057 
 
LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 Class 
 

THE WILL TO DOUBT 
 
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THE ETHICAL LIBRARY 
 
 EDITED BY J. H. MUIRHEAD, M.A. (Oxon.), LL.D. (Glas.) 
 
 Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy in the 
 
 University of Birmingham 
 
 The Civilization of Christendom, and other Studies. 
 
 By BERNARD BOSANQUET, M.A. (Oxon.), LL.D. (Glas.). 4r. 6 
 Short Studies in Character. 
 
 By SOPHIE BRYANT, D.Sc. (Lond.). 4*. 6d. 
 The Teaching of Morality. 
 
 BY SOPHIE BRYANT, D.Sc. (Lond.). 3-y. 
 Studies in Political and Social Ethics. 
 
 By PROFESSOR D. G. RITCHIE. 4j. Qd. 
 An Ethical Sunday School. 
 
 By W. L. SHELDON. 3s. 
 Practical Ethics. 
 
 By PROFESSOR H. SIDGWICK. 4j. 6d. 
 Social Rights and Duties. 
 
 By SIR LESLIE STEPHEN. 2 vols. 9s. 
 Lectures on Humanism. 
 
 By PROFESSOR J. S. MACKENZIE, M.A. (Glas.), Litt. D. 
 
 (Cantab.). 4j. 6</. 
 The Will to Doubt. 
 
 By PROFESSOR ALFRED H. LLOYD. 4j. & 
 
 LONDON : SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO., LIM. 
 NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN Co. 
 
 Other books by Professor Lloyd are : 
 
 Citizenship and Salvation; or, Greek and Jew. A Study in 
 the Philosophy of History. Boston, 1897. 
 
 Dynamic Idealism. An Elementary Course in the Metaphysics 
 of Psychology. Chicago, 1898. 
 
 Philosophy of History. An Introduction to the Philosophical 
 Study of Politics. Ann Arbor, 1899. 
 
iStbtcal 
 
 THE WILL TO DOUBT 
 
 AN ESSAY IN PHILOSOPHY FOR THE 
 GENERAL THINKER 
 
 BY 
 
 ALFRED H. LLOYD 
 
 Truth hath neither visible form nor body ; it is without habitation or name : 
 like the Son of Man it hath not where to lay its head. 
 
 LONDON 
 
 SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO., LIM. 
 
 25 HIGH STREET, BLOOMSBURY, W.C. 
 1907 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 THE chapters that follow comprise what might be 
 called an introduction to philosophy, but such a de- 
 scription of them would probably be misleading, for 
 they are addressed quite as much to the general reader, 
 or rather to the general thinker, as to the prospective 
 student of technical philosophy. They are the attempt 
 of a University teacher of philosophy to meet what is 
 a real emergency of the day, namely, the doubt that 
 is appearing in so many departments of life, that is 
 affecting so many people, and that is fraught with so 
 many dangers, and in attempting this they would also 
 at least help to bridge the chasm between academic 
 sophistication and practical life, self -consciousness and 
 positive activity. With peculiar truth at the present 
 time the University can justify itself only by serving 
 real life, and it can serve real life, not merely by 
 bringing its pure science down to, or up to, the health 
 and the industrial pursuits of the people, but also by 
 explaining, which is even to say by applying, as science 
 is "applied," or by animating the general scepticism of 
 the time. 
 
 That this scepticism is often charged to the peculiar 
 
 181400 
 
THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 training of the University hardly needs to be said, but 
 except for its making such an undertaking as the 
 present essay only the more appropriate the charge 
 itself is strangely humorous. One might also accuse 
 the University of making atoms and germs, or, by its 
 magic theories, of generating electricity or disease. 
 Scepticism is a world- wide, life-wide fact; even like 
 heat or electricity, it is a natural force or agent 
 unless forsooth one must exclude all the attitudes of 
 mind from what in the fullest and deepest sense is 
 natural ; scepticism, in short, is a real phase of what- 
 ever is real, and its explanation is an academic re- 
 sponsibility. Its explanation, however, like the ex- 
 planation of everything real or natural, can be complete 
 only when, as already suggested here, its application 
 and animation have been achieved, or when it has been 
 shown to be properly and effectively an object of will. 
 So, just as we have the various applied sciences, in this 
 essay there is offered an applied philosophy of doubt, a 
 philosophy that would show doubt to have a real part 
 in effective action, and that with the showing would 
 make both the doubting and the acting so much the 
 more effective. 
 
 But it may be said that effective acting depends, 
 not on doubt, but rather on belief, on confidence or 
 "credit." This will prove to be true, excepting in 
 what it denies. To be commonplace, to write down 
 here and now what is at once the truism and the 
 paradox of this book, a vital, practical belief must 
 always live by doubting. Was it Schopenhauer who 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 declared that man walks only by saving himself at 
 every step from a fall ? The meaning of this book is 
 much the same, although no pessimism is either 
 intended or necessarily implied in such a declaration. 
 Doubt is no mere negative of belief; rather it is a 
 very vital part of belief, it has a place in the believer's 
 experience and volition; the doubters in society, be 
 they trained at the University or not, and those 
 practical creatures in society who have kept the faith, 
 who believe and who do, are naturally and deeply in 
 sympathy. And this essay seeks to deepen their 
 natural sympathy. 
 
 Here, then, is my simple thesis. Doubt is essential 
 to real belief. Perhaps this means that all vital 
 problems are bound in a real life to be perennial, and 
 certainly it cannot mean that in its support I may be 
 expected by my readers to give a solution of every 
 special problem that might be raised, an answer to 
 every question about knowledge or morality, about 
 religion or politics or industry, that might be asked. 
 Problems and questions, of course the natural children, 
 not of doubt, but of doubt and belief, may be as 
 worthy and as practical as solutions. Some of them 
 may be even better put than answered. But be this 
 as it may, the present essay must be taken for what it 
 is, not for something else. It is, then, for reasons not 
 less practical than theoretical, an attempt to face and, 
 so far as may be, to solve the very general problem of 
 doubt itself, or say simply if this be simple the 
 problem of whatever in general is problematic; and, 
 
THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 this done, to suggest what may be the right attitude 
 for doubters and believers towards each other and 
 towards life and the world which is life's natural 
 sphere ; emphatically it is not the announcement of a 
 programme for life in any of its departments. 
 
 The substance of chapters I., IL, in., iv., and v. in 
 small parts, and vi. and vm. was given during the 
 summer of 1903 in lectures before the Glenmore 
 School of the Culture Sciences at Hurricane in the 
 Adirondacks, and except for some revision chapters 
 v. and vii. have already been published Science, 
 July 5, 1902, and the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology 
 and Scientific Methods, June, 1905. 
 
 To Professor Muirhead, the Editor of the Ethical 
 Library, I wish here to express my hearty appreciation 
 of his interest and assistance in the final preparation 
 of this volume for publication. 
 
 A. H. L. 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, 
 ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN, U.S.A. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER PACK 
 
 I. Introduction 1 
 
 II. The Confession of Doubt 5 
 
 III. Difficulties in the Ordinary View of Things . . 29 
 IV. The View of Science : its Rise and Consequent 
 
 Character ........ 56 
 
 V. The View of Science : its Peculiar Limitations . 74 
 
 I. Science would be Objective .... 75 
 
 II. Science would be Specialistic ... 86 
 in. Science would be Agnostic . . . .106 
 
 VI. Possible Value in these Essential Defects of Ex- 
 perience ........ 131 
 
 VII. The Personal and the Social, the Vital and the 
 
 Formal in Experience 154 
 
 VIII. An Early Modern Doubter 172 
 
 IX. The Doubter's World . . . . .193 
 
 I. Eeality, without Finality, in all Things . 193 
 II. Perfect Sympathy between the Spiritual and 
 
 the Material 203 
 
 in. A Genuine Individuality .... 224 
 
 IV. Immortality 234 
 
 X. Doubt and Belief 248 
 
 Index 281 
 
THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 i. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 WITHOUT undue sensationalism it may be said that 
 this is an age of doubt. Wherever one looks in journey- 
 ing 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 destruc- 
 tive 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 every- 
 where, the inward view is at least not more reassuring. 
 Who can examine his own consciousness without find- 
 ing 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 
 
THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 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 in- 
 dustrial, 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 ex- 
 perience, 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 in- 
 hospitable 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 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 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 con- 
 trolled. 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, 
 
THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 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. 
 
II. 
 
 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 ordi- 
 narily 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 per- 
 vade our views of things, before completing our con- 
 fession 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, 
 
 5 
 
THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 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 reflec- 
 tions will certainly not have been in vain. Then we 
 shall close' our confession by seeking the companion- 
 ship of a great doubter of modern times, and by learn- 
 ing 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 any- 
 body 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 abso- 
 
THE CONFESSION OF DOUBT. 
 
 lutely nothing but belief in himself, in his all-doubt- 
 ing 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. 
 
 So, to turn now to those general ancj, easily recog- 
 nized facts, which were to be the special interest of 
 the present chapter, in the first place: We, are all 
 universal doubters. We are all universal doubters in 
 the sense that every one of us doubts something, and 
 there is nothing which some of us have not doubted. 
 Who would be so rash as to say that what a fellow- 
 being had questioned might not be questionable to 
 himself also, or that, if anything in his own ex- 
 perience had ever been subject to question, all the 
 ' v other things might not also be subject to question? 
 But the merely dubitable is the already doubtful. 
 In this sense, therefore, not so abstruse and for- 
 mally logical as it may appear, we are all universal 
 doubters. 
 
 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 
 
THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 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 re- 
 
THE CONFESSION OF DOUBT. 
 
 garded 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 in- 
 structive 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-conscious- 
 ness 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. 
 
 But, furthermore, not only are we all universal 
 doubters; the case for doubt in the world is, if pos- 
 sible, even stronger ; for also and this is the second 
 v general fact : Doubt is a phase, nay, a vital condition of 
 all consciousness. To be a conscious creature is to be a 
 doubting creature. 
 
io THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 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 con- 
 ditions or relations that would put restraint upon the 
 doing of it. Even the law of relativity, a psycho- 
 logical 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 clear- 
 ness 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 
 
THE CONFESSION OF DOUBT. 
 
 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 pur- 
 posely 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 con- 
 ditions of some uncertainty. In so many ways, 
 then, through the necessary inexactness of con- 
 sciousness, through the unstable equilibrium of all 
 conscious activity, through the law and fact of rela- 
 tivity, 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 con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 Illustrations are abundant. Thus, once more to 
 take a somewhat minute case, which is really more 
 significant for being minute, with regard to conscious 
 activity being in a state of tension, visual sensations 
 always involve muscular sensations, and these are 
 incident not only to expressed, but also to possible, 
 yet restrained, movements. The eyes may have been 
 
12 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 moved and the head turned, but in spite of the im- 
 pulses present in them the legs have not been used 
 to bring the observer nearer to the object seen, nor 
 have the arms and hands been raised to secure a 
 contact with it, and perhaps a tracing of its lines, 
 although some stimulus for such contact and tracing 
 must be always present as a part of the actual or 
 possible value of the experience. Or, again, to adopt 
 an illustration used for a different purpose by Pro- 
 fessor William James, so simple a process as the 
 spelling of a word is complicated with all sorts of 
 diverting and unsettling impulses as each letter is 
 expressed. Let the word be onomatopoeic. Can I 
 really spell it correctly ? And what a gauntlet of 
 dangers I have to run. The initial letter o tempts, 
 perhaps with childhood memories of the alphabet, to 
 p-q-r-s-t, etc., or to indefinite words or syllables, actual 
 from my past or possible to my future experience, 
 such as of, off, opine, October, -ology, -ovy, and so on, or, 
 to suggest mere possibilities, such as ontic, orcate, ot, or 
 ow ; and every succeeding letter is equally a scene of 
 combat, a place of dangers met safely met, let us 
 hope, and triumphantly passed. Worthy the boy, or 
 the man, who reaches the end unhurt. And what a 
 voyage of uncertainties, what a course between hope 
 and fear, confidence and doubt, the spelling of words 
 or the spelling of life as a whole always is. One's 
 whole vocabulary, real or possible, or one's whole 
 repertory of acts is more or less directly involved, 
 whatever one does. As to the tentative nature of 
 purpose, which seems the only other point here that 
 can possibly require illustration, the right we all 
 
THE CONFESSION OF DOUBT. 13 
 
 reserve to change our minds in the different affairs of 
 life tells its own story. We never do do, or can 
 do, exactly what we consciously would do ; and recog- 
 nizing this, men, as well as women, insist on the right 
 of a change of mind, and sometimes even of conscious 
 misrepresentation or of disparity between their seem- 
 ing and their being in thought or in deed. That such 
 a claim has its dangers does not now concern us ; it 
 has also its opportunities ; but the fact of it and the 
 ground for it are quite evident. Even jurisprudence, 
 for which loyalty to established and visible forms is 
 peculiarly sacred, has its ways, direct and indirect, of 
 recognizing that purposes develop, that the returns are 
 never all in, that any purpose or meaning must sooner 
 or later assume a new form, and so may even now be 
 other than it seems. Bequests for institutions, for 
 example, are allowed to continue in force, although, 
 with the demands of a more enlightened day, the 
 formal conditions under which they were made have 
 been openly violated. In short for it all comes to 
 this " Not the letter, but the spirit," is an inevitable 
 comment, or at least an inevitable feeling about every- 
 thing that is done. A man vaults a fence, and then, 
 even if he get over fairly well, vaulting is not what 
 it was for him. He may continue to use the old 
 word, or the same arms and legs, but with a changed 
 meaning and a changed feeling of limb and muscle, 
 and so with a new purpose and a new body to control 
 and modify his next performance. And what is true 
 for vaulting is true also for making boxes or tables, 
 for writing essays, for talking, for thinking, for found- 
 ing colleges or theological seminaries, or finally, for 
 
14 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 what we so indefinitely call living. An activity such 
 as throughout its length and breadth ours is, a con- 
 scious activity that must for ever heed the call: "Not the 
 letter, but the spirit," an activity that never is, there- 
 fore, and never can be without the elements of the 
 game, since it must ever wait on its own revealed 
 consequences in order to grow into an understanding 
 of its real meaning; such an activity, among other 
 things, cannot but fasten doubt upon us as a most 
 natural heritage. As man is conscious, to doubt is 
 human. Other things may be human, too, but doubt 
 is so certainly and conspicuously. 
 
 Thirdly, in this presentation of general facts : Doubt 
 is inseparable from habit. Habit is usually associated 
 with what is permanent and established, but just here 
 lies its undoing. As we usually understand it, habit 
 really deadens what it touches by leading to abstrac- 
 tion or separation from actual conditions. Con- 
 servative as it surely is in things important and in 
 things unimportant, in things personal and in things 
 social, it sets him who is party to it behind the times, 
 for no act in its second expression, no simply repeated 
 act, no mere habit could ever be up to date in the 
 sense of really meeting all the emergencies of its own 
 time. Personal habits make fixed characters; social 
 habits make customs and laws; religious habits make 
 churches and creeds ; intellectual habits make schools ; 
 and of all these products, which for the sake of the 
 single term we will call institutions, it must be 
 said, however paradoxically, that in being made they 
 are also outgrown, for the habitual turns formal and 
 unreal and so unsatisfying. A growing nature has 
 
THE CONFESSION OF DOUBT. 15 
 
 her ways of making even conservatives keep pace 
 with her. An institution in the sense of an acquired 
 manner of action, personal or social, can never really 
 be an end in itself, although to a narrow view it may 
 often seem to be; it is at best only the manifested 
 means to a newly developed or developing end which 
 must eventually transform it. In so large a thing, for 
 example, as political life, the institutes of monarchy 
 have become the instruments of democracy, and this 
 conspicuously ever since the French Eevolution; in 
 the history of thought, of man's intellectual life, the 
 objective dogmas of one time have been only the 
 subjective standpoints of the next, the metaphysics 
 of one time has made the scientific method, the 
 working hypothesis, of the succeeding time ; and in so 
 small a thing as a child's vocabulary, the oft-repeated 
 and finally mastered syllable ba, or some other equally 
 intellectual, has become in time only one of the means 
 to a whole word, say laby or bath, or even basilica or 
 barometrograph. In all life the thing we get the habit 
 of is only a tool with which we strive towards some- 
 thing else. Some one thinking no doubt of Hercules has 
 called the institutions of life a great club which the 
 irresistible arm of society, always a hero when looked 
 back upon, swings fatally against the present. 
 
 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 i 1 " Habit expresses the tendency of the organ- 
 
 1 Mental Development of the Child and the Race. Methods and 
 Processes. By James M. Baldwin. Macmillan, 1895. 
 
1 6 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 ism 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 fundament- 
 ally, not merely a tendency to repetition or imita- 
 tion, 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 pro- 
 tective colouring accordingly. The habit of always 
 being adapted is at least as radical as it is conser- 
 vative. 
 
 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 constitu- 
 tions are amendable constitutions ; our religious rites 
 and doctrines are recognized as only symbols; our 
 theories are only standpoints. 
 
 So, once more, because change is at least an ever- 
 present companion, if not actually an integral part of 
 habit, doubt must be as real and general as habit. 
 
THE CONFESSION OF DOUBT. 17 
 
 Change must make doubt. Sociologically, institution- 
 alism must always imply a contemporary scepticism ; 
 the conservative must have an unbeliever for his 
 neighbour. Indeed, to add an important point, some 
 go so far as to say in general that change, that is, 
 something new and different, is not only a necessary 
 incident but also an actual motive in all activity, and 
 when all is said they seem quite right. Perhaps 
 habit, as always an interest in adaptation, would imply 
 as much. Certainly novelty is a universal motive, 
 and as for society there can be no question that it has 
 a very strong predilection for lawlessness in all its 
 forms. True, it may be objected that at times men, 
 individually or collectively, seek not something else, 
 but simply more of something already secured; more 
 money, it may be, or more learning, or more territory, 
 or more pleasure. There is, however, in spite of man's 
 many conceits to the contrary, no change that is purely 
 quantitative. More is also different or other. Accord- 
 ingly, we both always find, and, what is even more to 
 the point, always seek a real change whenever we do 
 anything". To speak again in most general terms, the 
 motion in the outer world, which is the fundamental 
 stimulus of all consciousness, both physically, that is, 
 literally, and figuratively, is more than merely an 
 outer stimulus ; something there is within the nature 
 of the subject which answers to it with perfect sym- 
 pathy and makes it equally an inner motive. For- 
 sooth, could any stimulus ever produce a response 
 without its being in accord with an existing motive ? 
 Life, then, is a game, and the game of life, doubts and 
 all, is a real interest as well as a necessity. "We are 
 
18 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 creatures of habit, but we have, and we cherish, no 
 habit stronger or more essential than the habit at 
 once of adaptation and variation. 1 
 
 A fourth general fact, very closely related to the 
 foregoing, is this : Doubt is necessary to life, to real life, 
 to deep experience, Doubt is but one of the phases of 
 the resistance which a real life demands. Eeal life 
 implies a constant challenge, and doubt is a form 
 under which the challenge finds expression. The 
 doubter is a questioner, a seeker; he has, then, 
 something to overcome; he fears, too, as well as 
 hopes. 
 
 Were all things settled once for all, were all things 
 clearly known and freely executed, or were the conse- 
 quences of the things to be done always capable of 
 being accurately foretold, there would be no real 
 
 1 Let me add, that if certain people, struggling in the present 
 maze of educational theory, and objecting, with a zest and a com- 
 bativeness 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 (1) 
 that the natural child or the natural man always has something to do, 
 and (2) 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 ever 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 educa- 
 tion serve actual life, would substitute a natural for an artificial and 
 externally imposed hardship. Not hardship, but real achievement 
 makes the educated man. 
 
THE CONFESSION OF DOUBT. 19 
 
 living, there would be nothing really to do. In such 
 case life in general, or in any of its different ex- 
 pressions, 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 chal- 
 lenge 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 some- 
 thing to do, awakens emotions that such words as 
 relativity, and instability, and change, and even game, 
 have discouraged, or even wholly suppressed. Lessing, 
 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 
 
20 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 x 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 posses- 
 sion. The knower is made also a doubter, and the 
 doubter appears as having, in a sense, forgotten, with- 
 out 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 
 
THE CONFESSION OF DOUBT. 
 
 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. 
 
 For the rest, the positive value of doubt to real life 
 can hardly need further emphasis. In one form or 
 another the idea, as important as many may find it 
 commonplace, must constantly recur in these pages. 
 We turn, therefore, to our fifth, and for the present, 
 last general fact, with which we shall find ourselves 
 still in sight, perhaps even in clearer sight of the 
 brighter horizon. We are all universal doubters; 
 doubt underlies all consciousness; even habit has 
 gloomy doubt, as Horace would say, sitting up behind; 
 like pain or want, like ignorance or contradiction, 
 doubt is a dynamic principle, making experience 
 deeper and ever deepening, and life real and alive; 
 and fifthly : As man is dependent and feels dependent, he 
 is a doubter. His widespread, or rather his universal, 
 sense of dependence begets doubt. Witness the fact that 
 doubt shows man a seeker after company; the com- 
 pany of nature, the company of his fellows, the com- 
 pany of God. 
 
