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THE WILL TO DOUBT.

INTRODUCTION.

Without undue sensationalism it may be said that this is an age of doubt. Wherever one looks in journeying through the different departments of life one sees doubt. And one sees, too, some of the blight which doubt produces, although the blight is by no means all that one sees. There is heat everywhere in the physical world, but not necessarily only arson or even destructive fire. Morals, however, social life, industry, politics, religion, have suffered somewhat--and many would insist very seriously--from the prevailing doubt. Moreover, if the outward view shows doubt everywhere, the inward view is at least not more reassuring. Who can examine his own consciousness without finding doubt at work there? We would often hide it from others, not to say from ourselves, but it is there, and we all know it to be there. Other times may also have been times of doubt, but our day, as the time to which we certainly owe our first and chief duty, is very conspicuously and very seriously a time of doubt.

Now there are some, and they are many, who would decry the discussion of such a thing as doubt, for they see only danger ahead. Doubt they compare with death or disease, and to dwell upon any of these is idle, unnatural, morbid. Why not let such things alone, and look only to what is pleasant, to what is good and true and beautiful? Then, too, doubt, the confession of doubt, is the royal entrance to philosophy and the risk of an entanglement with philosophy, which seems to them the source of much that is harmful, the essence of all that is impractical, is altogether too great. Doubt for them is even less to be played with than fire, with which already it has been compared here. Again, as others in matters political and industrial, so they in matters intellectual and spiritual resent anything that appears likely in any way to disturb the standing credit of the country. To doubt is just to join the opposition, and the opposition is made up of heretics and agents generally of mere destruction. To treat doubt as real and positively significant, as having any true worth in human experience, as being even a proper object of will, is to stop permanently, not the wheels of commerce and industry, but the wheels of the present life in all its phases. In a word, perhaps one of the words of the hour, Christian Science has not wished to be more inhospitable to the reality of disease than have these believers to the reality and usefulness of doubt.

Yet all who feel in this way are short-sighted. Their contentions, like those of their cousins, perhaps their country cousins, the Christian Scientists, may have worth for being corrective, but at very best they are only one-sided. In a fable, never in real life, a man might get the smell of burning wood in his house and refuse to recognize the danger because of the inevitable delay to his business which the alarm of fire would involve; but doubt is not less real nor less dangerous, nor even less capable, when under control, of useful applications. Any danger, too, squarely faced is at least half met. Why, then, be so impracticable, so like characters in fables, as to overlook or turn one's back upon the doubt of the day, refusing it a place and a part in real life? The negative things of life can be so only relatively. Death itself cannot possibly be absolute, and doubt, not unlike death, indeed perhaps only one of death's messengers, must be even a gift, or an agent, of the gods. Some things, dangerous when hidden, are wonderfully serviceable, when recognized and controlled. Sometimes men really have entertained angels unawares.

And so throughout these chapters, although some may think me and those who follow me morbid, and although we may have to enter the dangerous parlour of philosophy, the doubt of our time is to be squarely and fairly faced. In all candour, we are from the start to be confessed parties to it, hiding nothing intentionally, and at the same time trying always to give nothing undue emphasis. The doubt that all seem to know, that many really feel without perhaps clearly confessing, and that some confess or even actually boast, we shall face and examine closely, trying as we can to find its true meaning and real worth. In short, the confession of doubt, of our doubt, and the fruits of confession are the burden of these chapters.

THE CONFESSION OF DOUBT.

Our confession must, of course, be thorough-going, and can be made so only through a complete statement of every possible reason that experience affords for the attitude of doubt. To the end, therefore, of such a statement we shall consider in this chapter certain general and easily recognized facts about doubt itself, while in chapters that follow we shall continue the confession by examining, first, our customary or "common-sense" view of things, and then the view of science, and having brought together in each case numerous incongruities, or contradictions, which ordinarily are at best only casually noticed or timorously overlooked, we shall find ourselves facing in a peculiarly telling way, not only certain strong reasons for doubt, but also some of the real issues that doubt raises. As no issue, moreover, can be more central or crucial than the meaning of the contradictions found to pervade our views of things, before completing our confession we shall allow ourselves some reflections, that should prove useful to us in the end, upon the possible worth of contradiction in human experience; for even to casual thinking contradiction, although good ground for scepticism, suggests some positive advantage and opportunity; the advantage of breadth, for example, of freedom from special form, or the opportunity of personal spontaneity and initiative as against the restraints of formal consistency, of class, and of institution; and if these things, among others, can be associated with our case for doubt, our reflections will certainly not have been in vain. Then we shall close our confession by seeking the companionhip of a great doubter of modern times, and by learning what we can from him of doubt itself and of the doubter's natural world. And finally, as a result of all our own efforts, supplemented by his help, we shall be able to reap some of the fruits for life and thought that a confession so fully made may fairly claim.

From start to finish, moreover, of this study of doubt we have to remember that there can be no important difference between what is possible and what is real. Thus anything whatsoever that can possibly be doubted is really doubtful. Also, if anybody is amazed to hear mention of facts about doubt, as if doubt should not somehow submit to its own nostrum, let him merely reflect that, strangely enough, nothing is quite so indubitable as doubt, nothing so convincing as the reasons for doubt. Let me not be too subtle, but to doubt doubt is only to affirm it, and somehow--whether for good or ill need not now be said--all the negative things of life possess a peculiar certainty, and are all most easily proved. A great Frenchman once put the case quite plainly when he said, after canvassing very carefully the whole field of his consciousness, that his doubts were the only things there, the only things he could be quite certain about, and these were so very real that they left him absolutely nothing but belief in himself, in his all-doubting and ever-doubting self, to rest upon. His was surely a sweeping confession, and his residuum of belief may not at first sight seem very promising or very substantial, but quickly, I think, we shall find ourselves in agreement with him, at least as to the reality and the wide scope of our doubting, and it is also a possibility well worth foreseeing that we may even find his belief in the reality of an ever-doubting and all-doubting self a rock for our own saving.

