fellow—how do you discover proper meanings for these words that will enable me to conduct myself properly by them?”

“How did you discover how to design gunsights that would enable you to hit the mark?”

“Why the theory of gravitation makes it a mathematical necessity.”

“Are you sure? I seem to remember that the theory of gravitation was turned upside down and inside out in your lifetime. Did that cause all the gunsights to be junked?”

He slapped his thigh. “By God, you’re right. Exterior ballistics evolved by purely empirical means, trial and error. Whenever we got enough data to analyze we invented formulas to fit. We never tried to make the practice fit the theory. When the theory didn’t fit, we junked it and made up a new one. But it worked. We built machines in that way that were marvels of accurate prediction,” he said and thought, then his face clouded. “But how can you apply that technique to the problems of living?”

“Well, Perry, so far as I know there are just two ways of working out a practical theory of human relations that will enable us all to live happily together. One is the hard way of trying to work out empirical principles from what we know of the real world. The other is by divine revelation. I won’t say that the second way is impossible, but we moderns have grown to distrust it. Our conclusions in 2086 from the first method are embodied in the current code of customs. He who complies with that code will live with reasonably little conflict in 2086 whether he believes that the code is a list of final truths or simply rough generalizations. The code embodies our 2086 meanings for these troublesome words that you could not define. You have other meanings, unspoken, and in my opinion your meanings are both inaccurate and dangerous, for I believe that if you were able to define your code in spoken objective words you would find that your code did not correspond to the real world around you.”