 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 move- 
 ment. Nothing so much as such relations gives 
 
22 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 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. " Eeturn 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 for- 
 giveness, 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 oppor- 
 tunity. True, our resort to nature is sometimes, 
 perhaps in greater or less degree always, by the way 
 of moral dissipation, or political anarchy, or intel- 
 lectual suicide, or religious profanity; but even these 
 dark ways to the home and the great mother-heart of 
 
THE CONFESSION OF DOUBT. 23 
 
 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 reck- 
 less, 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 Eousseau'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 ! Eousseau, 
 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 
 
24 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 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 dis- 
 tress 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 
 
THE CONFESSION OF DOUBT. 25 
 
 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 depen- 
 dent; isolation gives a sense of loss; and, if ever a 
 solution of the doubt comes, in the life and conscious- 
 ness 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 com- 
 panions, 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 sig- 
 nificant role in the evolution of society, the role of 
 mediation between old friends and new, between the 
 past and the future, the narrow life and the broader 
 
26 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 and deeper life, what is conservative and what is pro- 
 gressive ; 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, 
 
THE CONFESSION OF DOUBT. 27 
 
 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 en- 
 lightened 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 seek- 
 eth, 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 ex- 
 planation, and a further fact is reserved for a con- 
 
28 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 eluding 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 con- 
 ditions 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. 
 
III. 
 
 DIFFICULTIES IN OUR ORDINARY 
 VIEWS OF THINGS. 
 
 IF the doubter were brought into court under indict- 
 ment 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 dis- 
 charge 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. 
 
 29 
 
30 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 " 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 
 
DIFFICULTIES IN VIEWS OF THINGS. 31 
 
 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 hang- 
 ing 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 inde- 
 pendent 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 
 
32 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 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. 1 
 
 But, to take up something else certainly not less 
 confusing to the ordinary mind, "practical," and un- 
 accustomed to reflection, this is a world of separate, 
 individual things, of chairs, hands, atoms, eyes, stars, 
 men, stones, books, leaves, rivers, lives, mountains, 
 relations, notions, distances, days or years, and so on, 
 
 1 In the rise of Christian Science, against which I have no special 
 grudge, although I have already taken exceptions to its claims, there 
 is a special case, special because affecting a single, relatively small 
 class, of the popular hospitality to contradiction. Thus, the Christian 
 Scientists would reduce all reality to mind, but at the same time they 
 busily deny reality to a large group of mind facts, namely and 
 notably, the ideas of disease. Recently, it is true, according to the 
 newspapers, their healers have been told to "decline to doctor 
 infectious or contagious diseases," yet not because such diseases have 
 any reality, but because the illusion of them is so real as to make the 
 "Christian" treatment of them both imprudent and impractical. 
 Philosophies and religions of illusion are certainly weird, uncanny 
 things ! 
 
DIFFICULTIES IN VIEWS OF THINGS. 33 
 
 indefinitely and above all indiscriminately; a world, 
 moreover, into which in part God, in part man, defy- 
 ing an equally powerful agent of chaos or dissipation, 
 has put at least for a time a certain kind of order, an 
 order that might be said to be good enough for all 
 practical purposes. Yet with all its indiscriminate 
 manifoldness, and with the irregular, uncertain conflict 
 between chaos and order, it is nevertheless a single 
 world, in short, just one more individual thing, one 
 more example, perhaps outdoing all others, of the 
 marvellous license with which human beings are wont 
 to speak and think of a " thing." Chairs, hands, moun- 
 tains, men, stars, and the whole universe, are all 
 " things," and in this world of things, that is itself 
 another thing, or, should I rather say, apart from this 
 world of things, that is another thing, there are two, at 
 least two, discordant powers taking turns at making 
 order and disorder. 
 
 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 
 
34 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 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 naively 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 
 
DIFFICULTIES IN VIEWS OF THINGS. 35 
 
 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. 
 
 Nor is this particular conflict in our ordinary ideas 
 yet before us in all its fatefulness, for as if to defy 
 the principle of consistency to the very last degree of 
 its forbearance we are often, if not usually, given 
 not only to unifying our world of things in terms of 
 just one more thing, or of persons in terms of just one 
 more person, but also to thinking of this one more 
 thing, or person as sui generis, as altogether different 
 in nature and substance. So do we mingle our 
 duplicity about reality with that about the unity of 
 things. The many, for example, are physical or of the 
 substance of matter; the one is ideal or of the sub- 
 stance of mind or spirit. The many persons are 
 merely human, the One is divine. Strange, indeed, 
 that men should ever take one more as the unity of 
 all the rest, but if possible it is at least, at first sight, 
 stranger that this one more should be relegated to 
 a sphere wholly apart and peculiar. In the madness 
 of such compounded contradiction there may lurk real 
 method, but of the contradiction and of the compound- 
 ing there can be no question. 
 
 Even the soul, a something, an entity, that each one 
 of us has been in the habit of claiming for himself 
 
36 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 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 stand- 
 point 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 
 
DIFFICULTIES IN VIEWS OF THINGS. 37 
 
 even when disintegrated, empty space and pure un- 
 eventful time. With such space and time there would 
 be union indeed ! But, again, strange as such a pro- 
 cedure 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, what- 
 ever 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, com- 
 pounded 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 nega- 
 tive, 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 enlight- 
 ened, 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 
 
38 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 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 through- 
 out 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 dis- 
 tance. 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, 
 
DIFFICULTIES IN VIEWS OF THINGS. 39 
 
 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 con- 
 stant 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 abso- 
 lutely 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 tern- 
 
40 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 porally 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 mani- 
 fold 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 
 
DIFFICULTIES IN VIEWS OF THINGS. 41 
 
 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 experi- 
 ence. 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 sym- 
 bols ; 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-con- 
 ceit. 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 con- 
 sciousness. 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 
 
42 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 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. Con- 
 sider, 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 
 
DIFFICULTIES IN VIEWS OF THINGS. 43 
 
 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 hin- 
 drance 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 our- 
 selves, 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 indi- 
 vidual 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. 1 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 
 1 Chapter vn. 
 
44 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 of experience on all sides and in all parts, but it never 
 does, and it never can, relieve the individual, or de- 
 prive 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 indepen- 
 dently 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 thor- 
 oughly 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 
 
DIFFICULTIES IN VIEWS OF THINGS. 45 
 
 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, can- 
 not 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 
 
46 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 sinfulness of the theologian; being unavoidable, it is 
 wholly without any warranted opprobrium. In- 
 deed, 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 re- 
 sponsible, 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, 
 
DIFFICULTIES IN VIEWS OF THINGS. 47 
 
 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 responsi- 
 bility; where there's a "free will" there is always a 
 will taken for some unperformed or imperfectly per- 
 formed deed. 
 
 So the double origin of conduct offers a very serious 
 difficulty, which, when it is understood, is not unlike 
 that of the two powers or selves or classes, but even 
 more is to be said in exposure of our moral judgments. 
 Thus we have the confident conceit of freedom, of our 
 own freedom in good or our neighbour's freedom in 
 evil, or in general of man's freedom to act without 
 regard to the determinations from environment, but 
 we have also a strange though possibly a fortunate 
 way of qualifying the very freedom that we claim. 
 We claim freedom only to avow, almost in the same 
 breath, duties and responsibilities. We have the free- 
 dom, but only the duties make it worth anything. A 
 startling paradox this, so familiar to us all: "I am 
 free to do all that I ought to do," or, "I am free to carry 
 out certain necessities of my true life." A startling 
 paradox ; and, above all, a strange way of escaping the 
 necessities of environment, unless, forsooth, it really 
 opens the door, or supplies a secret door, by which the 
 
48 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 necessities of environment and the necessities of one's 
 true life can come together? If freedom demands 
 law, why should it hold aloof from the natural law, 
 the law of environment so definitely present ? Possi- 
 bly, then, as once before suggested, one contradiction 
 in experience may be the corrective of another, the 
 paradox of freedom and duty only correcting the con- 
 tradiction of two sources of conduct, personal will and 
 environment. In the case, for example, of the disposi- 
 tion to distinguish between one's own acts and 
 another's, with respect to their initiation by will or 
 by environment, to mingle duty and necessity with 
 one's own supposed freedom is equivalent in effect 
 to denying one's neighbour's freedom because of 
 the restraints of his environment. But such con- 
 siderations, however promising for future reflection 
 upon the conflicts in our moral consciousness, are 
 not of immediate interest. Our doubts may once 
 more find hope in the reflection that the faults of 
 experience may balance themselves, but we have no 
 occasion to abandon our doubting as idle or meaning- 
 less. Contradictions that balance each other, errors 
 that are mutually corrective, are still contradictions, 
 are still errors. 
 
 So, to reduce our moral judgments, confusion and 
 all, to small compass, we are free, others are not ; they 
 are free, we are not; and our freedom is bound by 
 duty, by duty to the moral law, while their freedom, 
 unless a hopeless lawlessness, is bound by the environ- 
 ment and its law. Again, good and evil are each un- 
 mixed, and moral acts serve two masters that is to 
 say, spring from two sources. We may, therefore, 
 
DIFFICULTIES IN VIEWS OF THINGS. 49 
 
 still believe in morality yet how can this be ? And 
 freedom yet how is freedom possible ? 
 
 But finally, as last to be examined, there is the idea 
 of law, just now brought to attention. This idea is a 
 focus for a good many conflicting views. Witness the 
 familiar argument from the knowledge of law in 
 nature to fatalism, an argument as absurd as it is 
 widespread, for the bare fact that we know the laws of 
 nature really emancipates us from the blind fate to 
 which the argument points. Can knowledge ever 
 mean anything but freedom ? Certainly no law can 
 ever be known unless the sphere of its operation 
 accords with the nature of those who have the know- 
 ledge. Simply to know is to share in and be at one 
 with whatsoever is known, and the clearer and more 
 cogent or rational the knowledge, the truer and realer 
 is this participation or union. The law we know, 
 then, must have all the meaning and the natural 
 authority of a law of our own enactment, and so 
 must actually have the sanction of our will. Will, I 
 say, cannot help sanctioning knowledge, for knowledge 
 is always true to, because conditioned by, the natural 
 action of the knower. But no such message of free- 
 dom, or say of human opportunity in natural necessity, 
 is commonly received by men at large from the evi- 
 dences of law in nature. Superstitiously they see 
 only fate. Clear knowledge and blind fate ! 
 
 Nor are we commonly satisfied with only so much 
 superstition. We go still further and make the case as 
 bad as possible by treating the law we know as if in 
 its spirit, if not in its letter, it were final. In other 
 words, we view nature, with some of whose ways we 
 
50 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 have become conversant, not merely as a source of 
 blind fate, or external necessity, for our lives, but also 
 as essentially and ultimately a sphere of strictly 
 mechanical routine. Yet here again we are surely 
 reasoning beyond our premises the very essence of 
 superstition for the routine we know can never 
 answer substantially, or even formally, to nature as 
 she really is. Our positive knowledge, our knowledge 
 that arrives at specific formulae, even though these 
 formulae reach the noble dignity of mathematics, is 
 bound to be in terms of some particular experience, 
 personal or national or racial; it is relative and 
 special; it is partial knowledge; and he is super- 
 stitious, and does, indeed, argue beyond his premises, 
 who takes the whole, whose law he does not know, to 
 be literally analogous to the part, whose law he thinks 
 he knows, but can in fact know only partially. No 
 whole ever is one of its parts, or merely analogous to 
 one of its parts ; a law never is the law, or even in its 
 lawfulness literally analogous thereto; and mechanical- 
 ism, whether as a popular or a philosophical "ism," 
 has no justification save just this false analogy. 
 
 And the prevalent confusion in the notions of law 
 or lawfulness is of course reflected in the corresponding 
 notions of lawlessness. Here, as with other negative 
 terms, men forget that negatives necessarily are quite 
 relative to their positives. All specific, definitely 
 manifest, known and positive lawlessness simply must 
 have some place in the law of things ; it can no more 
 be an absolute lawlessness than any human routine 
 can be supposed final ; and, on the other hand, there 
 can be no positive law whose breaking haa not some 
 
DIFFICULTIES IN VIEWS OF THINGS. 51 
 
 sanction; there can be no lawfulness which does not 
 warrant some lawlessness. This truth, perhaps as 
 nothing else could, must show the error in the notion 
 of mechanical routine as affording an adequate descrip- 
 tion of the ultimate nature of things. Where the 
 whole always gives point to the negation of any of its 
 parts, where the law always sanctions some breaking 
 of any law, fro think of the whole in terms of its parts 
 may be human, but it is of the human which is prone 
 to err. Those who would still insist upon seeing only 
 routine in law, and upon judging lawlessness as only 
 relative to such seeing, might do well, rising above 
 their ordinary views, to remember with some real 
 appreciation that once upon a time the law-breakers 
 and the reformer were very closely associated; they 
 were associated in life, and at the end they were 
 crucified together. Whatever may be one's theology, 
 there is a deal of food for thought in those deaths on 
 Calvary and in the several lives which they closed. 
 
 Lawlessness suggests the supernatural. So many 
 have promptly concluded that just as with the know- 
 ledge of law in nature human freedom must be re- 
 signed, blind fate taking its place, so anything or any- 
 body at all supernatural, Satan for example as well 
 as God, must once for all withdraw. If law reigns, 
 God can will whatever he wills only because the law 
 is so; the law is not so because he wills it; and this in 
 common opinion only makes him decrepit, without 
 real initiative, dead. Yet, once more, what super- 
 stition ! The knowledge of law has never robbed 
 man of his freedom, nor even slain his God ; or this at 
 least: the loss of freedom or the death of God, for 
 
52 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 which any law that man has had knowledge of has 
 been responsible, has always been only the forerunner 
 of a larger and fuller freedom and of his God's resur- 
 rection and glorification. This or that law may rob 
 and may kill, but this or that law, let me reiterate, 
 never is the law, and why common opinion has to 
 judge all things in heaven and earth, as if it were, is 
 hard to comprehend. Neither nature nor God, if 
 these two need to be thought of as two, is law -bound ; 
 each rather, with a meaning which I must hope now 
 to have made clear, is law-free. The law in which 
 nature is free is as infinite, as transcendent of any 
 particular human experience as the ever-developing 
 freedom of man or as the will of God. And God, or 
 the Supernatural, is not confined to the narrow sphere 
 of what man knows, as man knows it ; this stands only 
 for what man calls nature. God is the all-inclusive 
 sphere or source of the absolute law, for which know- 
 ledge can be only a constant striving, or which is itself 
 even a party to the constant striving. Somehow the 
 law must be a living thing, not a routine : the super- 
 natural must be not nature as she is known, but 
 nature's fullest and deepest life. 
 
 HVery emphatically what has just been said about 
 nature or God being law-free, or about the law being 
 infinite, or not analogous in form or substance, in 
 spirit or letter, to any thing in positive knowledge, is 
 no argument for the Jonah story or even for the 
 miracle of the wine at Cana's wedding feast ; and yet 
 time and again people who apparently should have 
 done enough thinking to know better, to the great 
 satisfaction of thousands have used the infinity of 
 
DIFFICULTIES IN VIEWS OF THINGS. 53 
 
 nature's or God's lawfulness, which is to say the only 
 partial and tentative character of all human know- 
 ledge of law, as a clinching proof of all the miracles 
 in the Bible. Can they not see that like what is 
 lawless in general, the miraculous must be in the 
 premises only relative to the experience of the time ? 
 Even chance is not less so. The spiritual meaning of 
 those miracles may persist, for the miraculous we 
 must always have with us ; but if even our relative, 
 imperfect knowledge stands for anything, if it be even 
 a tentative knowledge, a working standpoint, the 
 literal truth of most, or even all of them, disappeared 
 long ago. Miracles, like laws, come and go ; only the 
 miraculous, like the law, goes on forever. 
 
 And this leads to something else, to something also 
 Very common, perhaps the reverse of the foregoing. 
 With what an unaccountable delight many of us have 
 accepted naturalistic explanations, for example, of the 
 sun standing still, or of the retreat of the waters of 
 the Eed Sea, or of the Immaculate Conception, or of 
 any of the many other marvels in either the Old or 
 the New Testament, and have thought that so our old 
 beliefs are to be preserved. I have myself heard 
 honest and earnest men, even members of an academic 
 community, appeal to parthenogenesis as a fact in 
 nature which would at least make the miracle of 
 Christ's birth scientifically plausible as well as spiritu- 
 ally significant; but such an appeal, besides being, in 
 my opinion, positively irreverent, is as blind religiously 
 as it is ignorant scientifically. Cannot such men 
 appreciate, and cannot all others who do as they do 
 also appreciate the fact that naturalistic explanation of 
 
54 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 any miracle, if really a genuine explanation, may prove 
 the fact, but must in just so far destroy, I do not say 
 the miraculous, which is indestructible, but the par- 
 ticular miracle ? 
 
 The lawful miracle, then lawful, of course, so soon 
 as explained is one more contradiction in our prevalent 
 notions about law. That it exemplifies, too, a habit of 
 mind which is exercised by us in many directions 
 besides that of interpretation of the arbitrary things 
 of the Bible can hardly need be said. In life generally 
 the arbitrary is peculiarly fond of going to law, some- 
 times to what is called nature's law, as when revolu- 
 tionists of all sorts strikers and radical reformers 
 raise the cry of " natural rights," laying down the law 
 as to what men are by nature, and sometimes to 
 "human" law, as when the conservatives in govern- 
 ment or business with their vested rights, be these 
 coal mines, oil fields, or political privileges, appeal for 
 " justice " to the courts or to the military. 
 
 But, to say no more, with the lawful miracle, with 
 law the strange support of what is arbitrary, with this 
 as a very good example of the duplicity which in 
 general we are all of us wont to allow in our practical 
 life, the present exposure of our ordinary consciousness 
 must come to an end. With regard to the real sub- 
 stance of things, or to their unity, or to the nature of 
 space and time and causation, with regard to the worth 
 of knowledge, with regard to our human conduct, to its 
 freedom and responsibility, or finally with regard to 
 the place of law in nature and in the life of man, our 
 ordinary consciousness is manifestly inconsistent and 
 vacillating nay, is grossly contradictory ; and we are 
 
DIFFICULTIES IN VIEWS OF THINGS. 55 
 
 led at least to suspect that the disorder which we 
 have found is inherent and essential, having the nature 
 of an original human defect. Such a defect, however, 
 is cause for doubt ; so that man, above all " practical " 
 man, having inconsistency or duplicity as almost, if 
 not quite, an uncontrollable habit with him, should be 
 himself a prince of sceptics. 
 
 And yet, although we have indeed found man 
 spending at least his waking hours in a room that 
 seems disorder incarnate, and although before the 
 court of practical life the doubter seems thus to have 
 been thoroughly justified, while his too hasty judges 
 are in turn condemned, nevertheless the case for doubt 
 is not of such a character as to leave absolutely no 
 hope for belief. Now and again in the evidence, as it 
 has been disclosed, have we not felt the presence of 
 something, not yet given its due weight, that would 
 make man more than a mere doubter and unbeliever ? 
 Have we not been led to suspect that somehow, with- 
 out loss of their reality and validity, the most cogent 
 reasons for doubt, even the contradictions in our views 
 of things, might turn into bases of belief, that an 
 experience essentially paradoxical may not be as hope- 
 less as at first sight it may appear, that in all the 
 madness there is at least a chance of some method ? 
 The view of science, however, must be examined 
 before our attention can be turned definitely upon 
 such a possibility. Enough if in our present doubting 
 we are still left with a little hope. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE VIEW OF SCIENCE: ITS RISE AND 
 CHARACTER. 
 
 WITH science we usually associate accuracy and con- 
 sistency, and at first thought we are not likely to 
 expect that the work and standpoint of science can 
 contain anything substantial enough for the doubter 
 to base his claim upon; but second thought is our 
 first duty at this time, and second thought always 
 changes the view, and in this particular instance it 
 will show science in important respects to be quite 
 as vulnerable as the unreflective consciousness of 
 practical life, for science also is honeycombed with 
 contradiction and paradox. 
 