Our life is ever cherishing what we are pleased to call its verities, some in religion and morals, some in politics, some in mathematics and science, some in the more general relations to nature, but what elusive things these verities are! How shallow, or how hollow all of them are, or at one time or another may become. To take a rather minute case, such as it is always the philosopher's license to make use of, a case that is, however, quite typical in experience; here is a word--any word you like--that has been spoken and written by you for years. Always before it has been spelt correctly and clearly understood, but to-day how unreal it seems. Are those the right letters, and are they correctly placed? Is that the true meaning? What has happened, too, to give rise to these unusual questions? Well, who can say? And who has not substantially asked every one of them, not merely with reference to some long-familiar word, but also with reference to much larger things in life? Self and society, love and friendship, mind and matter, nature and God have again and again been subjected to essentially the same questioning. The verities of life, all the way from simple words used every day to the great things of our moral and spiritual being, have lost, sometimes slowly, sometimes very suddenly, the reality with which we have supposed them endowed, and although we may still bravely believe we find ourselves crying out passionately for help in our unbelief. There certainly are the verities; not one of them can possibly fall to the ground; yet these very verities are never quite in our experience.

Still the world has its thoroughly confident people. Every one of us has met some of those estimable beings to whom doubt seems wholly foreign, people who assert with trembling voice and sacred vow that their convictions, political perhaps or religious, are unassailable, and that they must hold them to the grave. But, whatever may be said of political convictions, religious convictions have often been regarded as a contradiction of terms. How can one be sure and religious at the same time? Moreover, positive people under any standard are notoriously as fearful as they are dogmatic. Fear is often, if not always, the chief motive of dogmatism, and fear is hardly the most natural companion of genuine confidence. The part which the emotion of fear has had, both in the personal life and in the doctrine of the dogmatic among men, would make a most instructive study.

If, then, dogmatic people are slaves to their fears, while more thoughtful people, as has not needed to be said, seem to get no reward from their self-consciousness but the uncertain reward of their doubts, then only such as live quietly, asserting nothing, depending on nothing, and even assuming nothing, but simply taking what comes, are left to represent genuine belief. Yet how many such are there? A few may seem to approach the ideal, if ideal it be, but the class itself in realization must be said to be a hypothetical one, and few, if any, of us could ever really envy or strive to imitate its supposed manner of living; for, in spite of all the dangers and all the doubts and fears, only the constantly examined life can ever really lure us. Doubt, besides being a general condition of life, seems to be also incident to what gives life worth.

In so many ways psychology is teaching us to-day with renewed emphasis that we are conscious of nothing as it is, and that more or less clearly we all know our shortcoming in this regard; or again, with still more directness and emphasis, that for us there is no such thing as a state of consciousness which does not indicate tension, or unstable equilibrium, that is to say uncertainty, in our activity. Nor have we need of the testimony of science to these facts, since common personal experience is well aware of them. In small things and in great consciousness transforms or refracts. In small things and in great consciousness marks a moment of poise between an impulse to do something, and more or less distinctly recognized conditions or relations that would put restraint upon the doing of it. Even the law of relativity, a psychological law only in its definite formulation, in its idea a simple fact of everyday experience, true for all conscious states from the crudest perceptions of the organs of sense to the most highly developed ideas of critical reflection, by binding as it does all the details of actual or possible experience into a whole, every part of which acts upon the other parts, points very directly to this fact of poise and instability, besides indicating also that knowledge never can be literally or objectively exact, and that at least with some clearness every knower must know it cannot. How can there ever be even a single stable or a single finally accurate element in the consciousness of a creature whose experience, in the first place, can comprise only related, interdependent parts, and whose nature, in the second place, is an essentially mobile and active one? Moreover, as just one other way of suggesting the inexactness and uncertainty of consciousness and the balancing, tentative nature of all conscious life, we always think, and think properly, of conscious creatures as having will, as doing what they do purposely or from design. The new psychology, however, to which we naturally turn, and which again has only formulated what we can recognize from everyday experience, declares that the purpose in conscious activity is not a developed, but an always developing one. Purposive action is action that never finally knows, but is ever finding out its real intent, purpose being identical with the progressively discovered meaning of action. A volitionally, purposively active being is always a seeker as well as a doer. Indeed, any doing would itself be empty, or idle, if it were not a seeking, and so if it were not subject to conditions of some uncertainty. In so many ways, then, through the necessary inexactness of consciousness, through the unstable equilibrium of all conscious activity, through the law and fact of relativity, and through the tentative and provisional nature which must always belong to purpose, we see how doubt must be a phase or condition of all consciousness.

So intimately is change seen nowadays to be related to habit, or indirectly involved in it, that in technical science a new account of habit has been formulated. To cite but one case, Professor Baldwin, says: "Habit expresses the tendency of the organism to secure and retain its vital stimulations," and such an account, placing the interest of habit in so general and so changeable a thing as "vital stimulations," is designed to make habit fundamentally, not merely a tendency to repetition or imitation, but instead a demand for constant adaptation or differentiation. In the doctrines of inheritance, also, always moving necessarily in close sympathy with those of habit, a similar departure has been made. Both habit and inheritance are in fact seen to belong to life in a world of change, or variation, and they have assumed what I will style a protective colouring accordingly. The habit of always being adapted is at least as radical as it is conservative.