 More than once scientists themselves have turned 
 sceptical about their work and its results. The cry 
 of bankruptcy in science, not merely as a charge, but 
 also as a confession, has been heard in the land not 
 infrequently ; now perhaps low and uncertain, but 
 again clear and strong. And why not ? Why should 
 the scientist escape the questioning of other men ? 
 Subtle and wonderful as science is, does it transcend 
 humanity? Surely, when all is said, the scientific 
 consciousness is not formally different from the 
 ordinary consciousness. The same eye is looking at 
 
 56 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 57 
 
 the same world, only through microscopes and tele- 
 scopes. The same mind is measuring the same en- 
 vironment, only with carefully devised instruments 
 of precision instead of arm's lengths or stone's throws 
 and rules of thumb. In a word, science is merely the 
 ordinary consciousness highly developed, not with- 
 out considerable abstraction, into critically conscious 
 method and clearest possible perception. Indeed, per- 
 haps without myself clearly knowing all my reasons, 
 I am constrained to say that science is related to 
 ordinary perception very much as the 'inventor's con- 
 sciousness of his wonderful flying-machine to the 
 simple sensations of a bird. The mechanics of flying, 
 so elaborately present to the former, are nevertheless 
 also present in the latter, while with both we have 
 the same eye or the same mind looking and the same 
 world seen. The boasted methods and ideals of the 
 one are but the only half-waking instincts of the 
 other, and whatsoever is essential to either belongs 
 also to the other. But, to mark the great difference 
 between them, the inventor has the disposition to 
 treat flying abstractly that is, as if a thing by itself, 
 as if for its own sake ; and he goes even farther, 
 making abstraction of the mere explanation and 
 mechanical expression of flying ; while the bird simply 
 flies, and, if I may hope to be understood, all things 
 else, the sun and the wind, the trees, and all living 
 things, and you and I who follow his course are flying 
 with him. 
 
 But no poetic soaring such as this can satisfy our 
 present needs. To understand and appraise the view 
 of science we must trace its rise as clearly as we can, 
 
58 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 and then critically examine its peculiar conceits, its 
 own ideal methods and attitudes. 
 
 As for the rise of the scientific view, we may well 
 return to the definition of science given above: the 
 ordinary consciousness highly developed, not with- 
 out considerable abstraction, into critically conscious 
 method and clearest possible perception. Perhaps 
 development of anything is always at the cost of 
 abstraction; but be this as it may, science certainly 
 arises through an abstraction, namely, through the 
 abstraction of consciousness of one's world, through 
 the treatment of this mere consciousness as some- 
 thing to be cultivated quite for its own sake ; and the 
 motive and the meaning of such a treatment are not 
 far to seek. Consciousness, to the exclusion or in- 
 hibition of direct, overt action, becomes a matter 
 for abstract, which is to say, exclusive cultivation, 
 with any serious change, with any upheaval in the 
 familiar conditions of life. A man or boy, if you 
 prefer is taking a cross-country run, and for a time 
 all goes well ; the manner of his going suffers no inter- 
 ruption, or no serious interruption ; but gradually the 
 undergrowth thickens from low bushes to higher 
 brushwood, and at last, perhaps quite suddenly, break- 
 ing through some wild hedge, the runner finds himself 
 at the very edge of a stream too wide and too deep 
 for any ordinary crossing. Thereupon his running, 
 or at least his forward running, say the running of 
 his "real life," ceases, and looking takes its place. 
 He is now, in a familiar phrase, " looking before leap- 
 ing " ; yet with his looking there is a good deal of 
 running too, more or less overt, but also more or less 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 59 
 
 instrumental or merely mechanical, as, going from one 
 point to another, he measures the relations of bank 
 to bank, or of possible stepping-stones to each other, 
 or hunts for fallen logs or for shallow places. But, 
 finally, the measurements all made, the peculiar con- 
 ditions as fully as possible appreciated, in the way 
 found to be most feasible he crosses the stream and 
 runs again. And just in that "looking before leap- 
 
 \ ing," with the accompanying check put upon the for- 
 ward running and with the change of the " real life " 
 of running into merely instrumental action, we get at 
 least a glimpse of what science is, of the sort of 
 abstraction that its rise implies. 
 
 Only science, specifically so called, is more than 
 such a casual, merely personal study of a new situa- 
 tion. Science is the distinct work of a distinct class 
 
 \ abstractly studying a new situation that has confronted 
 the progress not of an individual, but of a whole people, 
 and in this character it gets at once all the advantages 
 and all the conceits that belong in general to the life 
 of a class. It gets, too, all the limitations. Science, 
 once more, is not strictly a personal experience, al- 
 though in personal experience, like that of the cross- 
 country runner, we can get a glimpse of just that 
 which may develop into science. Science is char- 
 acteristically a profession. The runner withholds his 
 running for a time and merely looks and studies, yet 
 his looking is only for a time ; sooner or later he will 
 run again ; and even while he studies there is his 
 continued moving about, his instrumental action, as 
 we called it ; but the professional scientist waives all 
 thought of possible future activity. Although in reality 
 
60 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 his looking is before leaping, it is not consciously 
 so for him ; he is one who under the constraints of 
 his class merely looks and studies, making of these 
 processes things quite worthy in themselves. 
 
 In other words, to enlarge somewhat on what has 
 just been said, the rise of the profession of science 
 does indeed involve both the same check upon the 
 " real life " and the same reduction of activity to a 
 purely mechanical or instrumental character that we 
 have pointed out in the case of the runner at the bank 
 of the stream, but a number of different social classes 
 divides the labour. In general, society as a means 
 to the expression and development of human activity, be 
 the activity running or living in a broader and fuller 
 sense, always shows the different phases or factors of 
 the experience identified more or less exclusively with 
 as many different classes or groups, and, in respect 
 to the particular case here under consideration, upon 
 the rise of science society appears to delegate the 
 work of careful observation and critical thinking to a 
 separate class, which, as already suggested, gives up 
 any direct responsibility to the real life. Another 
 distinct class, arising contemporaneously, is composed 
 of those who do feel directly responsible, or " practical," 
 continuing the life of positive, overt action. This 
 second class maintains the vital processes, although in 
 a more or less consciously instrumental way, since its 
 members have the lives of others as well as their own 
 lives to support. So society gets its workers or 
 labourers as well as its observers and thinkers. 
 
 The rise of science, then, involves a disrupted 
 society. Moreover, the division is by no means so 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 61 
 
 simple as the foregoing analysis may seem to have 
 implied. Observing and thinking, for example, have 
 often made, too, separate sub-classes, and also there 
 have been many distinct groups among the workers, 
 such as clerks, soldiers, artisans, road-menders, and 
 tillers of the soil. The simple analysis, however, has 
 been quite enough to show, what has seemed to need 
 emphasis, that all the passions of social life, or rather 
 of social caste, are brought to bear upon the pro- 
 fession of science, giving it the peculiar conceits and 
 advantages of class or caste, and also imposing upon 
 it the peculiar limitations. The advantages, among 
 others, are the strength that lies in union, and the 
 long continuity and the imitation that always ensure 
 an accumulation of experience and a refinement of 
 method and an attainment to impersonal, impartial 
 standards; the conceits are exclusiveness, sense of 
 sanctity or intrinsic worth, and consequent claims 
 to aristocracy; and the limitations, although possibly 
 already quite obvious, are hereafter to be pointed out. 
 But whatever the limitations or the opportunities, it 
 is now our chief concern that the social conditions 
 of its rise must greatly intensify the abstraction of 
 science, the treatment of the consciousness of the 
 world, which is but the sphere of action, the totality 
 of the manifested conditions of action, as something 
 to be cultivated wholly for its own sake. 
 
 Nor is this fact that science is an abstraction, 
 intensified by the conditions of class life, the only 
 fact to which the rise of science bears witness. There 
 is something else equally significant something, in- 
 deed, so intimately involved in this as perhaps not 
 
62 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 properly to be referred to as another fact at all, being 
 only a further manifestation of what is already before 
 us. There never arises abstraction without duplicity. 
 
 Plainly a disrupted society, such as has been seen to 
 be incident to the rise of science, means also a dis- 
 rupted life. In general the corporate life of any single 
 class resulting from the division can be only partial, I 
 do not say in respect to " real life," since this phrase has 
 itself been associated with too narrow a meaning, but 
 to human nature, to human life in its entirety, in its 
 real fulness, in its true breadth and its true depth. 
 All class life, I repeat, involving as it does disruption 
 
 x and selection of some particular interest or relation, 
 is inadequate to any human being, and the life of 
 science is no exception to this rule. Membership in 
 any class and conformity to its peculiar life, which is 
 
 \ partial and abstract as partial, have never satisfied 
 anybody, and the life of the professional scientist, 
 again, is no exception to this rule. Accordingly any 
 abstraction in life, the isolation of any specific interest, 
 when seen in just the light of its necessary inadequacy, 
 of its definite, more or less exclusive partiality, must 
 imply in life a demand for reality and completeness, 
 and this the more as the abstraction is assertive, as 
 the isolation is insistent. Simply, the whole life will 
 never brook an untempered neglect from any of its 
 always self-assertive parts. Plainly, however, as 
 plainly as a disrupted society must mean a disrupted 
 life for each resulting group, such a demand can be 
 met only in one way, if the cause for it continues; 
 it can be met only by some form of duplicity, by some 
 way in which, however indirectly, the life of those 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 63 
 
 concerned will always really be more than it seems 
 or will always actually imply what explicitly or 
 formally it appears to exclude. No such narrow life, 
 in short, as must always characterize any social group, 
 can ever be without its compensating innuendoes or 
 indirections for the life from which it is outwardly 
 aloof, and while the peculiar manner in which the 
 true reality and the wholeness of life are thus con- 
 served will very naturally always be determined by 
 the particular class or the particular class-character 
 involved, being of one sort for road-menders and of 
 quite a different sort for scientific observers, the 
 organization of society seems bound at every turn to 
 show that duplicity, compensation as it always is 
 for partiality, is an indispensable condition. Duplicity, 
 whatever may be its own special dangers, is always 
 better, being nearer to reality, than narrowness. 
 
 Is not the road-mender also a good Catholic, or in 
 some other way, conventional or unconventional, 
 religiously devout, piously doing, not his own, but 
 another's work ? Does not the scientist give point to 
 the idea of another and different life, that is to say, of 
 his life of knowledge not being the whole of life, by 
 the agnosticism which he not only carefully asserts 
 but also actually embodies as a factor in his method ? 
 The road-mender slaves at his humble task, ignorant 
 and yet trustful, believing in an infallible wisdom and 
 an absolute power, and the scientist lives with great 
 enthusiasm to know the world as it is, but tells us at 
 the same time with no less enthusiasm and with a 
 meaning that certainly ought to temper his exclusive- 
 ness that the object which he studies and describes 
 
64 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 is nevertheless really unknowable. To quote Mr. 
 Spencer: "The man of science . . . more than any 
 other, truly knows that in its ultimate essence nothing 
 can be known." Surely there is meaning for Steven- 
 son's story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in other fields 
 besides that of morality. Class life must always in- 
 volve its members in a protective or compensating 
 duplicity. 
 
 But now, whatever in the life of other classes this 
 duplicity, which conserves the wholeness of life even 
 when formally life is narrow and partial, ought to be 
 called, in the profession of science it often goes under 
 the name of dualism. Seen at different angles, it is 
 now dualism, now objectivism, now agnosticism. In 
 each of these different ways the scientist, quite out- 
 doing or transcending his profession, recognizes a 
 sphere of reality or a sphere of activity, that is beyond 
 that of the knowledge which he makes his special 
 business, and, as is very important to observe, the 
 peculiar manner of his recognition of this sphere, or 
 the peculiar character of his duplicity, is relative to 
 just the abstraction which makes his science what it 
 is. Thus his peculiar duplicity is one of conscious 
 subject and unconscious, external object, of observing 
 man and objective nature, of real knowledge and un- 
 knowable reality. 
 
 Yet here, before discussing further the relation of 
 dualism to science, it is well to observe that the 
 positive history of science justifies the account of its 
 rise which has now been given. The age of science 
 among the Greeks was coincident with the closing 
 conflict between Greek civilization and the general life 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 65 
 
 of the Mediterranean, and the age of modern science 
 began, not to attempt a long story, with the discovery 
 of America. All " looking before leaping " is transi- 
 tional or revolutionary, and while, of course, there had 
 been transitions and degrees of scientific inquiry 
 before, the science of the Greeks belongs to that very 
 critical transition from Greece to Kome ; and modern 
 science, to the transition, certainly not less critical, 
 from Christendom to who can say to what? But 
 not only does history show science to arise when there 
 is a stream to cross ; also it shows the life of the time, 
 in the first place, to be sharply disintegrated, its 
 different factors being separately and abstractly ex- 
 pressed through as many different social groups, and, 
 in the second place, in each of the groups to be given 
 to double living, to the storm and stress of being one 
 thing and seeming another. Always an age, conspicu- 
 ously and characteristically scientific, has been an age 
 of clearly developed classes and of a general duplicity 
 in living. 
 
 Thus, to give a striking, although possibly too 
 philosophical an illustration of the duplicity, Demo- 
 critus, the great materialist and atomist, and Plato, the 
 great idealist, were contemporaries and equally were 
 creatures of their day and generation, and their 
 century was the century of great achievements in 
 Greek science. Moreover, as regards the coincident 
 organization of society, we know at least of Plato that 
 he was keenly conscious of the divisions of society 
 into distinct classes. And in very much the same 
 way materialism and idealism, not to mention hedon- 
 ism and rigorism, or naturalism and supernaturalism, 
 
66 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 have been inseparately associated with the rise and 
 the successes of modern science. These philosophies, 
 it must be remembered, are always more than so 
 many conflicting "isms." They are, too, more than 
 the special conceits, in theory or in practice, of so 
 many separate social classes or of the great leaders of 
 these classes. In their very differences they are the 
 definite, the "public" expression of a conflict, or 
 division, that inwardly affects every individual mem- 
 ber, whatever his class or profession, which the society 
 contains. In the day and generation of Democritus 
 and Plato were there not well-defined parties, manifest 
 in all the different and separately organized phases of 
 life moral, industrial, political or religious, namely, 
 the parties of the conservatives and the radicals ? And 
 were there not also, as typical individual characters, 
 each of them revealing to everybody something present 
 within his own life, the only conventional loyalist and 
 the more truly loyal reformer, as well as the idle or 
 careless transgressor and the coldly calculating traitor ? 
 A life so divided and so variously impersonated was 
 certainly teeming with duplicity. 
 
 Nor have we yet finished with the evidence from 
 history. An age of science has always been not 
 merely an age with a stream to cross, nor yet merely 
 an age of classes and double living, but also an age of a 
 thoroughly conscious utilitarianism. Whether material- 
 istically or idealistically, all things have been treated 
 \ and also looked upon as means to some end, not ends 
 in themselves. For the disrupted society all activity 
 has been more or less consciously calculating and in- 
 strumental. As we know, the disruption means 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 67 
 
 actual, when not also intentional, division of labour, 
 and surely there never has been division of labour 
 without eventual development of a distinct sense of 
 the various special instruments and activities as 
 utilities rather than things of intrinsic value. For a 
 time, it is true, the several classes and their activities 
 may maintain the semblance of conservatism and in- 
 dependence; but their inevitable duplicity is bound 
 sooner or later to give a consciously conventional or 
 utilitarian character to the conservatism, and just this 
 makes the activity of the people instrumental or only 
 mediately instead of immediately worthy. If, as some 
 are sure to contend, the division of labour always 
 tends to end, and often does end, in the formation of 
 castes, and in consequence the instrumental character 
 of the activities is forgotten, it needs only to be said 
 in reply that an invitation is then given to some out- 
 side power to step in and to make use of, instead of 
 just treasuring or hoarding, the developed instruments 
 or utilities. Caste in the organization of society not 
 only induces absolutism at home, but also, and in this 
 way is fully revealed its real but suppressed utili- 
 tarianism, invites conquest from abroad. The days of 
 Greek science were, almost notoriously, days of con- 
 ventionalism and utilitarianism : witness the Sophists 
 and their teaching, and the life which they waited 
 upon for pay; while the surviving conservatism, by 
 which, as cannot be questioned, the life of the time 
 was blind to its own real mission or purpose, made 
 possible and even historically necessary, first, the 
 Macedonian, and then the Eoman conquest of Greece. 
 What the Greeks, being too conservative, though 
 
68 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 utilitarian, failed to make full use of, another people, 
 less hampered by tradition, finally appropriated. And 
 as for the days of modern science, these, so far as un- 
 folded to our view, have not been unlike in kind: 
 witness the Machiavellism, with which they began, 
 and the spirit of commercialism, which has character- 
 ized them throughout. 
 
 One thing more, too, from the facts of history may 
 have our attention, although possibly this addition is 
 quite unnecessary the fact, namely, of scepticism 
 coupled always with a hopeful curiosity. A disrupted 
 society, dividing the labour of human life, is as 
 sceptical as it is conventional, and as given to experi- 
 ment and exploration, which are never without their 
 sense of mystery, and even to conquest, never without 
 its risks, as it is utilitarian. Was it curiosity or mere 
 Hellenic conceit, the sense of adventure or the mere 
 dogmatism of a Greek, that took Alexander abroad 
 with his armies, or that earlier turned the attention 
 of Athens to the possibilities of the "West? And 
 which, curiosity or religious and political propagand- 
 ism, a pagan greed or a Christian piety, inspired the 
 Western and Southern voyages of the fifteenth and 
 sixteenth centuries? Which gave rise even to the 
 Crusades? It would be interesting, if our present 
 purposes only warranted the undertaking, to trace 
 the forerunning conditions of a period of scientific 
 endeavour. We could then show both how scientific 
 curiosity has developed as but one expression of a 
 general interest in experimental endeavour, in adven- 
 ture and in conquests of all sorts, and especially how 
 this interest, with its mingling of doubt and con- 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 69 
 
 fident seeking, has been preceded by a period of art. 
 Art, appeal as it always is from the human as ex- 
 pressed in the established ways of some given social 
 organization to the natural, shows a people sensitive 
 to a mystery, a real but unseen end, in its developed 
 activities, but not yet willing to let the experimental 
 and instrumental character of those activities have 
 free expression. It appeals to the natural, which is of 
 course the sphere of all adventure, but, still cherishing 
 the human, it never gets, so to speak, out of sight of 
 home. Science, the successor of art, shows home, that 
 is, the human and the subjective, left far behind. But 
 to follow out the line of thought here suggested would 
 take us too far afield. Let it suffice, then, that we 
 see these two things : how historically and socially 
 the investigations of science, whatever their relations 
 to an antecedent art, such as that of the Greeks 
 or of Christendom in the Kenaissance, are but an 
 incident within a general life of appeal to nature 
 that is, of exploration and conquest and then how 
 the scepticism, involved in the inquiries of science, 
 is intrinsic to a life that, for reasons now clear to 
 us, has become both conventional and utilitarian, both 
 formal or unreal in itself and consciously only in- 
 strumental. The first of these brings to mind what 
 was referred to in a previous chapter, that science is 
 man in his doubt seeking the companionship of 
 nature; and the second will aid us greatly in under- 
 standing the attitude and method of science, to which, 
 having the evidence of history, we have next to turn. 
 
 We have found the rise of science to imply a 
 general abstraction of the various factors in human 
 
70 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 life, and to be itself, in particular, the abstraction of 
 the consciousness of nature, nature being the totality 
 of the manifest conditions of life. This abstraction 
 has been developed and intensified by the formation 
 of distinct social classes; and, in the special case of the 
 consciousness of nature, by the formation of a class of 
 scientists, so called, who cultivate their science for its 
 own sake. We have found the rise of science to imply 
 also a general duplicity, evident within the field of 
 science in what is known as dualism. Duplicity is a 
 natural accompaniment of all abstraction, and it has, 
 as we saw at least in part, a certain protective and 
 corrective function, which both the logic of experience 
 and the social and historical conditions of its expres- 
 sion and development warranted us in ascribing to it. 
 And, finally, we have found that in actual life abstrac- 
 tion and duplicity make activity conventional and 
 utilitarian, that is to say, consciously instrumental 
 or let me now say experimental. In just these 
 conditions, then, the general abstraction and duplicity, 
 the conscious formalism and regard for utility, and the 
 sense of experimentation, we have the determinant, 
 formative influences of science's attitude and method, 
 for any given set of conditions always makes the 
 method with which the conditions themselves are met. 
 Socrates, with his method of cross-questioning so 
 fatal to all ideas that should give knowledge any 
 visible form or resting-place, was but the spirit of his 
 time, the spirit of radical inquiry become incarnate 
 and assertive in public places. He was but a visible, 
 public exponent of the critical examination of life 
 which the self-consciousness of his time made neces- 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 71 
 
 sary. Indeed, no organic form, no living creature, 
 ever reflected the character of its environment more 
 fully, or more successfully effected an adaptive life 
 than the method, with its searching questions, and its 
 subtle, logical gymnastic, of that honestly and radi- 
 cally inquisitive Sophist. And the standpoint and the 
 procedure of science, in respect to the relation to their 
 environment, are closely comparable with the method 
 of Socrates. 
 