With this reform in the account of habit we have not only analogous reforms, as was said, in the account of inheritance, but also in the scientific view of character, custom, law, creed, and the institution generally. Moreover, if in scientific theory we find these new views, in practical life there are at least signs of the same standpoint. What may be called a new conservatism--the most truly conservative thing being taken to be the most thoroughly pertinent or adaptive thing--has for many years been getting possession of us, and is now quite manifest. Our political constitutions are amendable constitutions; our religious rites and doctrines are recognized as only symbols; our theories are only standpoints.

Were all things settled once for all, were all things clearly known and freely executed, or were the consequences of the things to be done always capable of being accurately foretold, there would be no real living, there would be nothing really to do. In such case life in general, or in any of its different expressions, religion, or politics, or art, or science, or industry, or morals, if one may suppose for a moment that any of these differences could ever develop, would consist in a purely passive condition, a mere fixed status; it would be a wholly static thing falsely called life; its movement, if movement there were, could be only the rest or routine of strictly mechanical motion.

To a real life, then, doubt, as an evidence of challenge and resistance, is absolutely necessary, and appreciation of just this necessity is certainly an important part of our present confession, and the confession is important, because it is sure somewhat to brighten what heretofore may have seemed a dark horizon. Confession often changes night to dawn, and here the association of doubt with real living, with a world in which there is always something to do, awakens emotions that such words as relativity, and instability, and change, and even game, have discouraged, or even wholly suppressed. Leasing, perhaps better than any one else, has given expression to these emotions, and has at the same time reflected what in his day had certainly begun to be, and what in our own time very widely and very deeply is, the ideal spirit. Thus, as he wrote:--

"Not the truth that any one may have or may think he has, but the honest effort which has been exerted to compass it, makes what is really worthy in human life. For not in having, but in seeking truth, are those powers developed, in which alone man's ever-increasing perfection consists. Possession makes us inert, lazy, proud. If God held in his right hand the perfect truth, and in his left the ever-restless struggle after truth, and bade me choose, although I were bound to be ever and always in the wrong, I should humbly select the left, saying: 'Father, give; surely the pure truth is for Thee alone.'"

This is a splendid utterance, and it has touched a responsive chord in human nature the civilized world over, not so much, however, for the humility of the choice as for the zeal in a life of seeking and striving, or for the idea that knowledge is itself a dynamic thing, a living, moving function, not a passive possession. The knower is made also a doubter, and the doubter appears as having, in a sense, forgotten, without for a moment betraying, the constant doubting within him. If I may so speak, he has, even while he lacks; such is the condition of his seeking; such is the way in which doubting is necessary to real living. Doubt saves from the possession that makes "inert, lazy, proud," yet does not take away. Doubt makes experience always deep, even putting consciousness in touch with reality, and it makes life for ever living.

Still others may be quoted in the same vein. Socrates made life, particularly mental life, if this may be supposed distinct, essentially active or dynamic when he identified true wisdom with self-conscious ignorance, with a power in one of always finding oneself in error, and in modern times Hegel has done the same thing as effectually, though perhaps not in general so intelligibly, by finding a principle of negativity or contradiction the very mainspring of all consciousness, of all thinking. Known truth is at once imperfect or even false, being necessarily partial, relative, and at best only tentative, very much, let us say, recalling something already remarked, as an established form of life is no longer the real life, but merely the developed means to a revolution, a life that is passing even as soon as it has come.

Of course the social impulse, thus to be associated with doubt, is only one of the phases of its dynamic and life-giving character, for a social life, a life of dependence on what is without, of real relations beyond self, must be a life of real and constant movement. Nothing so much as such relations gives vitality. This special phase, however, of the place of doubt in real life is a very interesting one, and it suggests, besides, so much that is of positive value as almost to transform what so far has been in large part a sceptic's confession into a sceptic's boast.

Thus, in the first place, doubt seeks the company of nature. "Return to nature!" has time and again in human history been the cry of the human heart. Has civilization lost its hold, seeming unreal, artificial, formal? Has morality become hollow? Has a lover suffered the shattering of his dearest hopes? Has a creed lost its credibility? Have you and I wearied of our study or our labour, whatever it be, and come to wonder if it, or anything, is worth while after all? Have friends, ideals, and God Himself deserted us? We turn, and all people turn to nature. Exactly so the homesick traveller takes himself homeward, or the prodigal arises and goes to his father. And your experience and mine, and the poetry of all literatures, which tells so deeply the experiences of all men of all times, are a constant witness to the comfort, and forgiveness, and renewed confidence in self that nature imparts. Nature is our infancy, in which all things are possible; she is our untrammelled will; she is infinitely hopeful for us and infinitely kind; her necessity is so wide and so open that its very law, so different from any human law, is our greatest opportunity. True, our resort to nature is sometimes, perhaps in greater or less degree always, by the way of moral dissipation, or political anarchy, or intellectual suicide, or religious profanity; but even these dark ways to the home and the great mother-heart of us all have never been hopelessly misleading. If history and literature and personal experience can be trusted, even they have led to a kind nature. Have you never failed in anything and become reckless, and then profited from the very knowledge of yourself which the recklessness uncovered? Personally and socially recklessness, return to nature that it is, is always a helpful assistant to nature's great teacher, experience. Great is the pathos, but also, as it is understood, great is the inspiration of Rousseau's passionate outcry that his will was perfectly good. He was incapable of a single wholesome relation in life, yet, so he said, no man was better than he! Rousseau, philosopher of revolution, spoke for nature. Out of her great love, nature always takes the will for the deed--and perhaps she alone should have the privilege of doing that; for she knows that the deed, however violent, however bad, is sure to leave at least the will good.

But intellectually, as well as morally or politically, or as well as in any of the departments of the practical, emotional life, when trouble comes we turn to nature. Nature has a mind as well as a heart, and when state, and church, and social tradition have lost their validity and infallibility, their various formulae being no longer reasonable to us, when we have to depose them from their position as our accepted teachers, then we become scientists, which is to say, intellectual prodigals. Science, the open-minded study of nature, is only a homesickness for truth seeking relief. Does the scientist doubt? He is one of the princes of doubters. He doubts, as in due time we shall more fully appreciate, even to the extreme position of agnosticism. He doubts all things human that always he may be learning of nature.

So the companionship of nature for the comfort and pardon which she is sure to give, and for the deeper knowledge which she is certain to impart, is a passion of the doubter. True, no passion is free from dangers; yet this passion, at least this passion, has somewhat of hope in it.

But, secondly, the companionship of one's fellows is not less strongly desired. Huddling together in time of distress is by no means peculiar to the animal world; in human life it has more than once made distress seem richly worth while. "We have each other" in word or thought has been the comforting reflection of many a family, or many a community, when the money has gone, or when in other ways, possibly through a great fire, or a great earthquake, or the ravages of a disease, afflictions have come, and "Now we know how others have suffered" has been not less common. Indeed, it is my own conviction that these two reflections always rise together. The distress or affliction of doubt, however, is certainly no exception to the rule. Doubt often separates an individual from the customary corporate life with which he has long identified himself, throwing him out of his church, or his party, or his society, or even his immediate family, but the doubter at once feels his loneliness, and gets a yearning, never realized before, for social relations. Benedict Spinoza may have been better than most of us, but he was not in any other way different, and though maligned and insulted, as earlier in history another of his race had been, for his doubts and heresies, and though exposed to the dangers of the assassin's knife, and finally, when other measures failed, with special cruelties excommunicated by his synagogue, he loved his people, and all men besides, as few have loved them. Doubt makes one dependent; isolation gives a sense of loss; and, if ever a solution of the doubt comes, in the life and consciousness which it enjoins the lost companions, whether they will or not, are included with oneself. In many ways this is an important fact; yet it must suffice that we see the affinity of the doubter for society. Man ever confidently seeks what man has lost. Dependent man and doubting man must have society.

That doubt, furthermore, not only creates a motive to social life, even to the restoration of lost companions, but also by weakening the barriers which have divided some class, a sect perhaps, or a party, or a nation, or a race, from some other class, puts social life on a broader and deeper basis, is also an important fact, and full of significance beyond our immediate interest. Thus, to suggest indeed how those two reflections mentioned in the preceding paragraph are inseparable, besides his wish to retain or recover his wonted companions, the doubter would also associate them and himself with new companions, I venture to say, as if in a figure, with Gentiles as well as with Jews, and this gives to doubt, or to those who experience it and adequately use it, a most significant r?le in the evolution of society, the r?le of mediation between old friends and new, between the past and the future, the narrow life and the broader and deeper life, what is conservative and what is progressive; but at least for the present it is again enough if we see that doubt, not only by its personal losses gives the motive, but also by its removal of barriers gives the larger possibility of society.

And, in addition to the company of nature and the company of man, doubt, springing as it does from man's sense of insufficiency, seeks also the company of God; yet not of the God of any theology. As here conceived, God is that which lies at the back of nature, and at the back of man in the sense of being in character broader and deeper than either of these, and quite superior to any difference between them; he is the single, all-inclusive, wholly indeterminate reality upon which the doubter depends, and must depend; he is as nameless and unspeakable as he is indeterminate and all-inclusive, and he is real and perfect only as so nameless. To theology, God is determinate; to doubt, imperfect if determinate. At times, perhaps only half in earnest, or at least not clearly knowing if he is in earnest or if he wishes others to think him so, the doubter speaks of nature as his God, of the hills, or the fields, or the sea, or the sky, or the busy street as his church, or the great book of the universe as his Bible. At times, with the deepest emotion and with open avowal, nature and God are fully one to him, and the poetry, or the science, or the philosophy, to which his doubting leads him, is veritably a religious revelation. But always his doubting, as he knows it, as he is honest with it, is an appeal, not merely to nature as physically a powerful agent in the life he is pursuing, nor to others like himself who, by sharing, may lighten his distress and enhance his final victory, but also to a full, inclusive experience; to a life, perhaps like his own, yet indeterminately deeper than any he has known; to a mind and a heart, such as he knows must be present in that which surrounds him and moves within him, in knowledge more enlightened and in emotion more inspired, than his doubting mind and faltering heart have ever been; and such a life or such a mind or heart, whatever name it be called by, is God. Can mind appeal to anything but mind, or heart to anything but heart? And doubt--can it be doubt without the appeal?