 Thus science seeks a complete abstraction of the 
 looking consciousness, and then with a timely duplicity 
 it looks to a wholly external, natural world. So in 
 the field of its peculiar abstraction does science take 
 the character and colour of its surroundings. But, 
 further, it presumes upon the peculiar forms and con- 
 ditions of its subjective, looking consciousness, the 
 activities of the mind, being mediative or instru- 
 mental to the presentation of the external objective 
 world, and it uses also the activities of life at large, 
 both the bread-and-butter activities and the mechanical 
 inventions, both the political and the industrial 
 organizations, as supplementary aids to its observa- 
 tions ; for just science, the looking consciousness, is the 
 end, and this end is presumed to justify every avail- 
 able means. So, again, does science take the cue from 
 its environment, expressing in its own way and to its 
 own purposes the general experimentalism ; and this 
 the more significantly when we remember that, besides 
 being experimental, treating the mind as an instru- 
 ment and life's activities at large as only aids more or 
 less directly pertinent to the mind's work, it is 
 agnostic. Its peculiar agnosticism not only reflects 
 
72 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 its duplicity, as was before suggested, but in addition 
 shows how very abstract its knowledge is, and I 
 know no better phrase how timelily adventurous. A 
 time of science is a time when all things final are 
 beyond; yet also, when all things present, however 
 mysteriously, are really leading yonder. 
 
 Further, science always divides the field of its opera- 
 tions, and so, besides greatly compounding its abstract- 
 ness, reflects in its own way, or, as it were, projects on 
 its own plane, what I will call the specialism of the 
 contemporary social organization. There is division of 
 labour in this, but there is also a difficulty, which, 
 among other difficulties, is hereafter to be considered. 
 
 And there is, finally, one more characterization of 
 science which is suggested by the conditions of its rise, 
 but by something in those conditions not yet brought 
 into clear view. An age of science is an age of a 
 rising, although perhaps formally suppressed and 
 disguised individualism, and quite in sympathy, the 
 method of science is "inductive," science, though 
 interested in classification, always having regard for 
 the natural rights of particular things, of single indi- 
 viduals, reasoning from the particular to the general, 
 as the phrase runs, not in the reverse order. Indi- 
 vidualism has been a much misunderstood thing, be it 
 a social movement or a logical condition of inductive 
 thinking. The individual as person or as objective 
 datum has been greatly abused. But at least for the 
 present, waiving any discussion of the true character 
 of the individual or any protest that the individual 
 and the definite or particular must not be con- 
 fused, I would only assert, but I venture to assert 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 73 
 
 strongly, first, that behind the conventionalism and 
 utilitarianism of the life of a society divided into 
 distinct classes, behind the abstraction and the inevi- 
 table duplicity, behind the sense of experiment and 
 adventure, the individual person is the real power, and 
 secondly, that in induction science has only translated 
 this real individualism of its time into an attitude or 
 method for the conduct of its looking consciousness. 
 In this way, as in those other ways, has science been 
 educated to its peculiar manner. 
 
 We have thus seen how science arises, and how its 
 rise gives it a certain character. But already suspicion 
 of limitations in the view of science, and so of a case 
 for doubt with regard to it, has come to us. Abstrac- 
 tion and duplicity both suggest limitations, though 
 these may not be unmixed. What the specific diffi- 
 culties are, however, and how far they really justify 
 our doubting, must be reserved for the ensuing 
 chapter. 
 
CHAPTEE V. 
 
 THE VIEW OF SCIENCE: 
 ITS LIMITATIONS. 
 
 LIMITATIONS or opportunities ? Error or truth ? In 
 the familiar illustration the tracks which limit the 
 locomotive to a certain course are essential to its 
 successful movement, and something of the same kind 
 may be true of science. A man's vices and virtues 
 are never really far apart, and, again, the same may be 
 true of science. But for the moment we are to ap- 
 proach science from the standpoint of its limitations ; 
 we are to see how its own natural ideals, as suggested 
 by our characterization of the scientific view, are 
 evidence of its inadequacy. So doing we shall take a 
 most important step towards a thorough-going con- 
 fession of doubt. 
 
 Among scientific men it is a commonplace that for 
 accuracy and genuineness or purity, that is to say 
 for complete abstraction, science must be (1) inde- 
 pendent of " life," all the subjective interests, whether 
 personal or social, the interests of politics, industry, 
 morality, or religion, being science's most unsettling 
 influences ; (2) specialistic, the " Jack of all trades " in 
 science being anything but persona grata among scien- 
 tific men ; and (3) agnostic or " positivistic," all con- 
 
 74 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 75 
 
 ceits about what is beyond positive experience, and 
 even all dogma about what seems really present to 
 experience, being most arrant heresy ; and every one of 
 these ideals, besides being derived from the habits or 
 instincts, commonly unrecognized and unappreciated, 
 of the ordinary consciousness, is wholly in accord with 
 the conclusions of the preceding chapter. The attitude 
 of science, as there disclosed, involved a looking to 
 an external world the objectivism ; a division of the 
 field the specialism; and an experimental, adven- 
 turous mind the agnosticism or positivism. It in- 
 volved other things, too, but these three are now 
 selected, so to speak, as three determining points of 
 science's circumference. Consideration of them, to 
 whatever results it may lead, should meet all the de- 
 mands of the present task. As for the results, these 
 will show fundamental difficulties, very like to those 
 of ordinary experience, to lurk in each one of the 
 three ideals. The scientific consciousness is abstract 
 and just for being in consequence objectivistic, special- 
 istic, and agnostic it is artificial and unreal, though 
 perhaps only relatively or not unmixedly unreal, and 
 especially it is honeycombed with paradoxes and con- 
 tradictions, with the translated but not transcended 
 contradictions of ordinary life. 
 
 To the examination, therefore, of these difficulties, 
 or limitations, we must now turn, taking the three 
 ideals in order. 
 
 I. SCIENCE WOULD BE OBJECTIVE. 
 
 The ideal of a purely objective science is in many 
 ways a great delusion, for it may effectually blind 
 
76 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 science to its necessary subjectivism, so far as it gets 
 any substance or content, and to its necessary formal- 
 ism, so far as it acts upon a merely external world. 
 With regard, for example, to the last point, just so far 
 as the ideal of objectivism is realized, science becomes 
 merely so much technique. By technique here is 
 meant everything that makes scientific work purely 
 mechanical. A purely mechanical procedure is the in- 
 evitable, the natural and necessary method of a pure 
 objectivism. Scientists have their formal etiquette 
 about pre-empted problems or fields of research, their 
 notions about originality as dependent merely on 
 working a new field hence the pre-emption to 
 prevent transgression or theft of originality, their 
 conceits about bibliographical information, linguistic 
 proficiency and technical phraseology, their satisfaction 
 over "publication," "contribution," "production," and 
 "research," and an almost Gaston-Alphonse deference 
 of each to each among the different branches of scien- 
 tific inquiry; and under technique all these things, 
 as well as the more familiar matters of method and 
 apparatus and material, are here included. Physicians, 
 we are told, and not infrequently also their patients, 
 suffer from a professional ritual and etiquette, but 
 they are far from being alone in their misery. Scien- 
 tists, would-be objective scientists, and all who 
 appeal to them, are a close second. " Technique must 
 have its real uses, but plainly it has its limitations. 
 It is one of the enabling conditions, a sine qua non of 
 science, if science is to be objective, but it takes the 
 life out of science. A science that gets no further, 
 that is only "objective," that is, "pure" and "in- 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 77 
 
 ductive" is wholly vain, being like a domestic animal 
 which is only a pet, or rather like a vigorous plant 
 that runs luxuriously to leaves, never bearing either 
 flowers or fruit. Its much vaunted observation and 
 experiment may fill a good many pages and a good 
 many volumes, but material, even material in books, 
 and experiments, even carefully, minutely reported 
 experiments, are neither roses nor apples. 
 
 A fruitful science relates itself to something more 
 than a mere independent object. A fruitful science 
 involves synthesis, not formal, but real synthesis, as 
 well as analysis, its decomposed object being also only 
 the separated details of some organizing activity. In- 
 deed, however unconsciously, or even however against 
 its own avowed interest and desire, science has that 
 organizing activity in the real life. The " real life " 
 has seemed aloof, but science is truly an integral part 
 of this life. Science's very genesis in social evolution, 
 in spite of, nay, even because of its abstraction by a 
 distinct class and the assumption of a professional 
 garb, is witness to this relationship. Again, fruitful 
 science is practical invention, not abstract discovery, 
 and the real life of a person or a society or a race 
 is as important to it, as much a warrant of its 
 conclusions, as any object, however mathematically 
 described or describable, with which science was 
 ever concerned. As for the thing invented, the tool 
 or the machine, in general the instrument of adapta- 
 tion to environment, this sometimes takes visible, 
 wholly material form; sometimes it appears as a 
 method in the practical arts or in the fine arts or in 
 education or government; sometimes it is only an 
 
78 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 atmosphere or point of view, a habit of mind; but 
 whatever it is, it is useful, incalculably useful, and its 
 invention as something that is widely distinguished 
 from mere receptive observation, if this be even 
 possible, or from mere accurate description, is science's 
 primary justification. 
 
 But this, objects somebody, is sentiment, and senti- 
 ment of the sort that quite destroys science, making real 
 science, serious and accurate science, quite impossible. 
 Well, it does of course dispense with a purely objec- 
 tive science. It suggests the idea, perhaps the un- 
 comfortable idea, that, as in some other departments 
 in life, so in science, death is a condition of success. 
 Science must die to its objective self before it is saved; 
 it must lose its whole world to gain its own soul. Or, 
 to put the same idea differently, if the assertion be 
 not too much like verbal play, a subjective science is 
 not hopelessly unscientific. Is a man less interested 
 in having a proper edge on his razor because eventu- 
 ally he must use it on himself ? Nothing but a keen 
 edge can ever ensure a "velvet shave," and nothing but 
 the truth, the more accurate it be the better, can ever 
 set anybody free. 
 
 Still, all questions of sentiment or of sharp razors 
 or of the accuracy that liberates aside, we can get 
 support for our scepticism about a science that, if 
 purely objective, must be also empty and mechanical 
 from science itself. The consistent evolutionist is 
 obliged to deny pure objectivity to any scientific 
 knowledge, just as in general he is obliged to think of 
 all consciousness as never something by itself, but one 
 of the positive conditions of organic development. To 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 79 
 
 be an evolutionist, and at the same time to think of 
 consciousness as only an external ornament of life, 
 or in its higher development as the exclusive privilege 
 of a distinct class, to think of it as an aside in life, 
 perhaps a sudden result without in any way being also 
 a condition of development, to suppose science to be 
 solely objective and for its own sake, is nothing more 
 or less than simply to stultify oneself completely. 
 Even for the historian, whether avowed evolutionist or 
 not, whose great business is to remind us that what is 
 here or what is now is not all, the devotion to science 
 for its own sake, which also in other times has 
 possessed the minds and hearts of certain men, can 
 be at best only a local and a passing phenomenon. 
 Finally, apart from the standpoint of evolution or 
 history, it is to be said that human society at 
 large is sure to resent what may be styled the 
 aristocratic temper which pure, objective science is all 
 too likely to acquire from the exclusiveness of its 
 ritual or technique, or say from its abstract and 
 academic dress, and the resentment of society is 
 important evidence always. Aristocratic temper, 
 whatever its direction, is certainly as desirable in 
 social life as it is necessary; it is incident to the 
 development of all institutions political, ecclesiastical, 
 industrial, ceremonial, educational, and, to add to the 
 familiar list, epistemological ; but the resentment which 
 it is sure to awaken is not one whit less serviceable 
 to society, ensuring as it does, among other things, the 
 extension of science, the translation of science into 
 life. 
 
 So, to gather the threads together, two difficulties 
 
8o THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 have now appeared as affecting the objectivism of 
 science. The first, that of burial in technique, gave us 
 our starting-point, and the second has come to light 
 with discussion of the first. Thus, not merely is a 
 would-be objective science, through its bondage to 
 technique, made formal and empty, but also, as per- 
 haps only the other side of the same truth, a would-be 
 objective science materially that is, for its scien- 
 tific doctrines and formally that is, for its motives 
 and methods is always in practice dependent upon the 
 demands and sanctions of real life, and so not purely, 
 or not dualistically, objective after all. There is, in 
 brief, no other conclusion. Either science must be 
 empty, a matter merely of dead rites and dry symbols 
 and irrelevant ideas, or it must be pertinent and 
 practical; and, if the latter, its boasted independence 
 is gone. A purely objective science seems to get only 
 subjectivity for its pains. 
 
 Yet this conclusion is easily misunderstood. It is 
 far from denying any meaning to such words as object 
 or objectivity. The object is denied only as an external 
 independent existence. The object still remains to 
 experience as possibly of mediative value to its be- 
 holders, mediating between the actual in their life and 
 the possible, between the partial life and the whole 
 life, the old and the new, the social, which is always 
 narrow, and the personal. The whole must be always 
 "objective" to the part, the possible to the actual, the 
 personal to the social ; or, conversely, the " objective," 
 natural world can be only the convincing witness to 
 the part or to the actual or to the social, not that 
 there is an independent, wholly external world, but 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 81 
 
 that there is a whole or a possible or a personal. 
 " Truly, we are all one," writes Fiona Macleod. " It is 
 a common tongue we speak, though the wave has its 
 own whisper, the wind its own sigh, and the lip of 
 man its word, and the heart of woman its silence." 
 We are all one. Man and nature, which man beholds, 
 or the subject and the object, of which the subject is 
 conscious, are one ; but an objective science would hide 
 this from us, not tell it to us. 
 
 But besides burying science in technique, and 
 besides involving it in an only disguised, albeit a 
 socially significant subjectivity, the ideal of wholly 
 objective knowledge has also made science conserva- 
 tive in a way that must have peculiar interest here. 
 Keference is not now made to the double truth or the 
 double life which an objective science sanctions so 
 cordially that men can hold so-called advanced scien- 
 tific ideas without feeling them in any serious conflict 
 with the traditional teachings of religion and morality, 
 but to something else perhaps not wholly unrelated 
 to this, and certainly not less suggestive of contra- 
 diction. While science is commonly supposed to be 
 advanced and radical and up to date, if anything is, 
 it is so only in a way which calls for a very im- 
 portant qualification, for it manages to perpetuate, not 
 indeed the letter, but the spirit of old views. At its 
 best a purely objective science can give only a new 
 material content, or a new arrangement perhaps of an 
 old content, to existing and time-worn forms of 
 thought; it cannot possibly do that in which real 
 progress must always consist, namely, develop, recog- 
 nize, and adopt new forms of thought, new categories ; 
 o 
 
82 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 it cannot do that without betraying its own ideal of 
 mere objectivism. Objective science to give a com- 
 monplace example has said relatively to a certain 
 doctrine of creation that spirit did not precede matter, 
 but instead matter preceded spirit, and except for 
 the excitement of the drawn battle which such a 
 startling declaration has precipitated this can hardly 
 be said to have involved any great advance. Cause 
 and effect have indeed been made to change places 
 by the new deal, and perhaps in common fairness it 
 was high time that a change be made, but no new con- 
 ception of causation itself has been recognized. The 
 new creationalism, the materialistic, has no essential 
 advantage over the old. Again, while deposing the 
 First Cause, an objective science has made all things 
 causes after the same plan individual, arbitrary, 
 antecedent causes ; and this is only to multiply 
 indefinitely, perhaps infinitely, the offensive creation- 
 alism. " Not so," says some one ; " there is a splendid 
 democracy in it, and it implies a great deal more 
 than mere multiplication. Indefiniteness, or at least 
 infinity, transforms anything or everything to which 
 it is applied. By making all things causes one forces 
 into science the important principle of the equation 
 of action and reaction, everything being seen as acted 
 upon as well as acting, and this principle, as if by turn- 
 ing creationalism fatally against itself, yields a new 
 standpoint, that of mechanicalism." Granted, and 
 granted cordially, but has a purely objective science 
 any right to change its standpoint ? 
 
 Possibly this does not mean very much. Then 
 approach the matter from another side, risking a 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 83 
 
 reference to one of science's pet conceits, the "ques- 
 tion of fact." It has been for science a question of 
 fact, of mere objective fact, whether matter made 
 mind or mind made matter; whether this or that 
 thing is or is not a cause of some other thing ; whether 
 certain very low, perhaps unicellular organisms show 
 purpose in their activities or do not, are gifted with a 
 natural tendency to social life, a real interest in their 
 kind, or are not so gifted ; or to take just one more 
 case whether the changes in the brain that precede 
 bodily movement are or are not directed by conscious- 
 ness, consciousness being in one case in causal relation 
 with the brain, and in the other only an idle, external 
 accompaniment, an " epi-phenomenon " ; but in each of 
 these questions of objective fact we see the scientist 
 only standing in his own light, obscuring the view of 
 what above all else it is important to see. Are mind 
 and matter, cause and effect, purpose, society, brain- 
 processes and consciousness such well-established con- 
 ceptions, are they such independent constants in the 
 scientist's formulae, that wholly uncritical questions of 
 fact are all that one needs to ask about them ? Why, 
 when one really thinks about it, to assume, as the 
 questions of fact of an objective science are made to 
 assume, that anything either is or is not something 
 else, is about as blinding and ill-advised as could well 
 be. It has the pleasing form of open-mindedness, but 
 only the form. It is very much as if some earnest, 
 yearning truth-seeker should exclaim : " I would see 
 clearly; therefore I will not open my eyes." No doubt 
 it keeps the scientist busy, eternally busy, dealing and 
 redealing his facts or data, as busy indeed as the play- 
 
84 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 ful cat that so hotly pursues her own tail, but it 
 does not con-tribute much that is positive and pro- 
 gressive. The very best that one can say for it is that 
 it turns the kaleidoscope of human experience, leading 
 as it usually does to a new arrangement of hard, un- 
 changing things. To the question, for example, about 
 lower organisms showing purpose or social feeling in 
 their activity, the scientist, after most careful experi- 
 ments, may answer in the negative, and be quite 
 emphatic in his answer too; but almost at once he or 
 some one for him will appreciate that mankind, 
 when scrutinized and experimented upon in the same 
 way, under the same instruments and through the 
 same laboratory methods, is similarly deficient; and 
 then, somehow, the wind is taken out of his sails, 
 since social feeling and purpose refuse to be so easily 
 disposed of. In this case, as in all cases, the question 
 of mere objective fact simply returns, as importunate 
 as ever, for another reckoning, with Shelley's cloud 
 silently laughing at its own cenotaph. 
 
 And what is the difficulty ? Once more the diffi- 
 culty is in the assumption, so natural to an objective 
 science, of fixed conceptions. Are purpose and social 
 feeling so fixed in their nature, and above all so well 
 understood, that their presence or absence can be 
 established by an experiment or two or ten thousand 
 conducted on strictly objective principles ? No con- 
 ceptions are fixed, and instead of questions of fact we 
 should have, what a strictly objective science cannot 
 have, questions of meaning. Thus, not: Are low 
 organisms, or any organisms, social or purposive ? 
 but: What, if anything, do the processes of their 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 85 
 
 lives testify as to the real nature of society or 
 purpose ? 
 
 The conservative character of objective science, or 
 the view-point in its question of fact which the con- 
 servatism determines, is the chief source of the 
 negative attitude of science so familiar to all and so 
 often an object of complaint. To take, perhaps, the 
 most widely interesting case, for science to suppose 
 that God either is or is not because he must either be 
 or not be the particular thing men have thought him 
 is to beg the theological question altogether. Indeed, 
 for this question of God's existence and for any other 
 question of objective fact a negative answer is almost, 
 if not quite, a foregone conclusion, since the very put- 
 ting of the question is, ipso facto, evidence that a new 
 idea of the thing inquired about of God, perhaps, or 
 purpose or society is at least just below the horizon 
 of man's consciousness, and so that the old idea has 
 already lost its validity. Nothing ever is where you 
 seek it, or what you seek in it, for the simple reason 
 that your conscious seeking has changed it. 
 then, look perhaps with a telescope after a God in 
 the skies for what you should know you cannot find ? 
 Why despair when a question meets a "no" of its own 
 dictation? The real questioner lives in a living world, 
 in which all things change and die, yet only for 
 rebirth, while the "objective" questioner simply 
 cannot see that the negative of his answer can be 
 only relative to what is already passing. 
 
 In so many ways, then, a would-be objective science 
 is open to criticism, and affords in consequence a cause 
 for doubt. Only subjectivity can make it fruitfully 
 
 od in \ 
 
 find? I 
 
86 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 and worthily scientific. Only a change in the form of 
 its question can make it substantially as well as form- 
 ally progressive. Only a tempering of its negative 
 answers to a merely relative meaning can make it 
 honest. It is looking at what is not, and in a way 
 which is artificial, and it sees everything only in the 
 clear light of its own shadow. Surely to be scientific is 
 human ; to be objective is to rival the lover's unselfish- 
 ness. 
 