The doubter who refuses or hesitates to speak the name of God may thus be a protestant, but plainly he is no atheist. A mere name, in any case, is quite as likely to obscure as to illumine the reality; the chiaroscuro effect must ever belong to it. Doubt is no road to atheism. As a way to theism it may be beset with hardship, and its goal may be quite beyond the horizon; but the doubter is not by nature an atheist; quite the contrary. As no other, feeling dependent, he is a seeker, and even a confident seeker after what is perfect. He truly and confidently seeketh, for he seeketh after what hath neither visible form nor body, what is without habitation or name, what, like the Son of Man, hath not where to lay its head. He seeketh, what his very seeking itself is, not a God, but the life of the God.

The general facts about doubt are now before us, and although much needs yet to be said in explanation, and a further fact is reserved for a concluding chapter, still not so darkly as it began this first chapter in our confession of doubt has come, perhaps somewhat abruptly, to an end. We have next, entering more fully and critically into the conditions of our human experience, to scrutinize closely our ordinary habits of mind, those common-sense views of things that on the whole prevail among men. In these ideas, impulsive, unreasoning, above all often flatly contradictory, we shall find some of the strongest reasons for our doubting nature.

Let me add, that if certain people, struggling in the present maze of educational theory, and objecting, with a zest and a combativeness that fairly belie their contentions, to the use of interest as the primal educational motive, if these people would only recognize change as always a part of interest, their greatest trouble would be removed. They refuse to have education easy or pleasant; interest, they insist, must make it so; and doubtless the advocates of interest are in part to blame for this view; but change, which to my mind is involved in all interest, includes resistance and struggle; change is ever a challenge to effort; and, such being the case, an education led by interest is not necessarily easy or idly pleasant. The real meaning of the interest theory, at least as I have to understand it, is simply that the natural child or the natural man always has something to do, and that education should promote that something. It is far from meaning that there should be no compulsion or discipline, no pain or self-denial. Whoever honestly over expected to do, or ever did any thing without these? The interest theory, then, would not eliminate hardship or discipline, but, to my understanding, by making education serve actual life, would substitute a natural for an artificial and externally imposed hardship. Not hardship, but real achievement makes the educated man.

DIFFICULTIES IN OUR ORDINARY VIEWS OF THINGS.

If the doubter were brought into court under indictment for his offences against common sense, against ordinary experience and belief, and the jury of his peers sitting upon the case were composed, as of course it would be likely to be, of faithful believers chosen at random from the different walks of practical life, no better defence could possibly be offered than a simple statement of the incongruities which the consciousness of ordinary life is constantly addicted to. True, for some reason lying deep in human nature, a defence that ends by convicting the jury of error, is hardly likely to lead to the immediate discharge of the prisoner; judges or jurymen are not in the habit of taking a rebuff in that way; but in course of time the prisoner will be justified, and his justification, however tardy, is all that now concerns us. To his defence, therefore, and the discomfiture of his judges, but to the latter without any malice, we turn at once.

And where shall we begin? Our predicament in this defence is something like that of the small boy, bewildered over the task of "picking up" his nursery. "I can't do it," he says. "There are so many things; I can't tell which to take first." Poor little fellow! If he halts now, what will he do when the littered room--I had almost said the littered playroom--of his later life confronts him? Contradictions under foot everywhere are certainly not less confusing than blocks, horses, papers, trains, marbles, picture-books, and the like--or unlike--scattered over a nursery floor.

Here, for example, in practical life is the natural, physical world. How real, brutally real, it is; its very law is fate; its forces are no respecters of persons, inexorably ruling and compelling all alike, giving life and taking it, full of the grimmest humour, raising hopes only to cast them down. Is some one rash enough to suggest that things physical are only so many ideas, real only as states of mind, of God's mind possibly, in some way coming to consciousness in the senses of men? The practical man knows a thing or two about that. He kicks a stone, or strikes his fist loudly upon a table, and so ends the matter, laughing the mad idealist away. And yet, prestissimo change! What do we hear him saying now? This brutally real world of physical things and powers is but a fleeting show; a thing only of space and time. What is really real and abiding is the spiritual that is everywhere and always. Another world there is, not to be spoken of in the same breath with this present world, a world compared with which this is but a mist before the eyes.

In so many familiar ways this duplicity towards what is real is manifest. People go to church to do such a wonderfully strange thing; nothing more nor less than to save their real souls from an unreal world, or sometimes to hide a real worldliness under unreal rites or symbols. "You may think me worldly, selfish, sensuous," says some one, "and I can not deny that often I do seem so, but this life of mine is ever only a yearning after the things that are spiritual, for which, as you see, I pray so earnestly, and which have nothing at all to do with one's worldly life." Yes, we do see, and particularly we see that things spiritual are often an impertinence in worldly affairs. The "real self" never does the things that are really done. Only this, just this is where the duplicity lies. Again, from some one else, a practical man presumably and an accuser of the doubter, we hear the following: "Only the spiritual life is real; look to it that you fear, as I fear, deeply and constantly the material world hanging like a sword over us all." Can it be, as would certainly appear, that superstition is still among us, that so readily we can give reality to unreality, that belief in ghosts still holds our human minds? Once upon a time--at least once--the Christian Church rose in bitter resentment because a certain man, by merely questioning the separate reality of the physical world, threatened to deprive the holy priesthood, with all its time-honoured prerogatives, of its heaven-appointed labour. Yet what is to be said of a church that prefers to think of an independent physical world, by which man is bound and damned, in order to save for itself the task, either hopeless or useless, of rescuing him? Labelling a man "rescued" or "Christian" does not make another-world creature of him. In political history, too, what a paradox it is that kingship by divine right has always been also kingship by physical might. The practices of an avowed supernaturalism have always been strangely materialistic.