 II. SCIENCE WOULD BE SPECIALISTIC. 
 
 But, secondly, there is the scientist's ideal of 
 specialism, which is at once not less earnestly cherished 
 and not less strikingly at constant war with itself. 
 What specialism for science means is known at least 
 in a general way to everybody, and that an objective 
 science must be made up of numberless independent 
 inquiries needs only mention, since the objective 
 world, if really innocent of all personal or subjective 
 relations, is necessarily manifold and discrete, being 
 made up of a number of wholly separate details, and 
 being approachable in every one of its parts from a 
 number of wholly separate standpoints. The objective 
 world apart from a subject is like a workshop without 
 a workman a collection of unused and so unconnected 
 tools and materials each one of which may have an 
 infinite number of uses; and the objective scientist 
 views it very much as a stranger, perhaps a savage 
 may I be forgiven that mark might view the lifeless 
 shop, seeing now this thing, now that, but never the 
 living unity of all the things. So, to repeat, as soon as 
 the self or subject is removed and the world is turned 
 objective, all things and all views of things must fall 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 87 
 
 apart, and science as the observation of such a world 
 can be only "special." Not so clear, however, or at 
 least not so commonly appreciated, is the peculiar 
 fallacy and contradiction of specialism to which atten- 
 tion is asked here. Once more is science to be seen as 
 in a sense standing in its own light, since it cannot be 
 at once special and directly and literally true and 
 adequate. 
 
 To begin with, specialism makes vision, the mind's 
 vision as well as the sensuous vision, dim or distorted. 
 It may even be said to induce a species of blindness 
 or, as virtually the same thing, to create in conscious- 
 ness curious fancies, strange perversions of reality, 
 seen not with the natural eye at all, but with the 
 imagination, always so ingenious and so original, and 
 one might almost add so hypnotic, in its power of 
 suggestion over the senses. In ways and for reasons 
 neither unknown nor unappreciated by most men, 
 specialism even closes one's eyes and makes one dream. 
 It makes the specialist among physicians see his 
 special ailment in every disorder, and every disorder 
 in his special ailment, and this so truly that merely 
 to consult him may be to fall his victim. True, he 
 may never be, perhaps can never be, wholly wrong, 
 and his transgressions, conscious or unconscious, have 
 often helped discovery, but nevertheless his situation, 
 not to say that of his patient, is full of humour, and 
 always among other troubles he is under the error of 
 partiality or one-sidedness. And in science generally 
 the specialist always does and always must dream. 
 His dreams may be waking dreams, but he is always 
 transgressing his own proper bounds without ever 
 
THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 clearly comprehending that he has transgressed. Nor, 
 be it admitted, can this necessity of dreaming be a 
 wholly unmixed evil to science. However unfavour- 
 ably it may reflect on the final, literal validity of any 
 special science, it only shows nature, or reality, pre- 
 serving her unity against the attempted violence of 
 specialism. It shows that in spite of the specialist 
 being all eyes for his own peculiar object, the mind 
 that is within him and that is above all else such, 
 apparently, is the nature of mind responsible not 
 exclusively to the special and sensuous, but to the 
 all-inclusive and essential, and is therefore bound to 
 conserve for experience the interests of an indivisible 
 universe in every particular thing, leads him, devotee 
 that he is, patiently repeating his sacred syllable, into 
 most wonderful visions. For the sake of inclusiveness 
 and reality his mind projects his would-be special 
 consciousness into regions of strange subtlety and 
 marvellous logical construction ; as Oriental priest or 
 Occidental scientist he is a specialist, yet not without 
 a mind, or a real, ever-present world, which refuses to 
 be special, and as he dreams he comes to see, yet knows 
 not that he sees, the whole universe. A seeing blind- 
 ness, then, is this specialism ; a monomania too, but, 
 of course, conventional and respectable. 
 
 Mathematics and physics and chemistry and biology 
 and psychology, not to say also the social sciences, all 
 depend upon the far-seeing mystical visions of the 
 mind, if not of the eye, upon the subtle, logical 
 constructions which their would-be scientific special- 
 ism, their desire to know all things narrowly, forces 
 upon them. Each one may be special, but each as it 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 89 
 
 gains precision and as it becomes truly an account of 
 the facts, under the guidance of an exacting mind 
 that at any cost must present the whole to conscious- 
 ness, conserves within itself the common universe of 
 them all by developing under what is called the 
 " scientific imagination " all sorts of indirections, dis- 
 guises, abstractions, logical constructions for the things 
 and view-points of the others. Each to be veracious 
 has no choice but to be also voracious, and when, for 
 example, a physical scientist insists on seeing his world 
 only physically, while in reality it is of course, to say 
 no more, a world of chemical process also, and even of 
 vital and mental character, he is sooner or later con- 
 strained to admit to his thinking what above were 
 called abstractions or logical constructions, but what 
 also pass under the name of "working hypotheses." 
 These are formally true to his physical standpoint, but 
 any outsider in order to explain why they are hy- 
 potheses that work must call them compensating or 
 conserving conceptions in short, logical constructions 
 that are, or that in part involve, substitutes for the 
 neglected points of view, being, as it were, the secret 
 agents of a universe refusing to be divided. To 
 characterize them in just one more way, a science's 
 working hypotheses, results as they are of science's 
 blind but brilliant dreaming, many or all of them, 
 are doors in the panelling by which the other sciences 
 are quietly admitted to a room seemingly tightly 
 closed to all comers. Every science, and this the more 
 as it becomes scientific, must entertain all the others, 
 however unwittingly. Tennyson's "flower in the 
 crannied wall," so often plucked, is nothing in all- 
 
90 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 inclusiveness when compared with a well-developed 
 special science. No science, physical or psychical, 
 biological or social, ever does or ever can live to itself 
 alone. It may will to, but it does not and it cannot. 
 All the others live with it and for it nay, they all 
 live in it. 
 
 Yet in actual practice, what are these working 
 hypotheses that work because they are compensating 
 conceptions or doors in the panelling ? No veracity 
 without unrestrained voracity is interesting as a 
 formula, but how verify it? Verification, or illus- 
 tration, is now imperative. Illustration, however, is 
 very difficult for a reason which the scientists now 
 on trial must allow me to mention. The scientists 
 know too much about the sciences, or at least of them, 
 while I know too little. Still, as too much knowledge 
 is often the source of obscurity, and so only a form of 
 ignorance, my situation is not altogether hopeless. 
 Thus, while it is true that the scientists are likely to 
 insist, even in the face of a mind bound to preserve 
 the unity of an indivisible universe in all the varied 
 studies and conclusions of science, that physics is only 
 physics and chemistry only chemistry and biology only 
 biology and psychology only psychology, and while 
 also all illustrations must come from the field of their 
 special studies, and may therefore only set them more 
 firmly in the wilful blindness of their specialism, 
 still the principle of a conserving mind, or an eternally 
 conserved truth or an indivisible reality, is a dis- 
 turbing influence which they cannot evade. Then, too, 
 I am forgetting and allowing them to forget a very 
 important fact in scientific work to-day. In these 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 91 
 
 times the running together or merging of different 
 sciences, as if through something of the nature of a 
 chemical reaction, is a very familiar phenomenon. It 
 is as familiar, although not so loudly heralded, as that 
 of the railroads and industrial companies ; and it has 
 been taking place with such persistence and confidence 
 as actually to suggest a natural affinity, each of the 
 sciences involved having the rich experience of dis- 
 covering itself already in the others. This fact, then, 
 must make illustration less difficult, since, in a way 
 that must appeal to the scientist as no merely theo- 
 retical considerations can, it proves or goes very far 
 toward proving what is to be illustrated. Moreover, 
 specific illustration is hardly necessary in the sphere 
 of the different physical sciences, or again, in that of 
 the social or the psychological sciences, for within 
 each one of these groups the affinity but just now 
 referred to has been very clearly exemplified, as in 
 the interesting case of physics, chemistry, and mathe- 
 matics, which nowadays are one science, not three, and 
 which can be held apart only on methodological 
 grounds, not metaphysically. Illustration, accordingly, 
 appears, after all, to be needed only for the specialism 
 that separates the physical and the psychical sciences. 
 Physiological psychology and physically experi- 
 mental psychology, both of them suggestive of noth- 
 ing less incongruous than seething ice, are sure to 
 come to mind at once; but also there is a mathe- 
 matical psychology, comparable with a developmental 
 mechanics and biometrics in biology, and hardly a 
 single field of science, however apparently distant and 
 alien in nature and interest, has not contributed some- 
 
92 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 thing to psychology or to epistemology, the general 
 science of knowledge. But now it is likely to be 
 objected by some one that just because sciences, 
 whether in clearly related or in widely separated 
 fields, are useful to each other, just because they can 
 serve, as they do, in the role of methods of each other, 
 they are not necessarily in any real and natural 
 affinity. May not their association be purely one of 
 utility, involving no surrender of special individuality 
 and requiring in any case only temporary relationship? 
 The question is absurd. Any means that really serves 
 an end must have something in common with the end 
 it serves; and, again, an end that really sanctions a 
 means, whatever the means be, must itself be, at least 
 potentially, which is after all to say essentially, in and 
 of the means employed. Different sciences, then, even 
 physics and psychology, or natural science and theo- 
 logy, cannot be even temporarily methods of each 
 other without partaking in some way, under some dis- 
 guise or other, through some peculiarity in their con- 
 ceptions or in the relations of their conceptions, of 
 each other's subject-matter. 
 
 In view of this fact of mutual participation of 
 nature and idea among the sciences that use each 
 other, I have myself conceived, and in another place 
 have given expression to, what appropriately may be 
 called a physical psychology or epistemology. 1 This 
 new hybrid science is especially concerned with noth- 
 ing more nor less than those substitutes, disguises, or 
 
 1 See an article: "Epistemology and Physical Science A Fatal 
 Parallelism," in the Philosophical Review, Vol. VII, No. 4, July, 
 1896. 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 93 
 
 indirections, really present in all the physical sciences, 
 for the peculiar nature, for the peculiar sort of unity, 
 intensive instead of extensive or qualitative instead of 
 quantitative, or say also even vital and spiritual instead 
 of physical, which is always associated with mind. In 
 conservation of matter, energy, what you will, in 
 plenitude, in motion as only relative and so as always 
 under a principle of uniformity and constancy or even 
 immobility, in motion too as inclining to vibration, 
 which suggests poise or tension, or to rotation, in 
 which we see rest as well as motion, and finally, not to 
 extend what might be a long list, in the infinity of 
 space and time or of quantity, the physical sciences 
 have hidden entrances for the silent, usually unnoticed 
 admission of what is psychical. But I may seem 
 to be jumping too far, to be presuming too much. 
 Then put the case in this way not quite so direct, 
 but to the same goal. All of these conceptions, so 
 necessary to a " working " physical science, need very 
 little examination to be seen to be treacherous to the 
 physical standpoint and its peculiar categories. One 
 might as well try to make water unsupported assume 
 definiteness of form as to conceive the conservation of 
 energy or plenitude or the relativity of motion in the 
 character of what is physical, or at least of what is 
 properly and conventionally physical. Being treach- 
 erous, then, to the physical science that has conceived 
 them, they are, as was said, doors for what is not 
 physical; hidden doors, perhaps, but certainly doors 
 to be opened at will ; and by them rnind is bound to 
 enter the physical world and its sciences. To those 
 familiar with the history of philosophy, the specula- 
 
94 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 tion of the early Greek thinkers, notably Anaxi- 
 mander, Parmenides, and Anaxagoras, will afford 
 illustration of the physical view running, in spite of 
 itself, into treacherous conceptions, and eventually 
 reaching the discovery of their treachery and with it 
 the idea of mind or Nous. 1 
 
 So for science is the material world, what properly 
 it is often said to be, a sort of dark mirror of man's 
 inner life, of his psychical nature. Physical science as 
 consciousness of the outer material world is not, and 
 has itself shown that it cannot be, merely and 
 exclusively physical. By virtue of its working hypo- 
 theses, which are as secret doorways, it is psychical 
 also. Though darkly and indirectly it is our human 
 self -consciousness. Perhaps it is our self-consciousness 
 rendered impersonal or the self seen through the 
 mirror of not-self or through the disguise of what a 
 photographer would call a " negative " ; and, if it may 
 be so described, we are reminded of Burns : 
 
 wad some power the giftie gie us, 
 To see oursels as others see us ! 
 It wad frae monie a blunder free us, 
 And foolish notion. 
 
 Only the bonnie Kobert himself was too much of a 
 specialist in poetry to see that natural science was the 
 very thing he prayed for. 
 
 And just as there is thus a physical psychology, so 
 
 1 See articles: "Pluralism: Empedocles and Deinocritus," in the 
 Philosophical Review, Vol. X, No. 3, May, 1901; "A Study in 
 the Logic of the Early Greek Philosophy Being, not-Being, and 
 Becoming," in the Monist, Vol. XII, No. 3, April, 1902; and "The 
 Poetry of Anaxagoras's Metaphysics," in The Journal of Philosophy, 
 Psychology, and Scientific Method, Vol. IV, No 4. 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 95 
 
 in like manner there is a psychological or epistemo- 
 logical physics, which in its turn is concerned with the 
 indirections, or doors in the panelling, present in all 
 the psychical sciences, for those very physical things 
 quantity and matter. The devil will have his due; 
 even an optimistic theology has to recognize him. And 
 psychology has a sensuous self, the self of the purely 
 sensuous consciousness, which has always involved it 
 in a curious psychical atomism, a projection, in a word, 
 of the physical on the plane of the psychical. Sensa- 
 tionalism, too, as a psychological theory in the history 
 of thought has always been associated with materialism. 
 
 With regard, then, to the separation even of the 
 psychical and the physical sciences, which obviously 
 has at its base the distinction between mind and 
 matter, we observe that our principle of affinity and 
 mutual participation still holds. By a sort of projec- 
 tion or reproduction mind and matter both appear, 
 the one openly, the other in disguise, in each kind of 
 science. However unawares, the physical entertains 
 mind ; the psychical matter ; and specialism, so far as 
 standing for anything more than scientific method, has 
 to withdraw from its last stronghold. The very 
 dreaming of the scientific imagination is its undoing. 
 
 For other evidence against the integrity and ade- 
 quacy of specialism, showing how mind defies special- 
 ism and conserves its indivisible universe, there are 
 the following simple but certainly interesting facts. 
 All the different sciences, however special and how- 
 ever apparently alien in subject matter, are wont to 
 use the same general methods as, for example, the 
 laboratory or experimental method or the historical 
 
96 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 method, the fatal consequences of which to the cause 
 of pure specialism may easily be inferred. History 
 is famous for overcoming differences. The common 
 interest in mathematics must also be mentioned, for 
 mathematics, through its latest developments in 
 danger of turning into a pure logic, is quite inde- 
 pendent of all those material differences that separate 
 the different sciences. It is formal and universal, not 
 special ; so that the special science that would also be 
 mathematical appears somehow to be at least in aim 
 as universal as it is special. Perhaps mathematics 
 more than anything else has fed the voracity which 
 we have seen veracity to exact. Has it not been 
 the chief agent in the virtual annihilation of the 
 barriers between physics and chemistry ? This par- 
 ticular mingling of the special sciences has been men- 
 tioned here already, but mathematics is threatening 
 the party-walls of all the other sciences also. Further, 
 what are we to infer from the idea that all sciences 
 seek law ? Certainly law is not special as science has 
 seemed to be. Somehow law is not many, but one. 
 Many laws can only be different phases or cases of 
 one law. The very essence of law is to be one and 
 single and all-embracing. To put the case theologi- 
 cally, could any one suppose that G-od made the laws 
 of chemistry and sociology and psychology as so many 
 separate and independent enactments ? On such a 
 supposition he had been a strange God indeed, lacking 
 the very thing, unity of being and character, which 
 men have come to associate with divinity, and what 
 theology demands of God, science, even against its 
 own specialism, must demand of its object. Again, 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 97 
 
 the way in which by implication, when not openly, one 
 science is given to handing over its hardest problems 
 to another is very instructive as well as amusing. 
 Not many years ago I was present at a joint meeting, 
 a good-natured and doubtless honestly ambitious con- 
 ference of biologists, physiologists, and psychologists, 
 and the addresses then made have often reminded me 
 of one of Thomas Nast's famous cartoons : A closed 
 ring of political grafters, none other than the noto- 
 rious Tweed and his followers, each pointing to his 
 neighbour and putting on him the responsibility of a 
 very embarrassing situation. "Find the rogue " was 
 the artist's inscription; but with apologies for the 
 association, we can easily change it to "Find the 
 special science." And, lastly, in this list of the simple 
 evidences against an adequate specialism there are the 
 conspicuous analogies other than those of common 
 method or common interest in law, which are always 
 easily traced among the sciences, even the sciences in 
 the opposite camps of matter and mind, of any par- 
 ticular time. Atomism in physics is contemporary 
 with atomism in psychology and with individualism in 
 political philosophy; a monarchical politics with an 
 anthropomorphic, creationalistic theology and an also 
 monarchical physically centred astronomy, whether 
 heliocentric or geocentric; and a Newtonian as- 
 tronomy, which really makes a law or force instead 
 of an individual body the centre and control of the 
 solar system, with democracy or constitutionalism, and 
 with inductive instead of deductive logic and natural- 
 istic instead of dogmatic theology ; so that at no time, 
 whatever the scientist's special interest, whatever his 
 
98 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 special syllable, can he fail to have at least a formal 
 sympathy with others. Such analogies among the 
 sciences, so often recognized and so absorbingly 
 interesting to the students of the history of thought, 
 if not exactly doors in the panelling, may be said to 
 make the panelled partitions at least translucent if 
 not unsubstantial and transparent. 
 
 But the most important fact in illustration of our 
 case against specialism is yet to be considered, and 
 unfortunately it takes us where to some the waters 
 may seem dangerously deep. Not only for reasons 
 already given and emphasized is the special science 
 a misnomer, a contradiction in terms, except in so far 
 as specialism be taken merely as an incident, not 
 without its humour, of scientific method, but also for 
 the same reasons (and chiefly because the truth and 
 reality of the universe are bound to be conserved) 
 every special science must sooner or later develop 
 its doctrines either into direct paradoxes or into 
 tenets that oppose and contradict each other. Thus, 
 as has been shown, specialism in science is itself a 
 paradox, and, as now asserted, every special science 
 assuming precise form and real validity becomes a 
 home of paradoxical or contradictory doctrines. In- 
 deed, these doctrines just through their opposition 
 appear be the most effective agents of that compen- 
 sation for neglected points of view, or conservation of 
 all points of view, which we are insisting is for ever 
 forced upon the scientific specialist. In the cases 
 of physical epistemology and epistemological physics 
 we have already seen doctrines working to this end. 
 In those cases the real treachery to the avowed 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 99 
 
 standpoints lay in virtual when not open contra- 
 diction. And, for the general principles, is it not 
 quite clear that nothing so surely as contradiction in 
 any given point of view, or in the specific doctrines 
 developed under it, can serve the interests of any 
 other points of view? I have heard it said, but by 
 whom originally I do not know, that a paradox or 
 contradiction was only the mind on tiptoe struggling 
 to look over a very high wall. 
 
 The point is just this. The special science, because 
 special or partial and because at the same time court- 
 ing scientific character or validity, that is, conformity 
 with reality, must be relative, formal, abstract, arti- 
 ficial, unreal, but also for exactly the same reason it 
 must contrive to admit to its conceptions other view- 
 points than its own. Its own peculiar view-point is 
 relative, but that it may attain actual validity 
 it is bound to overcome its relativity by admitting, 
 secretly perhaps yet not less truly, other points of 
 view; and paradox or contradiction is the natural 
 door for such admissions, the original view-point being 
 tenacious to the last. Physics says : " I will be physics 
 through thick and thin ; I will be physics though the 
 heavens fall and though dreadful paradoxes arise " ; 
 and in like manner psychology cries aloud : " I will be 
 psychology though I suffer from a splitting dualism 
 for my pains." Have you, gentle reader, never held and 
 held and held to some particular notion about things, 
 modifying the details perhaps little by little, but always 
 imagining yourself strictly loyal to the old, old view, 
 and then suddenly discovered your consciousness alive 
 with contradictions ? If you have, you know, possibly 
 
ioo THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 too well, the natural history of every special science, 
 and also you can sympathize deeply with the hen and 
 her cherished chicks that proved ugly ducklings. The 
 special science, I repeat, must be hospitable, however 
 grudgingly, to strangers, though at the expense of 
 becoming thoroughly divided against itself. Such hos- 
 pitality is an obligation call it logical if you will, or 
 moral or metaphysical, for the name matters not if it 
 only suggests coercion which is not less binding upon 
 the scientific spirit than upon the spirit of racial unity, 
 always urgently present in you and me. You and I 
 may be so special or exclusive as to drive stran- 
 gers from our doors, but an impulse to call them 
 back and give them entertainment always follows an 
 impulse that is only the necessary reaction of the 
 expulsion. Humanity is indivisible in ' spite of our 
 asserted exclusiveness, and nature is indivisible, too, 
 in spite of specialism. Partiality of any sort, along 
 any line, in any field, can never long persist without, 
 though often darkly and indirectly, though by the 
 way of bold, unrecognized, or unconfessed paradox, 
 receiving from outside all that it would exclude. I 
 am not merely repeating. At first, we saw only 
 that the scientific imagination brought to the special 
 science as its working hypotheses certain conserving 
 or compensating conceptions; then, that these con- 
 ceptions involved treachery to the science that har- 
 boured them; but now we are face to face with the 
 fact that their complete, their most effective form is 
 the paradox. 
 