So, in high places and in low, in the affairs of men now and in the past, the physical and the spiritual have ever been in a most remarkable relation; each real in and by itself, but with a most unusual courtesy also unreal at the slightest motion from the other; each now supreme, and now wholly subject; each now the whole life of man, and now the very opposite, the antipodes of all that is human; and each self-existent and independent, yet never without its real need of the other. Here surely is contradiction, or vacillation, in experience that is, to say the least, very confusing to him who reflects.

Confusion indeed! Nor have I exaggerated it. The loose association of chairs, distances, and days; the easy assumption of two supreme agents working against each other; the certain uncertainty about these agents being in the world or out of it, of it or not of it; and the readiness with which the whole universe, the all-inclusive thing, is treated as only one more thing to be included: these habits of the ordinary mind show a confusion that seems like insanity. Can we even face them safely and soberly?

For special regard I select just one, perhaps the central one; the habit of treating the universe, the unity of all things, as but one additional thing, the whole, as if it were only another part, the complete and infinite as if distinct from or outside of what is finite or incomplete; or again, in good old philosophical terms, the One as if it were another and so in effect, but one of the Many. Now some there are, and their number may be large, who never have thought of the contradiction and consequent confusion in the notion of a single world made up of many single things, yet itself another thing, or of the Infinite as external to the Finite, or of the One as not in and of the Many, but the contradiction is there, and can scarcely need more than mention to be seen.

Even in theory, scientific or philosophical, the wholeness or unity of the many things of the world has sometimes been taken for just one more thing, as when Anaximander taught that it was "that thing which is no one of the world's things," or for one of the many things supposed by it to be unified, as when Thales so na?vely declared all things to be water. Anaximander and Thales were only ancient Greeks, albeit very wise and enlightened Greeks, living as early as 600 B.C., but in very recent times they have had followers. Electricity has been taken as the one force of all other forces. Our chemists, some of them, have been hunting down the one element among the rest. Statesmen and churchmen have often dreamt of one man as somehow in his single person expressing the unity of all human life, and more than once they have even imagined him present in the flesh. God, although the Being in whom we, as ourselves persons, live and move and have our being, has Himself been another person. Society and its supposed component individuals have made two orders of existence. Life and living creatures; history and its many events; the solar system and its planets: nature and all her various kingdoms: these have also been held apart, making amazing dualisms. But, simply to repeat from above, taking the whole or the unity of all things as itself an independent thing, as itself one more thing, is a contradiction that needs only to be stated clearly to be appreciated. Let me hope that I have stated it clearly.

Even the soul, a something, an entity, that each one of us has been in the habit of claiming for himself and of holding very sacred and inviolate too, has been subjected to the same way of thinking. Doubtless, since God has not been spared, we should hardly expect the soul to escape. We view the soul so materialistically, even while we insist that it is not material. We say, we think, that it is something in the body; yet, of course, we are at our wit's end to tell just what particular place it occupies there. Similarly, God is supposed to be somewhere in the Universe, yet in no assignable place, and the chemist's universal atom is somewhere also, though surely not in the same place, and, wherever it be, waiting with its own, yet certainly a divine patience that ought to be inspiring, for experimental discovery. But with regard to the soul, although the life and unity of the body, although one of the things in the body, the soul itself is not bodily at all; it can enter the body and is important--who dares say how important?--to the body, and it can, as at death, leave the body, but though for a time in, it never is of the body. A strange standpoint certainly, but men insist that it is quite as true as it is strange. It seems very much like saying that when you build a house, in order to ensure it real solidarity, to give it real permanence and integrity, you should make a special point of putting your bricks or your lumber together, not with clinging, well-set mortar, or strong pins and straight-driven nails, but so much more sensibly, because so much further from what would be like the material bricks or lumber, or like the equally material mortar or nails, with those real and really compact things, absolutely continuous or indivisible, or at least indestructible even when disintegrated, empty space and pure uneventful time. With such space and time there would be union indeed I But, again, strange as such a procedure in building a house would be, men insist or at least I can readily imagine their insistence, that houses are built in that way, and built successfully. The method may seem absurd, but they insist that it is not madness. Are not abstract plans and such seemingly unsubstantial things as mathematical formulae, which are very near to being made of empty space and time, the real strength and integrity of all our great modern structures? And the soul, whatever be said of its being an immaterial thing, is nevertheless, even for being both immaterial and thing, the very sinew of the body.

Here may be method, then, and sanity, but there is always contradiction, obstinate contradiction, compounded contradiction! The soul, unity of the body, is only another thing or part in the body, and at the same time, though in the body, it is after all not really of the body. Possibly, perhaps necessarily, such patent contradiction, and, more than all, such compounding of contradiction, like doubling a negative, make for what is without contradiction, but this wholesome result is not consciously intended, and in the face of all, whatever our hopes or our beliefs, we must feel grave doubts and confess our doubting. Those who do build better than they know, if enlightened, would not again build in the same way. Two contradictions may be better than one, but even two make us wonder.

Closely connected with the contradictions in our customary ideas of reality, and ideas of wholeness or unity, there is the way in which we calmly take opposite sides in our notions about space and time, and about that very fundamental factor of our experience--causation. These are, all of them, so general and fundamental as possibly to seem too abstruse even for mention in this place, since throughout these chapters we are courting simplicity, but of space, and time, and causation, only what is very simple needs to be said. Thus to the ordinary consciousness how fatally things are separated from each other by conditions of space and time. Then is not now. Here is not there. Space and time are only physical and as brutal as all things physical, separating this from that with a finality that knows no degree. Lovers, continents apart, despair over the cruel distance. Time tears us ruthlessly from those dear to us. What is to be, as well as what was, though in the next moment, is absolutely beyond our grasp. Could anything be freer from dispute than the reality and the separating brutally of space and time? Yet, almost at a whisper, all distance and all duration become as nothing. Do not the lovers write to each other, flatly and passionately denying that they are far apart? Do we not constantly forestall the future and retain the past? Indeed, when all is said, a thousand years are as one day, and all the places of the earth are one. So real, and so vast, and so physical to us but a moment ago, space and time have now passed into mere phantoms of the imagination. We live, then, not only in a world that is brutally spatial and temporal, but also, and at the same time, in a world that is not spatial and not temporal at all; and living here--or there?--we have again to wonder and to doubt even in our belief. To our own constant amazement we find that we make our life a bridge over what would seem to be an absolutely impassable chasm.

As for causation our temerity is not less surprising. Wet and dry moons, unlucky Fridays, holy and unholy numbers, haunted houses, so-called providences, free in the sense of indifferently, irresponsibly free wills and fiat deities with their suddenly made worlds may not be generally in vogue at the present time, at least among the better educated, the enlightened and not infrequently conceited classes, but even among the wise and the consciously informed they have their natural offspring, and I am not so sure that many of them might not be found almost intact, at least in the more retired parts of the consciousness of my readers. To illustrate, for some if not for all of us, this is a world of many free and independent causes, yet also it is the single effect of one cause; it is again, our mood having changed, the single effect of two absolutely unlike beings or natures, each of them an all-powerful cause; it is a sphere here and now of causal, creative, productive activity, but it was itself created once for all long ago, at a date which the exegete hopes--in the equally distant future!--to determine for us; it contains some things that are only causes and some that are only effects, or some, or all, that are both causes and effects; it has parts that are the accepted causes of other parts; it has causes, those acting now and the one original cause, that are temporally antecedent to their effects; and, not to make the list longer, it is variously a world of one last effect, of one first and only cause, of an infinite series of causes and effects, and in whole, or in part, it constantly shows something made out of nothing or nothing resulting from something. A wondrous world most assuredly; and yet at first statement this record of our various notions of causation may not appear as a very serious arraignment of the consciousness which it exposes. Moreover some people actually glory in such a wonder as it presents. But, to be plain, though also monotonous, the uncaused cause or the effect that is only a part of the whole, or the cause or the effect that refuses to share in the other's nature, or finally the causation that is now so individual and so manifold and so effective, and that was once so single and so complete, is something that must give any thinker pause. Can a moving body move an immobile body? Can some things in the universe be mobile; others not? Can the moving body and the moved body belong to different moments of time? Can motion lead to rest or rest to motion? But our ordinary ideas of causation would allow, or even require, an affirmative answer to every one of these questions.

Alas! Shall this labour proceed? Can we afford to continue it? The defence of the doubter is getting almost too successful; it is becoming too personal to be pleasant. The task of picking up the room of our ordinary life grows harder, not easier, as it moves forward. Every thing that we touch tells of a spirit of violence in our nature. Even the small boy can not have been more lawless, for his toys were all battered perhaps, but not, like ours, all broken. Can we afford to go on? Afford it or not, we simply can not help ourselves, for our self-confidence is already shattered; our attention to the disorder is already beyond our control; each one of us is the doubter we would defend.

Here close at hand, where we have to see it, is another contradiction common in all human experience. It inheres in our conceits about knowledge. For us, on the one hand, the world we know not only really is, the tree out yonder or the planet miles and miles away being really and actually there, but also is just the world which our knowledge reports to us. What we have knowledge of is in our belief a real thing in and by itself, and we know it literally and directly, not figuratively, not afar off through symbols; we know it as it is; we know a real world, and we know it face to face. Yet, on the other hand, with all this simple confidence in our knowledge, what are we also given to saying, or assuming when we do not say it? Even in the moment of our confidence we humble ourselves with the cry of our utter foolishness, making our recognized foolishness only a counter-conceit. What but perfect folly is our knowledge before God's knowledge! "Illusion! The dream of a few hours or a few years!" is so often the best we can say of the whole fabric, past and present, of human consciousness. Not now, but only in the hereafter are we to see reality face to face; now we see only very darkly, if at all.

Some one here protests strenuously, raising an objection that might very properly have been raised before. Thus, I am told that only different people, or only the same people at different times, ever hold two opposite views, whether about knowledge or any thing else; never one and the same person at the same time holds them both; and so the present arraignment can not be as serious as it is made to appear. Well, with this objection I can agree in part, for there is at least a half-truth in it, but by no means does it tell, either in general or in particular, that is, with regard to the special case of the conceits about knowledge, the whole story of double living or double thinking among men. Indeed the easy way, in which men make the distinctions of society or the distinctions of time bear the responsibility for what must always in the end be the conflicts of their personal lives, is but another illustration of the difficulties besetting their ordinary views of things. Duplicity of view, like anything else in experience, must always be more than a matter of different people or different times, for the simple reason that, whether directly personal or not, it is present in the environment of the individual person. So, even if those two positions, confidence in worldly knowledge and religious trust and humility, for the sake of argument be momentarily associated only with different persons or social classes or times, our present point will really be just exactly as pointed, for there is always a third person or class or time into whose direct single experience the duplicity or contradiction is bound to enter. Consider, for example, the case of a child. For a part of the week he is perhaps at school; on Sunday at church; and the life in which he thus takes part must appear to him, there being in all probability little or no reservation on either side, to be hopelessly divided against itself. Now is knowledge power; now hindrance and greatest danger. Now he is to learn all he can; now, on the other hand, to forget what he may have learned. So is the conflict about him made his personal conflict, and exactly as in his case, so in all human experience the individual must share personally whatever the environment affords.