 Would that I had the ability to write with the 
 penetration and the clearness of statement that the 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 101 
 
 subject should certainly elicit, upon the strange equa- 
 nimity with which mankind, in science or in practical 
 life, receives and faces a direct negative or an open 
 contradiction. Perhaps the habit of easy division into 
 positive and negative, the ready resort to dichotomy, 
 explains the mystery; perhaps the fact that nega- 
 tion or opposition is and can only be in kind, that 
 there never is or can be any real change or need of 
 change in a mere negation, is at least an important 
 factor in the case; perhaps, again, the very hope- 
 lessness of the dualism, which a flat, unequivocal 
 negation plainly involves, is also to the point; but, 
 beyond all peradventure, we do accept the direct 
 negative with a patience, even an indifference, that 
 may greatly assist our natural conservatism, whether 
 of thought or life, but that on being recognized cer- 
 tainly does arouse our wonder. Good and its opposite 
 evil, true and false, real and unreal, unity and 
 plurality, life and death, the indivisible and the 
 divisible, rest and motion, plenum and vacuum, im- 
 material and material, actuality and illusion, lawful- 
 ness and lawlessness : these and so many other 
 opposites are the common stock-in-trade of our living 
 and thinking, and we accept and use them with 
 a complacency that cannot easily be exaggerated. 
 Yet the negative in each and every one of them holds 
 the future of the universe in the palm of its hand. 
 And the special scientist before his inevitable para- 
 doxes is as conservative and as complacent as the 
 rest of us. 
 
 But it is one thing to say, or even to reason out 
 cogently and satisfactorily in every way, that the 
 
102 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 special science, if both persistently special and 
 honestly scientific, must be sooner or later inwardly 
 contradictory and treacherous to itself, and it is quite 
 another thing to show the contradiction in actual cases. 
 The actual cases, however, are more easily found 
 than many are likely to suppose, and at mention 
 they may even seem like forgotten memories, like 
 things which at some time we have noticed but 
 become callous towards. Thus the atom is through 
 and through a self-contradiction, being itself only a 
 part of a divided reality, yet at the same time itself 
 real only because indivisible ; and a science harbouring 
 such an atom can hardly be said to be unmixedly 
 physical. The vibration, too, already referred to here 
 as motion in poise or at rest; infinity as one more 
 quantity that is significant because not quantitative; 
 the sensation, a component element of consciousness 
 that cannot possibly be composite ; the plenal 
 physical medium, which can be physical only if dis- 
 placeable by other material things, and so plenal only 
 if not physical, and which has served besides as an 
 immobile yet infinitely elastic basis of motion or its 
 transmission ; and, to give just one more instance, in 
 moral and political science the person, a self-existent, 
 actively free being or entity whose every deed as well 
 as whose every thought is responsible to something, 
 being adaptive and therefore social, social with other 
 persons and with nature, and whose every virtue im- 
 plies dependence and an existence shared with some- 
 thing else : these are all also self-contradictions. And 
 in view of them who must not see how the special 
 sciences are always more than special, ever correcting 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 103 
 
 in ways that may be unappreciated by themselves 
 their partiality of view, ever responsible to the totality 
 of things even while they would observe things only 
 under selected view-points. Such contradictions, once 
 more, show mind loyal to what students of logic are 
 familiar with as the " universe of discourse." Even in 
 science you cannot discourse about anything without 
 at least implicitly discoursing about everything, al- 
 though in order to do so you must speak in such 
 paradoxes as the atom, the person, the biologist's 
 "vital unit," the vibration, the plenum, and the like 
 indefinitely. 
 
 Nor is the scientist the only dreamer of paradoxes 
 among men. Ordinary practical life, as we have seen, 
 teems with paradoxes. But, for purposes of illustra- 
 tion, not to say also of giving greater breadth and 
 depth to the view, a reference to the situation in 
 the religious consciousness will have peculiar value 
 here. A religion that supplements reverence for a 
 personal God, working miracles and caring for the 
 elect, who even nowadays are more or less elect, 
 with belief in a devil, even nowadays more or less 
 personal, is clearly a blood relation to science, and it 
 is besides by no means so unnatural or irrational as is 
 often declared, particularly by the scientists. Its two 
 errors, just because opposed, conserve what is real, 
 and no science can claim more than that. Indeed, a 
 science, notably a special science, like a theology, 
 might well be described as a system of mutually 
 corrective errors, of abstractions that, because abstract, 
 distort the reality of things, but that also because 
 being at difference with each other and eventually 
 
104 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 falling into contradictory and so counteracting pairs 
 are at least parties to what is real and true. By hook 
 or crook, by the hook of abstraction or the crook of 
 contradiction, every science gets in touch with the 
 universe as a whole, and so even with its errors is 
 a " working " science. The errors of many a religion, 
 by their working together, have not failed to save 
 men. 
 
 So we may return to the assertion that in its 
 specialism, as well as in its demand for objective 
 knowledge, science is self-contradictory, and with this 
 conclusion established the exposure of science already 
 offers a very strong case for the doubter. Yet it does 
 this only to the extent and in the sense that contra- 
 diction warrants doubt. After all is said, have we 
 been only exposing science ? Has attack been our 
 only procedure ? Do we not find, as we reflect, that 
 in our exposure there has also been something very 
 near to defence ? Or, once more, through the science 
 to which we have taken exception have we not seen a 
 science in which we could believe ? In the examina- 
 tion of science's objectivism we saw that technique 
 buried science, but though we did not say this in so 
 many words that there might be a resurrection. If 
 fruitful in inventions serviceable to life, science was 
 justified in spite of its cultivated objectivism, and the 
 objectivity itself, besides an aid to accuracy, has 
 further significance as possibly an earnest of wider 
 social relationship, of broader and deeper life. The 
 question of fact, too, if appreciated and so made sub- 
 ordinate to the question of meaning, was even allowed, 
 and science, although at once formally conservative 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 105 
 
 and materially negative and destructive, seemed after 
 all to be the promise, so to speak, of a new dawn for 
 the very things denied. And now in what has been 
 said of the specialism of science, the same turning of 
 the edge of attack is all but manifest. Every special 
 science is narrow and relative it is in the form of an 
 unreal dream ; but reality somehow gives form to the 
 dream, for there are always the compensating concep- 
 tions. The contradictions by which the compensation 
 has been effected are, then, interpretable not more as 
 causes of doubting science than as reasons for con- 
 fidence in it. Thus, to be tedious again, the special 
 science is relative and formal ; it is a peculiar system of 
 ingenious abstractions that in so far are also errors; but 
 its formal character includes also contradiction; its errors 
 are so related as to correct and balance each other ; so 
 that, even in the face of our necessary scepticism 
 about it, science has been evident to us, as also was the 
 consciousness of ordinary life, as somehow always 
 building better than it knows or than its methods or 
 ideals and doctrines viewed only from without would 
 lead one to expect. Moving in it we have certainly 
 felt the presence of something, not yet called by name, 
 which is very like a principle or power of validity, 
 preserving the reality of things even in and through 
 the relativity and contradiction under which the 
 things are seen. While the letter of our knowledge, 
 even of our scientific knowledge, must ever have an 
 indeterminate future; while rest or stability, ultimate 
 reality or consistency is quite impossible to it, still 
 its inner, active spirit seems a source of faith that is 
 inviolable, that cannot be shaken. Different quan- 
 
106 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 titles, such as four and two, and sixteen and eight, do 
 not make the same sum, much less are they the same 
 digits; but they are in the same ratio, and similarly 
 the truth of science would seem to lie in the ratio, the 
 working together, of the errors of science. Outwardly 
 and materially changing with time and with people, 
 assuming ever new forms and comprising always new 
 doctrines, science nevertheless, as an active force, 
 as a positive resultant, is at least now conceivably 
 always the same and applicable to the same life. 
 Even the Babylonians of an ancient day successfully 
 predicted eclipses, the very errors of their astronomy 
 working together for truth, exactly as the heresies of 
 pagan religion seem to have balanced each other to 
 the preservation and the development of the life 
 which we of the present day and the Christian 
 civilization are pleased to call our own. 
 
 Accordingly the science we have to doubt is also 
 manifest to us as at least a possible object of faith. 
 The very causes of our doubt before our very eyes 
 have turned, or are in process of turning, into possible 
 bases of belief, and our confession of doubt as it pro- 
 ceeds is proving ever more worth making. We are 
 trying to be such honest doubters. We are indeed 
 such penitent believers. 
 
 III. SCIENCE WOULD BE AGNOSTIC. 
 
 Still we have, thirdly, the agnosticism of science to 
 consider and appraise. Agnosticism confines know- 
 ledge to actual positive experience, and in its form of 
 " positivism " to an only tentative acceptance of actual 
 experience, and it is thus in effect an admission of 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 107 
 
 just those limitations which have been found to 
 belong to science as objective and special. Objectivism 
 and specialism have both shown science to be stand- 
 ing in its own light, or at least to be standing in 
 the way of any direct and positive knowledge of 
 reality. Whatever they make possible to our virtual 
 as distinct from our positive consciousness, whatever 
 indirectly or implicitly may through them belong to 
 our conscious life, formally and visibly, positively 
 and directly, we cannot know reality. In a word, 
 science must and does recognize an unknowable, or 
 at least an unknowability in things, and agnosticism 
 is accordingly important among the three determining 
 points of science's circumference. But here is now 
 our problem : Does science put the right value upon, 
 does it ascribe the right meaning to, its agnosticism ? 
 Is the implied scepticism of the sort that we can 
 cordially accept? Especially, does science have any 
 due appreciation of the negative, not to say of the 
 suggested dualism, in the opposition between the 
 knowable and the unknowable ? 
 
 Now both objectivism and specialism plainly involve 
 aloofness, which is perhaps only another word for 
 what in the preceding chapter was called abstraction. 
 By the first of these two " isms " science is held aloof 
 from life ; by the second, through the many divisions, 
 from itself, that is to say, part from part. Men who 
 would be scientists withdraw, as we hear them boast, 
 from affairs, and as they withdraw it is also as if 
 they put on distorting and even discolouring glasses, 
 through which in one and another " special " way they 
 would behold the " objective " world. Their with- 
 
io8 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 drawal is thus not merely physical ; it is also mental. 
 To look out of the window one must turn one's head 
 and lift one's eyes and adjust both head and eyes in 
 other ways ; but looking in general, whether from the 
 needs of an objective or a special view, also demands 
 certain pertinent adjustments, and the demanded 
 adjustments make the resulting experience just so far 
 aloof, just so far discoloured and distorted. Granted 
 that these terms can be only relative in significance. 
 To be aloof from something is to have it equally 
 aloof from you, and you should be no more dis- 
 credited by the separation than it. To be distorted 
 and discoloured is to be so only with regard to some- 
 thing that in its own peculiar way may be equally 
 transformed. Such relativity, however, cannot deprive 
 the differences involved of real significance ; it can 
 only emphasize the general instead of the narrow, 
 local application of the terms found to be relative. 
 "What is relative is not unreal; it is simply shared, 
 like cousinship. So science, the looking of science, 
 means real aloofness and real disfiguration. 
 
 The truth of this has already been apparent to us in 
 a general way, but it will be worth while here to be 
 more specific. The space and time, for example, in 
 which scientists observe things are widely different 
 from the space and time of will and action. In ordi- 
 nary life a difference is felt between the world we 
 know and the world we live, but the extreme profes- 
 sional attitude of science greatly widens the differ- 
 ences. For science space and time are quantitative, 
 divisible, formal, mathematically correct, and inde- 
 pendent of what is in them, their reality or qualitative 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 109 
 
 value to active life being hidden or at least only very 
 indirectly presented I suggest, in the constant oppo- 
 sition of their finiteness and infinity while for will 
 and action they are qualitative, indivisible, insepar- 
 able from what is in them. Who ever did anything in 
 a composite, divisible space and time ? Action in such 
 a sphere would be hopelessly jerky; with Zeno's 
 flying arrow it would just always rest in statu quo, 
 though its status in quo might have an indefinite series 
 of positions. Again, the scientists reduce causation to 
 mere uniformity of co-existences or sequences, which 
 is no real causation at all, being only so much passive 
 existence or mechanical process, while will or action is 
 causation, the positive interaction of things, the active 
 relation, the vital unity, of what was and is and is to 
 be. It is true that here, too, the causation of real life 
 is darkly presented by science in a constant opposition 
 between a single first cause and an eternal series of 
 causes, for such an opposition makes real causation in 
 an important way quite transcendent of the mere differ- 
 ences of time ; but, setting this concession aside, who 
 ever did anything in a world either of one cause active 
 long ago or of an infinite series of causes ? And, once 
 more, science needs elements, while will or life is the 
 eternal denial of elements or anything like them. 
 Says a well-known writer i 1 "It is one of the greatest 
 dangers of our time that the naturalistic (or scientific) 
 point of view, which decomposes the world into 
 elements for the purpose of causal connection, inter- 
 feres with the volitional point of view of real life, 
 
 1 See Miinsterberg's Psychology and Life, p. 267. Houghton 
 Mifflin and Co., 1899. 
 
i io THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 which can deal only with values, and not with 
 elements." The danger involved will occupy us in 
 a moment, but the bondage of science to elements, 
 to a composite world, to a thoroughly "decomposed" 
 reality, will hardly be questioned. Through contradic- 
 tion, again, as in the chemist's component atom, itself 
 not composite, or the biologist's "vital unit," which bids 
 fair to be the master paradox of the day, science may 
 darkly and indirectly preserve the world of real life, 
 the world that is neither one element nor many, but in 
 this case as in the others the indirection, after all is 
 said, only emphasizes the aloofness. 
 
 So science is aloof, and in being aloof it disfigures 
 and defaces reality, and the argument for agnosticism 
 is consequently unassailable. No one more effectively 
 has shown this than Immanuel Kant, although one 
 may question Kant's final appraisal of the fact. Here 
 certainly is no place for an exposition of the Kantian 
 philosophy, but, briefly and simply put, that philosophy 
 has characterized space and time and the relation of 
 cause and effect, not to mention certain other very 
 general data of experience, as the a priori forms of all 
 valid, objective knowledge, and being translated this is 
 to say that these so-called forms are the enabling 
 attitudes of the merely looking consciousness or the 
 peculiar glasses which, as it were, the mind puts on 
 whenever it turns just to look. The typical Boston 
 girl, according to the cartoonists, is never without her 
 glasses. In like manner the typically, professionally 
 correct looking consciousness, the observing, scientific 
 mind, is never without those enabling attitudes. Do 
 you ask if they are then only subjective attitudes ? 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. in 
 
 They are subjective only as they are relative. They 
 are subjective only as they express the aloofness of 
 the scientific observer. And they are subjective, lastly, 
 only in so far as can be consistent with Kant's further 
 characterization of them as in every instance imbued 
 with essential opposition or "antinomy." Kemember 
 that an attitude that harbours opposition is always 
 tip-toeing to overcome the bounds of its own natural 
 vision. Such an attitude cannot be unmixedly sub- 
 jective. 
 
 But what now is the danger of science's agnosticism, 
 of science's own admission that being " objective " and 
 "special," or being under the constraint of certain 
 enabling attitudes, or being at best only tentative in 
 all its doctrines, it is not and cannot possibly be 
 formally realistic? One might imagine, or expect, 
 that confession of its limitations would be good for 
 the soul of science, and in truth we shall certainly find 
 some advantage resulting from the confession, but 
 even science's agnosticism is faulty in a serious way. 
 The writer quoted above has told us that the great 
 danger always threatening science is that the scientific 
 will interfere with the volitional point of view, and 
 this is equivalent to fearing, in the interests of science, 
 that the scientist will forget his agnosticism and try to 
 render what he cannot know in terms of what he does 
 know, or that the man of affairs will look to science for 
 his programmes of action. Such a fear, however, may 
 play to the professional conceits and the professional 
 isolation and abstraction of the scientific point of 
 view, but it is very far from grasping the true import 
 of the conflict between knowledge and unknowable 
 
ri2 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 reality. I should myself assert, in partial if not in 
 complete opposition to Professor Miinsterberg, that 
 science's very natural danger is that the scientific and 
 the volitional point of view will be kept apart, that 
 the professionalism and the formalism and what Kant 
 called the phenomenalism of science will prevent their 
 interference. At least, this danger is just as great, and 
 just as seriously a danger, as the other. Most people 
 know well enough that keeping science and life or 
 theory and practice apart has the effect of making the 
 former lose itself in a highly morbid intellectualism, 
 and the latter in the dead monotony, of a mere exist- 
 ence, sometimes presumptuously styled " practical life," 
 but such a result seems not to trouble either Professor 
 Miinsterberg or the conventional scientist whose cause 
 the vigorous professor has espoused. In other regions, 
 fortunately, a formal disparity is not accepted as argu- 
 ing to a natural divorce, but is even considered, let it 
 be said, a reason for association; and as for the dis- 
 parity between science and will, it is quite true that 
 life without science is lifeless and that science without 
 life is meaningless. 
 
 Perhaps the crowning fault of the agnostic scientist 
 is his lack of humour. He takes himself too seriously. 
 The lover, when his fair one has formally disagreed 
 with him, rejecting his suit with her outspoken 
 "No" and promising lasting friendship and good- 
 will even to assurances of assistance in his next 
 venture, takes hope, smiles grimly within himself, and 
 feels sure still that she and he, however disparite, are 
 meant to live together for better or worse. But the 
 rejected scientist takes the unknowable's " No " as if it 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 113 
 
 were final, and then, retiring to his study or laboratory, 
 proceeds, though in a morbid, abnormal way, to mingle 
 the scientific and volitional standpoints every time he 
 writes a line or makes an experiment. We watch him 
 as he goes, and find his case not without its humour. 
 If the true lover upon being rejected were satisfied 
 thereafter with caressing the lady's photograph, then 
 he and the agnostic scientist would be in the same 
 class. 
 
 But, as is needless to say, I am not writing a novel. 
 So, romance aside, unquestionably the forms and doc- 
 trines of the scientific consciousness are peculiar, 
 being, as has been shown, logically subtle, imaginary 
 and innocent of direct practical realism, being, in 
 short, the inhabitants of a world quite their own, and 
 to impose them intact upon active life cannot fail 
 to bring disaster, the usual disaster of a misfit. 
 Yet, let us bring to mind, in the first place, that the 
 scientific consciousness is not essentially different 
 from consciousness in general, and that consciousness 
 in general deals, and always must deal with artificial 
 forms, with symbols, constructions, and transforma- 
 tions ; and in the second place, that it always knows 
 with some measure of sophistication that what it 
 deals with is symbolic or constructed. Conscious 
 creatures, from the moment they begin to draw breath, 
 are trained to see one thing objectively and to 
 understand or construe quite another thing for active 
 expression. There is no visual sensation without 
 muscular sensation, and most men, if not all men, 
 have really learned in the long years of their own 
 and their race's experience to get along without seeing 
 
114 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 and yet also without foregoing the sensations in their 
 muscles ! Man's long training, in a word, has taught 
 him to use what he sees as not direct reality, but only 
 a symbol of reality, and so in volition always to allow 
 for the " practical " unreality of the objects before his 
 consciousness. The mere words bread and butter, 
 for example, or even the visible things in a restaurant 
 window, have never brought satiety to a hungry child, 
 nor do I myself fear that they ever will. Moreover, 
 the long training that is the surety against danger, 
 and that at the same time has made man keenly awake 
 to the value as well as the humour of symbolism, is 
 just what has rendered the high development of pro- 
 fessional science possible, and is also what makes 
 possible and properly controls the application of 
 science to practical life. 
 
 It may now be asserted that the facts are not in 
 accord with the view to which I have just given 
 expression, that sometimes, and very often too, the 
 forms and doctrines of science are imposed without 
 modification or translation upon practical life. Thus, 
 though the names for edibles themselves as present 
 to the eye or to any other sense are not normal 
 substitutes for food, nevertheless some people, whether 
 from poverty or from indigestion, have fed on them, 
 just as they have taken long journeys with maps, 
 time-tables, and guide books. In education, too, the 
 formal conditions of science have suggested object- 
 lessons and pure induction; in political organization 
 we have had programmes of extreme elemental in- 
 dividualism, of lawless democracy, and of abstract 
 communism and Christian Socialism; in religion God 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 115 
 
 has been like a thing seen, perhaps a tree walking 
 or a man working, whether with hoe or rake or with 
 other implement, perhaps a trident, and belief has 
 been identified with an articulate dogma or formula ; 
 and many a realistic novel, treating the details of life 
 as a scientist might treat them, or many a psycho- 
 logical novel, more problematic than artistic, has been 
 put upon the market. But what can all this mean, 
 undoubtedly true as it is, save that science belongs to 
 life, yet is applied to it with difficulty and only under 
 conditions of conflict? In the case of the edibles, 
 poverty or illness, both of them incidents of conflict, 
 is responsible for the unnatural substitution, and in 
 cases of education, politics, religion, and literature, 
 the substitution is equally a makeshift which the 
 conditions of conflict impose upon life. An individ- 
 ualistic programme will not work, nor will a purely 
 socialistic programme work. Mere induction will 
 not educate. No visible God ever was divine, and 
 no articulate creed ever was true. Life is a game 
 throughout; its vital character, its very integrity is 
 its experimental character; it is not a settled, ab- 
 stractly perfect thing. Life is dynamic, not static. 
 Accordingly it must move forward by its mistakes, or 
 by storm and stress of the incongruous and mis- 
 applied, being inspired, not by somebody's complacent 
 optimism, but by a sacrificial, always heroic idealism ; 
 and its scientific practices, however truly a mixing 
 of things formally incongruous or disparite, are just 
 aids to its reality. Moreover, those science-formed 
 practices are always in some measure sophisticated. 
 Human nature is rather a fine thing in its way, as 
 
n6 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 many a man has nattered himself and his kind by 
 saying. Witness the homeless, ill-clad, starving child 
 feeding over the odorous grating and before the well- 
 stocked window of the restaurant, and feeling, if not 
 actually saying : " As long as I cannot have and eat, 
 it is good to smell and see." Witness, also, the 
 educator or the statesman or the priest or the novelist. 
 Each knows his makeshift and feels some of the 
 humour of it, and in his closet, when not before his 
 public, acknowledges the violence to which he is 
 lending himself. 
 
 And another fact, besides that of the actual 
 applications of science, which, however violent, prove 
 the need as well as the dangers, and besides the 
 sophistication, perhaps also the sense of humour, 
 which always accompanies the applications and at 
 least tempers their violence, must also be mentioned. 
 Those science-formed programmes always go in pairs. 
 Individualism and socialism, realism and mysticism, 
 Epicureanism and Stoicism, orthodoxy and heresy are 
 inseparable, socially and historically ; and the effect of 
 such pairing is plainly to correct whatever of violence 
 the sense of symbolism and the sophistication and the 
 humour of the time may be unequal to. Thus in the 
 movements and programmes of society for any given 
 misfit there is always a counter-misfit. Possibly 
 human life, at least as socially organized, is only a 
 competition of misfits, its programmes coming, not 
 through the acquired supremacy of one side or the 
 other, but through the constant mediation, the 
 balancing and interacting of the two, and the misfits 
 are perhaps exclusively the gifts of science or at least 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 117 
 
 of the observer's consciousness generally, and man is 
 at once serious and humorous enough to impose what 
 science gives on the real life of his fellows, as a ready- 
 made clothier might on a stray countryman ; but is a 
 city, then, to have no Hyam, and is the life of society 
 also to dispense with the gifts of science because they 
 are imperfect ? There are worse things than clothes 
 not made to measure or than the men who sell or buy 
 them. There is the life that never changes its old 
 clothes for new. There are the clothes that never get 
 on the market at all. 
 
 Accordingly the interference of the scientific with 
 the volitional point of view is, to say the least, not 
 the only danger which the scientist or the practical 
 man needs to recognize. There is also the danger that 
 the disparity between science and life, or between 
 knowledge and the unknowable, will be construed to 
 mean that the two are never to live together. Science 
 may be innocent of any direct accord with reality, 
 being in form quite innocent of a real realism, but 
 after all, whether by itself or in its various applica- 
 tions or renderings in human life, it is so innocent 
 only in a qualified sense, only with reference to the 
 form of its specific doctrine and attitudes taken indi- 
 vidually. As itself a living whole, part acting upon 
 part, each abstraction corrected by some counter- 
 abstraction or perhaps by some inner self-opposition, 
 as conscious too of its own conditions and limitations} 
 as sophisticated and even humorous, both for all 
 logical purposes and for all purposes of applicability 
 in the life of society it is realism itself. As harbour- 
 ing what above was called, in so many words, an 
 
ii8 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 inner active spirit of veracity or power for reality, a 
 constant agent of validity and applicability, it is 
 itself a party to the real life. 
 
 But return to the idea of the divorce of science and 
 life, which is such an easy conclusion of agnosticism. 
 If divorced, it was said, they are lost, the one in a 
 morbid intellectualism, the other in the dead monotony 
 of mere existence. Now, in view of the fact that 
 many have found such a divorce to possess the highest 
 ideal value, it seems worth while to remark that after 
 all is said the separation can be only apparent, not 
 real. Even if we neglect wholly the writing and the 
 experimentation of the scientist, as volitional as they 
 are scientific, and the practical consciousness, moral or 
 prudential, of the disciple of the " real life," as scien- 
 tific as it is volitional, we shall find such to be the 
 case. We know men who have what may be styled, 
 and what sometimes is abusively styled, a double life. 
 They have their science, perhaps their laboratories and 
 their books and their own pet doctrines, and they have 
 also their social affiliations in business and in politics 
 and in religion; and, whether it be ideal or unideal, 
 admirable or reprehensible, their life certainly does 
 seem double, because their sociology and their busi- 
 ness, or their political theory and their party ties, or 
 their biology and their religion simply will not mix; 
 but their apparent duplicity has apparently little or 
 nothing to rest upon. It may count as two, numeric- 
 ally, but such counting never makes being. Men 
 should count less and think more. On the terms of 
 such a numerical separation, as was said, the science 
 can be only formal, the life only dead; but such a 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 119 
 
 science and such a life make one existence, not two; 
 and, however amusing the conclusion may be, it is 
 nevertheless true that the science, for just what it is, 
 has been applied, making the life just what it is. 
 Are scientific technique with its aloofness and logical 
 abstractions and a life that in its own special affairs 
 can be only conventional and ritualistic, or say routine 
 in the study or the laboratory and routine in the 
 church or market-place, are these so different as really 
 to be, whatever the appearances, independent and 
 distinct ? They may count as two for being in just so 
 many different places, but the man, scientist or prac- 
 titioner, is always necessarily with himself, and in this 
 sense never in more than one place, so that in charac- 
 ter and value the two routines are one and the same. 
 Moreover, the ennui which together they are sure to 
 induce must end sooner or later in a common cry for 
 help, in a passion for reality that will turn each 
 toward the other with an irresistible appeal. 
 
 Once more, then, there is danger for science not 
 merely in the interference, but in the obstinate inde- 
 pendence of the scientific and the volitional point of 
 view. A protected science may have no less, but also 
 it has no more justification than a protected industry. 
 Competition with life and will may often bring science 
 low, degrading its methods and impairing its profes- 
 sional success, but protection involves at least equal 
 risks. Professor Miinsterberg but may he forgive 
 me my Homeric epithets is a too zealous epistemo- 
 logic protectionist. 
 
 The difficulty as to the agnosticism of science may 
 be presented in another way. Dismissing all thought 
 
120 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 of either interference or divorce and all thought of the 
 scientist forgetting his agnosticism or taking it too 
 soberly, we may say that the scientific agnostic, 
 being under the spell of the scientific way of dealing 
 with things, is disposed to treat the unknowable as if 
 it were but one more thing or fact among all the other 
 things or facts with which he is wont to deal. The 
 world for him is then composed of two departments or 
 groups, which like a good scientist he classifies and 
 labels, the knowable and the unknowable; and nothing 
 could be simpler or more natural. Though the point 
 of what follows may be lost in its appearance of mere 
 wordiness, so to speak, the world of his interest, of his 
 formal knowledge, includes, among the other things, 
 that which he knows to be unknowable, and with 
 the inclusion and the knowledge of unknowability 
 he imagines his responsibility to the unknowable both 
 to begin and end. Or, again, the agnostic scieijtist 
 regards the unknowable as something apart from the 
 knowable, as something not for him to know and also 
 not having any vital, intrinsic relations to what he 
 does know, but something nevertheless objectively 
 presentable to a creature with knowing faculties 
 altogether different from his. The unknowable is thus 
 for him still the object of a looking and thinking con- 
 sciousness, yet never of his looking and thinking 
 consciousness ; it is knowable, and formally knowable, 
 yet riot to him, not through any of the forms of know- 
 ledge, the enabling attitudes, at his command. And 
 nothing, I say once more, could be simpler or more 
 natural. But, properly and professionally scientific as 
 it may be to give to agnosticism this turn, it is very 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 121 
 
 decidedly an excellent example of professional blind- 
 ness, being a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the 
 scientific point of view, for plainly it treats the un- 
 knowable as a matter, first, of knowledge the scien- 
 tist's knowledge of its unknowability, and as a matter, 
 second, for knowledge the knowledge of the creature 
 with the different faculties. Surely such treatment is 
 not honestly agnostic. Science, therefore, if it would 
 be honest as well as scientific, must forget its profes- 
 sionalism and take the negative of the unknowable in 
 another way. 
 
 In what way ? In making reply to this question I 
 must resort to a distinction, which I have frequently 
 found useful, between the dogmatic and the merely 
 instrumental. Thus agnosticism may be dogmatic, as 
 the conventional scientist would hold it, flatly declar- 
 ing for an unknowable, or it may be instrumental, 
 esteeming the unknowability in things, not merely as 
 relative to the existing conditions of knowledge, but 
 also as a constant demand upon science that it never 
 rest in itself, that it for ever treat its results as only a 
 means to some end. So viewed an instrumental agnos- 
 ticism is also teleological, but not in any sense of a 
 fixed and static telos. Telic character or purposive- 
 ness and fixity are like oil and water. Whatever the 
 traditional theologian may think or say, they simply 
 will not mix. 
 
 Of the two kinds of agnosticism, the first hardly 
 calls for further treatment, for it is plainly that which 
 has been recently examined and found to be more 
 scientific, or at least more professionally scientific, 
 than fully and personally honest, and the second is 
 
122 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 very nearly akin to positivism, but must be scrutinized 
 closely, for it certainly leads beyond the usual bounds 
 of positivism. The positivist in science, as has been 
 indicated above, accepts only actual positive experience 
 and accepts that only tentatively. The working hy- 
 pothesis is thus the master of his mind. What he 
 knows, however well established in his actual, positive 
 consciousness, is at best only relative and mediative. 
 But and just here appears the defect of his position, 
 or just here we see him still only the professional 
 scientist the mediation which absorbs his interest is 
 merely one of formal knowledge; what he knows al- 
 ways leads him just to more knowledge; his formulated 
 hypotheses as they are tested are but aids to new 
 formulations : whereas, besides this mediation, there 
 always is another at least equally significant, for 
 knowledge under the very conditions of its rise and 
 formulation must for ever be a means to something 
 besides mere knowledge. Eecognition of this other 
 mediation, accordingly, is all-important to any final 
 appraisal of the meaning of agnosticism, to an ap- 
 praisal that is justified just through being superior to 
 the special interests of formal and professional science. 
 Is it not one of the functions of the various negatives 
 in our human life really to save life from the narrow- 
 ness of its various professional abstractions, and is not 
 the attitude of agnosticism but one of these negations ? 
 And now, if for a paragraph or two I may be even 
 offensively abstruse, the conditions of our positive 
 experience, of our actual knowledge, are such, and are 
 commonly recognized to be such, that there must 
 always be an unknown. Every working hypothesis 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 123 
 
 by implication points to an unknown. It is equally 
 true, however, that the conditions of positive ex- 
 perience are such that there is no fixity to this un- 
 known; and the unknown changes in consequence, 
 both in possible content and in possible quality or 
 value, with every change in knowledge. But always 
 an unknown which is never the same unknown must 
 mean something more than merely a yet-to-be-known ; 
 yes, it must mean even more than an infinitely, eter- 
 nally remote yet-to-be-known, for its being always, 
 or its being infinitely distant, simply makes it some- 
 thing besides positive knowledge actual or possible. 
 It must mean something which, though not know- 
 ledge, is nevertheless in knowledge, now and always ; 
 something served by all knowledge but itself other 
 than any knowledge; something, then, which exceeds 
 or transcends whatever the formal enabling conditions 
 of knowledge are capable of presenting, but is itself 
 intimately and vitally involved in the presentation; 
 or, once more, something which is not at all in the 
 character of a separate unknowable thing or sphere 
 of things, nor even of a separate part in the things 
 known or knowable, but is in the character rather of 
 an unknowability, perhaps in a sense a relative un- 
 knowability, belonging to the very things and to every 
 part of the very things that are known or, let me 
 say, inhering in the bare possibility of all knowledge. 
 Must there not be a sense in which just that which 
 makes knowledge possible is itself quite impossible to 
 knowledge ? Who makes a law must be superior to 
 the law, or " legally supreme," and what makes know- 
 ledge possible can hardly be fully and directly an object 
 
124 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 of knowledge. Given actual, positive knowledge, then, 
 and there must always be not merely an unknown, 
 but also an unknowable; an unknowable, however, 
 that is in and of the knowledge, not in place or in 
 character a thing by itself. 
 
 I said I should be abstruse, and I have not yet 
 finished. In fully appraising agnosticism we need to 
 consider at close range another idea of the positivist. 
 Thus for the positivist knowledge is not a having, 
 but a getting on the principle that unto him that 
 hath shall be given ; not a knowing, but a questioning 
 and seeking; not a being, but a becoming that has 
 its ground in a being so real as to be without fixity 
 of form. And this is plainly equivalent to making 
 movement and action essential to the very nature of 
 the knowing mind or to making knowledge dynamic 
 instead of static, and infinitely plastic even like life 
 itself, that is always greater than its cross-sections or 
 specific forms. But in general to an active nature 
 nothing can ever be quite external ; to a truly active 
 nature there can be no essential impossiblity. For 
 reflect. The mere existence of anything external or of 
 anything impossible would in just so far remove and 
 deny the intrinsic character of the activity ; in just so 
 far it would set the supposedly active being in fixity of 
 life and definiteness of form. For an essentially active 
 nature, therefore, all things all things in heaven and 
 earth are both present and possible, and so, specifically, 
 if that active nature be the knowing mind there can 
 be no unknowable that is at the same time alien and 
 altogether impossible to the knower. Even the very 
 forms of the knower's knowledge must for ever com- 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 125 
 
 pass more than they may visibly present. The know- 
 ing itself in its own right and nature must be more 
 than formal knowing, or than the "objective," "special" 
 science, in which the formal knowing has its pro- 
 fessional realization. And the knower, as he knows, 
 in and through his knowledge must always be com- 
 passing just that which is not impossible to him, but 
 only unknowable that is, impossible merely to his 
 direct, formal knowledge. Is the inedible or the 
 invisible or the impenetrable or the unbearable or 
 the illegible or even the unintelligible ever wholly 
 impossible ? Such negatives, and in fact all negatives, 
 besides saving life from the narrowness of its various 
 forms, do this positive thing: they open the door of 
 life's wider, nay, of life's infinite opportunity or 
 possibility, and at the same time they render those 
 various definite forms really mediative or instrumental, 
 making them parts in an essentially purposive exist- 
 ence. With just this meaning, then, a meaning larger 
 and deeper than that usual to positivism, the attitude 
 of the agnostic is instrumental and teleological. Agnos- 
 ticism simply endows the knower must we not even 
 put our conclusion so ? with a wider freedom than 
 that of knowledge, and yet also makes his knowledge 
 both share and serve the wider freedom that is given. 
 
 Instead, then, of pointing to a known "unknow- 
 able," before which either some non-human creature 
 or some human vice-regent of such a creature is not 
 obliged to be so knowingly humble, instead of estab- 
 lishing the conceit that knowledge or science is wholly 
 for its own sake and so of divorcing knowledge and 
 real life, instead of making castes out of the social 
 
126 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 classes of those who look and those who do, the un- 
 knowable must be taken to point to the necessary unity 
 of knowledge and life, of theory and practice, to the fact 
 that all looking is incident to a running and before a 
 leaping, that all knowledge is responsible to life, and 
 that only life, however directly unknowable, can ever 
 inform knowledge. It even suggests I think with 
 Carlyle that " the end of man is action, not thought, 
 though it were the noblest." Yet, in truth, though its 
 own emphasis may thus exalt action, it cannot mean 
 any depreciation of thought or knowledge, only their 
 enlistment in the service of life. 
 
 At this point it would be interesting to show in 
 detail how action that is, volition or application to 
 life as central to the meaning of agnosticism is not 
 only the logically appropriate nor yet only the senti- 
 mentally ideal, but also the inevitable, the inner and 
 actually real motive, the natural outcome of the scien- 
 tific standpoint in each one of its three attitudes. 
 Such a showing might follow historical and socio- 
 logical lines, or it might appeal to psychology or it 
 might be abstrusely logical, but I can ask attention 
 only to a few suggestions of so general a character as 
 not to be easily classified. 
 
 The natural consequence of objectivism is something 
 like that attributed by many to modern militarism, 
 since it ends by inducing the very thing it claims to 
 prevent. An objective science discloses the mechanical 
 nature of man's environment, besides making man 
 himself also a good deal of a machine. But a machine, 
 whether environment or personal being, is always a 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 127 
 
 tool whose fine, accurate adjustments are just so much 
 presented opportunity that by a sort of hypnotism 
 turns the scientist's consciousness into that of an 
 effective agent in the world. Somehow a real machine 
 must move, and in the case before us with the move- 
 ment the asserted distinction between looking subject 
 and seen object collapses hopelessly. Witness such a 
 collapse, as the runner, who has been studying the 
 stream before him, takes his leap, or in history as an 
 age of self-consciousness, conventionalism, and utili- 
 tarianism, is followed by the rise of Napoleon. So does 
 objectivism pass over into action. As for the special 
 science, it may be impractical, because partial, but we 
 have seen how at least formally it loses its partiality, 
 becoming even all-inclusive, indirectly compensating 
 for its narrowness of view and so becoming virtually 
 co-extensive with all its associates in science. The 
 dividing partitions may still stand, but only as unsub- 
 stantial forms wholly transparent and ineffective, so 
 that the undivided universe is really present to con- 
 sciousness. The undivided universe, however, as pre- 
 sent to consciousness, is a call for will, since it cannot 
 be fully realized in any formal consciousness. The 
 natural decline of an asserted specialism, then, or the 
 development of specialism into a mere form without 
 substance, into a virtual universalism. makes science 
 applicable. It makes science applicable, for in the 
 first place it gives freedom from the bondage of mere 
 special technique, just as, for example, the decline of 
 religious or irreligious? sectarianism, a form of 
 specialism certainly, is sure to free religion from the 
 bondage of ritual, and in the second place, as was the 
 
128 THE WILL TO DOUBT 
 
 fate of objectivism, it makes the distinction between 
 self and not-self, subject and object, man and nature, 
 only a formal one, since the real unity of the objective 
 world is exactly that in which the self has its true 
 realization. In like manner a religion turned non- 
 sectarian shows man truly living and moving and 
 having his being, not aloof from God, but in God. 
 Thirdly, whether because of the freedom from tech- 
 nique or ritual or because, as the waters of science 
 become quiet with the union of its many streams, the 
 objective world does clearly mirror the image -of the 
 self, the decline of specialism, like the decline of 
 sectarianism, brings what some are pleased to call the 
 liberation of the human spirit. The psychologist would 
 call it the development of knowledge into will in a 
 word, the application of science, and the historian 
 would record it as the dawn of a new era. Psycho- 
 logically and historically the human spirit is liberated 
 and nature is let loose at the same time. Details 
 can always be observed objectively and specially or 
 separately ; the whole, on the other hand, is bound 
 to draw the observer into itself and so to change 
 the observation into motive and will. And, lastly, as 
 for agnosticism, suffice it to say, in addition to what 
 has been said, that the suppressed passion for reality to 
 which agnosticism must always testify ensures in good 
 time the assertion of the volitional as distinct from 
 the merely scientific point of view. Whatever this 
 may mean psychologically, historically and sociologic- 
 ally it means that a time of agnosticism leads to all 
 sorts of applications of science, such as those, for 
 example, in legislation and in industry. In morals 
 
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE. 129 
 
 and religion, too, the same wish and will to use the 
 results of science shows itself, as in the social settle- 
 ments, in scientific charity, in the "institutional" 
 church, and in the university extension movement. 
 Agnosticism, marking, as it always does, dissatisfaction 
 both with the uninformed and with the conventionally 
 informed life, and also rendering mere formal know- 
 ledge, however logically correct and thinkable, unreal 
 or artificial, calls for a larger freedom of life through 
 the mediation of knowledge. 
 