The individual and the environing society are the closest of blood relations, though we often allow ourselves, all too easily as has been said, to lose sight of the fact; they live under the same roof, and rely for sustenance on the same fare; and while to some the contradictions of life may be overlooked as personally impertinent and unimportant, being referred wholly to the environment, they are plainly the unavoidable heritage and the personal responsibility of every individual that counts himself a member of the human race. The objection, then, that was raised does not remove contradiction as a cause of doubt, but merely emphasizes what in a subsequent chapter must occupy us, the social aspect of experience. Thus, not only does experience, in ways now coming to our view, teem with contradictions, and is contradiction a cause of doubt, but also experience so conditioned is social as well as individual, a matter of personal relations between man and man as well as a matter of the single person's inner responsibility. Society in its manifold classes, in its conflicts and in its history, may help us to see the whole of experience, the unity of experience on all sides and in all parts, but it never does, and it never can, relieve the individual, or deprive the individual, of any side or part of what makes up an experience-whole. Grown men and women may be more definitely set in their lives and their ideas to certain specific things than children, but in no one, young or old, can such specialism ever be wholly exclusive of any of the other things.

To return to our immediate interest, if men are given to being doubters in their views about reality, spiritual and material; about unity or wholeness; about space and time, on the one hand fatally vast and independently real, and on the other formal and illusory; about causality, so actual and positive now, and yet so complete yesterday, or ever and ever so long ago; and about knowledge, so perfectly wise and so thoroughly vain and foolish; if, I say, men are double in all these different ways, in their moral judgments they seem, if possible, even more confused, and the confusion, the division against themselves, is the more serious for being with regard to what so directly concerns personal life and human fellowship.

To begin with, as will indeed readily appear, the offences of our moral judgments, which often, if not always, are largely influenced by religious or rather theological conceptions, are only a peculiar expression of the two-faced attitude towards causation, human persons or wills being the causes specially involved. In general the causes of the universe are of three sorts, those of natural force, those of supernatural agency, and those of human agency, and although toward them all essentially the same attitude is assumed, it is worth our while to consider particularly the causation that is commonly adjudged to belong to the human will and the moral ideas that spring from it.

For the purposes of the moral consciousness we translate the two conflicting powers of our world, or the spiritual reality and the material, into two agents of good and evil respectively, each having a power of doing whatever, true to its peculiar character, it may will to do, and then, as if in accord with this way of thinking, we find two distinct selves, a good self and an evil self, within each one of us, and we also divide the body social into two exclusive classes, the class of those who are identified with the righteous life and the class of those given to the unrighteous life, the sheep and the goats, the elect and the damned. But, to say nothing of the fact that these three ideas of the two powers, the two selves and the two classes, cannot be made really to accord with each other, although they possess an outward agreement, is it not clear that any attempt to take the good and the evil as two mutually exclusive things, be they spirits or selves or classes, is to destroy at once the real substance of virtue and the real value of the consciousness of evil? In practical life this means, what everybody knows so well, that an isolated, unduly holy righteousness, a sort of touch-me-not goodness, is bound to be empty, to be only ritualistic and aristocratic or pharisaical, and in any one of these respects it appears decidedly unrighteous; while an isolated unrighteousness, besides having at least the moral worth of a protest against its counterpart, is in itself exactly like the original sinfulness of the theologian; being unavoidable, it is wholly without any warranted opprobrium. Indeed, it all but comes to this, that righteousness as a fixed thing, fixed to a part of the universe or to a part of the individual self or to a part of society, is really in just so far evil, and the direct opposite of such righteousness is proportionately good. Good and evil, then, may not mix well, but certain it is that contradiction results from the common attempt of men to regard either as untainted or untempered by the other.

Still, not upon this real difficulty in our moral judgments would I now lay greatest stress, although it is real enough and important. In yet another way our moral consciousness is at war with itself. In estimating the worth of human conduct, so far as this is determined by its initiation, we are in an almost hopeless tangle. We are more than likely to think of other people as influenced by their environment in what they do, of ourselves as quite original and responsible, as independent of any such influences; or, more fully and more exactly, we are given to referring our own bad deeds to environment, our good deeds to ourselves, while for others we are prompted to do just the reverse, referring their good deeds to environment, their bad deeds to themselves. Such is human nature--not, to be sure, at its best, but common human nature; and even when we escape the foregoing personally invidious distinctions, we still--and this is the main point--treat self and environment as two naturally conflicting, altogether independent sources of conduct. Two different and independent sources of anything, however, can only make for conflict and contradiction. If only our courts of law could judge responsibility either wholly from the determinations of environment or wholly from those of personal will, or again, if only the will and the environment could be seen as not so radically opposed, what a simplification would ensue, and how much freer and more certain justice would be. To venture on a variation of an aphorism, where there's another way there is always a loophole; where there's environment there is always a shifted responsibility; where there's a "free will" there is always a will taken for some unperformed or imperfectly performed deed.

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