 But interesting as such reflections as the foregoing 
 are, and interesting also as it would be to undertake 
 an account of will in general in its relation to a con- 
 sciousness which in so far as scientific is always 
 artificial and symbolic, and is in particular, as we 
 have found, always a poise between opposing points of 
 view, 1 I must bring to an end this rather lengthy 
 examination of the standpoint of science. If I have 
 not already tarried too long, the special task of this 
 volume certainly does not warrant further attention 
 even to so important a department of human experi- 
 ence. 
 
 In conclusion, then, it is now quite apparent that 
 science is a fruitful field for the doubter. Science 
 lacks self-sufficiency. Socially it means the rise of a 
 caste, and logically it involves abstraction and conse- 
 quent division against itself. Its most cherished ideals, 
 as shown in its attitudes and methods, are chimerical, 
 or impossible. In general and in particular it has a 
 
 1 For an interesting account, mainly psychological in standpoint, 
 of will as involving such a poise, see Miinsterberg's Grundziige der 
 Psychologic, Vol. I, chap. xv. , Leipzig, 1900. 
 K 
 
130 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 paradoxical standpoint, being not less given to con- 
 tradictions than ordinary consciousness. 
 
 But, as must be added, the case for the doubter of 
 science has led also toward a belief in science. Not 
 infrequently in the course of the foregoing discussion 
 it must have seemed even as if belief rather than 
 doubt were the controlling motive. A little child has 
 said that faith consists in " believing what you know 
 to be untrue," and our present state of mind cannot 
 be far from such a faith. Actually the science 
 which we may believe in is the science of which we 
 are also confirmed doubters. We doubt the formal 
 attitude and the formal doctrines just because they 
 are abstract, phenomenal, paradoxical, but at the same 
 time we have to believe in the spirit there seems to 
 be no other word available as an ever-present agent 
 of validity, because, in spite of all, the very incon- 
 gruities save these formal doctrines from their 
 apparent artificiality and abstraction, and put them 
 in touch with what is whole and real. And if, as 
 was suggested, the scientific consciousness is only the 
 specially developed consciousness of ordinary life, 
 then we have gained also a new confidence even 
 in the unreflective paradoxical consciousness of every- 
 day life. Yet, that we may more fully compre- 
 hend what this means, we shall next consider at some 
 length the possible value of the defects in experience 
 which have now been observed. Ideas, which have 
 appeared heretofore as little better than hints or 
 suggestions, can then be presented in clearer form. 
 
CHAPTEK VI. 
 
 POSSIBLE VALUE IN THESE ESSENTIAL 
 DEFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 
 
 AN original sin, or an essential defect, must somehow 
 be for some good purpose. At least, if a general faith 
 in the ultimate propriety of all things has any ground 
 to stand on, such must be the case. The sin or the 
 defect cannot be unmixed; its very originality, its 
 essentiality, must line it, though it be the blackest 
 of clouds, with some silver. Theology has sometimes 
 forgotten this, but an honest doubter cannot afford 
 such a lapse. 
 
 Yet before examining the possible worth of the 
 original defects of experience, or, as some might regard 
 the present enterprise, before attempting to give the 
 devil himself a " character," we must recall the various 
 steps of our general undertaking as it has progressed 
 so far. We have been, in the first place, occupied 
 with a thoroughgoing confession of doubt, with the 
 greatest possible candour hunting down all the reasons 
 for the attitude of doubt which experience affords, 
 and so far, in the second place, we have found doubt 
 justified, whether for good or for ill, because of its 
 potential when not actual universality among men, 
 of its character as a condition of all conscious life, of 
 
 131 
 
132 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 its importance to real active life and deep experience, 
 of its intimacy even with habit, and of its natural 
 sense of dependence and consequent impulse to com- 
 panionship with nature, man and God, but more than 
 all and this was the special interest of the last two 
 chapters because of the paradoxical and self-contra- 
 dictory nature of all human experience. As regards 
 the last point, our ordinary consciousness, the often- 
 boasted consciousness of common sense, was found 
 to harbour a widespread, very persistent duplicity 
 towards such vital things as reality, wholeness or 
 unity, space and time, the causal relation, knowledge, 
 moral freedom and natural law ; and science, to which 
 many when dislodged from their ordinary standpoint 
 have been accustomed to retreat with greatest con- 
 fidence and hope, was examined with similar results. 
 Science was found in its rise to involve abstraction 
 of interest and disruption of life, and in its avowed 
 point of view to be suppose I say at this point 
 impossible but contradictory. So, in a word, as a 
 clinching argument for doubt, as an argument that 
 at least on the surface has less of hope in it than any 
 of the others, we are face to face with the bare, hard 
 fact that in the very nature of human experience, 
 besides the relativity and instability and subjectivity, 
 there dwells a spirit of positive violence. Contradic- 
 tion is just one phase of the error to which all men 
 are said to be addicted. As a background for the 
 inconsistent theologian, the fickle woman, the shifting 
 politician and other equally double-faced monsters, 
 we see both-sidedness, individually and to a certain 
 extent socially, to be a basal habit of human nature, 
 
POSSIBLE VALUE IN DEFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 133 
 
 and if the doctrine of original sin is tenable at all, in 
 just this fact it would appear to have its strongest 
 support. Humanum est errare may be translated : 
 Man is most human when hopelessly divided against 
 himself. 
 
 But just here our confession of doubt has reached a 
 critical stage; since in experience apparently at its 
 very worst, as if in a medley of discords we have 
 caught a promise of real harmony, and so something 
 from which to get genuine hope. In the very habit of 
 duplicity or contradiction we have again and again 
 had suggestion of an agent of validity, a power for 
 adequacy in experience, which would hold even a 
 phenomenal, relative, partial experience to a real 
 world. In short, really the strongest reason for doubt 
 is possibly a ground of belief; or, as was said in 
 substance at the close of the foregoing chapter, the 
 very experience of which we are already confirmed 
 doubters is, after all, just the experience which we 
 seem to see our way to believing in. 
 
 Since the time of the great Leibnitz, and probably 
 since the time self-conscious man drew his first breath, 
 all genuine optimism has caught its most assuring 
 vision of what was good, not in something quite apart 
 from what was evil, but in and through evil itself, as 
 if what is evil must be ever building better than it 
 seems or than it knows. Very much as mathematics 
 has viewed the negative quantity as an integral part 
 of the whole system of quantities, so in the person 
 of Leibnitz statesman, historian, scientist, mathema- 
 tician, and philosopher and I imagine in the person 
 also of you or me, though we may not claim the same 
 
134 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 authority, the human mind has been wise and deep 
 enough to see evil, representing all the negative things 
 of life as an organic part of the best possible world, 
 even of the world created by an infinite God. At least 
 since Leibnitz's time, I say, optimism has generally 
 justified itself, not by denial of evil in the world, but 
 in and through evil. Not long ago a young man who 
 was perhaps more profound and reflective in his habits 
 of mind than wise in his manner of statement, said to 
 me that the most spiritual truth as yet disclosed to 
 him was the identity of God with the devil. A 
 shocking declaration, of course; yet, to say the least, 
 not very far from the very spiritual idea, welcome to 
 most, if not to all, that the conviction of sin is the 
 beginning of salvation, or that the consciousness of 
 ignorance is the very ground of wisdom. And here, 
 similarly, belief within doubt, not belief apart from 
 doubt, or validity and reality only in a contradictory 
 experience, not aloof from a contradictory experience, 
 is the sum and substance of what our confession has 
 certainly been leading towards. 
 
 Nothing, it is indeed true, so blasts a man's 
 assurance as to have his ideas and arguments on 
 a certain matter, or on matters in general, exposed 
 as defective, and worst of all as positively inconsistent, 
 and with his discomfiture human nature must always 
 entertain the warmest kind of sympathy. In fact, 
 upon just this sympathy I have been depending in 
 the development of the argument of this book. 
 But human nature, however sympathetic, is really 
 superior to any momentary discomfiture, and most 
 if not all men sooner or later come to value highly 
 
OF 
 
 POSSIBLE VALUE IN DEFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 135 
 
 even their once discomfiting inconsistencies. " I am 
 glad," we seem to hear a fellow-being say, " that after 
 all, in spite of myself, I did recognize the other side. 
 You abused me and called me double; yet so doing you 
 were double too. I see now that my duplicity saved 
 me, not, however, for your view or for another's, but 
 for the both-sided and true, which we both shared and 
 served"; and exactly such a reflection on the incon- 
 sistencies of experiences, in their less or in their more 
 fundamental manifestations, is the burden of the 
 present chapter. Again, to one who complained that 
 with every breath he took he had to contradict him- 
 self, respiration being as necessary to his breathing as 
 inspiration, just as in walking falling is as necessary 
 as rising, we might properly and satisfactorily reply : 
 "You are really alive, sir," and just this answer is 
 also quite pertinent to any who might be disposed in 
 their doubting to despair over the essential duplicity 
 of human experience. Is not experience more than 
 any one idea or any one ideal ? Being really alive, is 
 it not infinitely more than this or that thing, than this 
 or that place or time, than this or that power or will, 
 than this or that point of view ? And. if more, what 
 so surely as universal duplicity and self-opposition can 
 ensure at once its vitality and its integrity ? 
 
 I am not forgetting or wishing my readers to 
 forget that there are other defects in experience 
 besides this of self-opposition, besides experience's 
 habit of never failing to induce its own conflicts; 
 but no defect seems to me so central or so conclusive 
 as this, and none is at the same time so clear in its 
 testimony to the intimacy of doubt and belief. Sub- 
 
136 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 jectivity, relativity, phenomenality, artificiality, par- 
 tiality, and instability certainly an imposing and 
 appalling list, though logically I must suspect it of 
 being at least a cross-division are all noteworthy 
 defects ; but supposing the list exact and complete, we 
 must recognize that all these either beget contradiction 
 or are begotten by it. Contradiction is just the life or 
 the heart of the interesting family to which they belong, 
 and so in applying our thinker's stethoscope to that 
 heart we shall have determined the hold upon life 
 of the whole race. 
 
 Now, there are five things, some of them already 
 foreseen, that seem worth saying here of the essential 
 habit of self-contradiction, and they seem worth say- 
 ing because so effectively and so comprehensively they 
 warrant the conclusion that even upon our strongest 
 reason for doubt we may rest a genuine case for 
 belief. 
 
 Thus, for the first of the five, contradiction incites 
 and even in itself implies movement; it requires, or 
 positively it is, action. As a mode of thinking, as 
 a logical form, it is the way, perhaps the only possible 
 way, in which the mind can, so to speak, make a cross- 
 section or take a picture of activity or give the sem- 
 blance of fixity, the formal appearance of static nature, 
 to what is dynamic. The photographer trying for a 
 portrait of reality might ask it only to look pleasant, 
 but the logician, for whom reality was essentially 
 dynamic, would demand manifest opposition, for in no 
 other way could his art, limited to conditions of rest, 1 
 
 1 This limitation is shown, for example, in the logical principle of 
 identity. 
 
POSSIBLE VALUE IN DEFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 137 
 
 be equal to its subject. Where experience is contra- 
 dictory, then, there is movement, whether for that 
 which is known or for him that has the knowledge. 
 In your character or mine, so like a lover's unselfish 
 selfishness in its apparent inconsistencies, in our 
 double views about reality or unity or law, in a 
 subjective-objective science, in an agnostic philosophy, 
 in all these the contradictions are only the marks 
 of essential unrest, of necessary movement, that make 
 the picture possible. For a world of opposites there 
 can be no peace. The very things opposed are them- 
 selves fluent and unstable, and that third something, 
 the tertium quid, a picture of which the opposition 
 tries to be or to which the things opposed necessarily 
 point, belongs, as Alice in Wonderland seems to have 
 discovered, to yesterday or to-morrow, never to to-day. 
 But, secondly, contradiction, at least as here under- 
 stood, is an expression, or in experience a means to the 
 expression, as well as to the maintenance, of real unity. 
 In general this is because real unity cannot take sides, 
 and so can never reside in anything that is, but must 
 rather be served by the co-operation of all things and 
 in particular by their mutually corrective or balancing 
 differences. This no doubt will appear to some readers 
 as just one more example of a philosopher's impossible 
 subtleties, as a mountain with its top in so rare an 
 atmosphere that the common man would not dare to 
 climb it if he could. Yet, suppose together we rise 
 to the heights of this seeming impossibility by a little 
 unprejudiced study of the conditions, remembering 
 that the summits of very wonderful mountains, 
 plainly impossible of ascent, have often been reached 
 
138 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 from the other side, and that difficulties of breathing 
 are often due to a needless exhaustion. To take a first 
 step, then, contradiction is only difference, or contrast, 
 at its limit. Naturally there is some opposition, 
 some mutual resistance, in all difference, in that, for 
 example, between one man and another, or one thing 
 and another, between religion and art, red and green, 
 or warm and hot, and often the difference or the 
 opposition seems very slight ; but contradiction, so 
 called, is only this difference abstracted and unre- 
 strained it is difference at its worst or best, differ- 
 ence as only opposition, or, once more, difference where 
 any possible unity of the things opposed has lost 
 all material ground or all chance of actual, visible 
 form, and has become, accordingly, at most merely an 
 empty, abstract principle. Contradiction, then, is 
 difference so wide that unity seems wholly betrayed 
 rather than served or maintained. A real unity, 
 however, requires for its realization just the freedom 
 from material form or ground which such extreme 
 difference would force upon it. It therefore gains 
 instead of losing reality by passing into the world of 
 the materially and visibly empty and abstract, or, say, 
 by leaving behind any hope of a finite residence and 
 entering the sphere of the infinite, to which difference, 
 or at least contradiction, so cordially invites or expels 
 it. And, this being true, we can see how unity is 
 served or maintained, as was said, by the contra- 
 dictions of experience. 
 
 Commonly men have an idea that differences mean, 
 or point to, unity, but they are more likely to suppose 
 that the unity is by mere contrast or antithesis than 
 
POSSIBLE VALUE IN DEFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 139 
 
 clearly to recognize that it is a most intimate fact of 
 the differences themselves. They will even see in a 
 number of things only so many varying aspects of 
 some one thing, and will go so far as to look upon the 
 aspects as actually enriching and deepening the unity, 
 but they still fail fully to appreciate how the real 
 unity is immanent and immediate in the differences. 
 Again, in all their thinking they contrast, and may 
 consciously observe that they contrast, only objects or 
 people that really have something in common, com- 
 paring, on the other hand, only such as in some way 
 are manifestly different, and in their practical affairs 
 they compete only with those who with them are 
 parties to one and the same life, a fundamental 
 sympathy, indeed, being a necessary condition of their 
 rivalry, and actually and actively hate only the beings 
 whom because of a common humanity they might love ; 
 but here, too, their appreciation lags behind the fact. 
 In life generally, moreover, in small things and in 
 large, extremes do have the habit of meeting. A man's 
 virtues are so near to his vices. The widest variations 
 in things are only relatively at variance. Even what 
 is cold is somewhat warm. Nothing is absolutely any- 
 thing. In history a single ideal, rising to influence, 
 has always divided men into two opposing camps. 
 Witness the fact of bipartisanship, not in politics 
 alone, but in all of life's interests. Democrats and 
 Republicans, Radicals and Conservatives alike have 
 loved their country and honoured their country's flag 
 and, regardless of party, their country's heroes or 
 patriots. Epicureans and Stoics in recent times or 
 long ago have found the same life worth living. The 
 
140 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 Eoman Law and the Eoman Holiday, working together, 
 like the right and the left hand, different yet in 
 sympathy, made the great empire. Two men, further- 
 more, in active, open conflict are in truth at serious 
 difference with each other; but, as they might even 
 say, if their conflict were in the form of a debate, 
 where words instead of fists or pistols were the 
 weapons, in the bare, unapplied principle involved, or 
 say in the abstract, in the final success of whichever is 
 the " best man," they do and they must agree. Simply 
 throughout this life of ours there has been and there can 
 be no idealism without conflict and no conflict, what- 
 ever the issue or the manner, without common 
 weapons, which means, too, without some common 
 relationship and some common interest. As for the 
 idealism, too, what is it but a demand for real unity ? 
 And the common weapons, or for quite general purposes, 
 the common forms in which a conflict or an opposition 
 is expressed, as if the hiding-place of unity, perhaps 
 a sleeping unity, only indicate in the very differences a 
 basis, a potential of agreement, even an earnest of an 
 underlying and sometimes awakening accord. So, 
 truly, in life at large extremes do meet. But commonly 
 men recognize at most only that they meet, without 
 realizing that their difference is intrinsic to a real unity. 
 Where unity is real, then, there must be infinite 
 difference, and infinite difference is just what the con- 
 tradictions of experience impose upon experience and 
 make it responsible to. Infinite difference gives to 
 everything an opposite and to all things unity; to every 
 man a rival and to human society, as a whole, solidarity. 
 Against the material it sets the spiritual; against 
 
POSSIBLE VALUE IN DEFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 141 
 
 the particular, the general ; against the subjective, the 
 objective; against the living, the dead; against the 
 lawful, the lawless ; against the caused, the uncaused ; 
 and to all these, the spiritual and the material, the 
 subjective and the objective, the living and the dead, 
 the lawful and the lawless, the caused and the 
 uncaused, it gives place in a perfect unity ; not, of 
 course, in any material unity, since such unity could 
 not be perfect, but nevertheless in a real unity. 
 
 For our first step, therefore, in the ascent of that 
 "impossible subtlety," contradiction is only difference 
 at its greatest limit; for the second, difference in 
 general, whether partial or extreme, marks an under- 
 lying, or more precisely an indwelling unity ; and for 
 the last step, real unity is served, not betrayed by 
 difference. Moreover, the wider the difference, the 
 nearer it be to positive contradiction or opposition, the 
 more conclusive and effective is the service. Eemember, 
 real unity can never take sides ; in the world of things 
 it must be always both-sided. It cannot be here or there, 
 now and then be the then in the past or in the future, 
 this or that. In the words, used of truth, perhaps an 
 appropriate refrain for this book, it can have neither 
 visible form nor body, neither habitation nor name; like 
 the Son of Man, it cannot have where to lay its head. 
 
 The particular opposition of life and death affords a 
 peculiarly serviceable illustration, for it is, of course, 
 at the bottom of many of the most searching para- 
 doxes of our human experience. Eeal life cannot be con- 
 fined to any single organic form or to any single group 
 of organic forms. In fact, it cannot be bound even to 
 the organic as commonly distinguished from the in- 
 
142 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 organic world. So for the biologist, very much as for 
 the theologian, whenever life takes a residence, death 
 must ensue sooner or later. Life and death, then, as 
 opposites, become the medium of real life. But not 
 only have we here a helpful illustration, also we have 
 a suggestion that should prevent an easy misunder- 
 standing. In general, as so plainly in this special case, 
 the opposition, so necessary to reality in experience, to 
 a real life or to any real unity, can itself be complete 
 and effective, not through any single instance of 
 extreme difference, not through the opposition of just 
 two distinct things, but only through an accumulation 
 or summation of all possible instances, so to speak, from 
 difference at zero to difference at infinity. In fact, a 
 real opposition or rather a truly infinite difference, 
 could be only in such a sum. Not the single climax of 
 death, but the constant dying, to which it is only a 
 climax, is what makes real the opposition of life and 
 death and makes this the medium, as was said, of the 
 real life. Death must constantly condition all the 
 movements and processes of life: it must have all 
 possible degrees. And, in like manner, extreme differ- 
 ence at large, just to be real itself and to make for 
 real unity, must be in and through all possible degrees 
 of difference. In other words, the perfect opposition, 
 or contradiction, upon which reality depends, like the 
 perfect death, is rather a continuum than the wide 
 gap, or chasm, which so many have thought it ; it is a 
 graduate difference, not a single cataclysmic difference. 
 Difference in gradation or degree, I have sometimes 
 heard it said, is not real difference ; but this statement, 
 though by no means without warrant or meaning, is 
 
POSSIBLE VALUE IN DEFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 143 
 
 misleading. Surely a cataclysmic difference, a " differ- 
 ence in kind," can be only one finite case of difference ; 
 the negative, or opposition, in it can be only relative ; 
 whereas, when in degree, difference becomes necessarily 
 infinite. Accordingly, as we must not forget, from this 
 point on through the remainder of this book, the con- 
 tradiction of which we have been thinking and which 
 we have found infecting experience at every turn, is 
 not, what at first and even second thought it may have 
 seemed, just an opposition of two things ; between its 
 lines, as it were, it is inclusive of, or maintained by, all 
 the manifold and various things in life and conscious- 
 ness ; it is the completed, short-circuited sum of an 
 infinite series. An infinitely many-sided world is the 
 only world that can claim real unity, and a world of 
 such real unity is the world to which the habit of con- 
 tradiction, which we have observed, relates our human 
 experience. 
 
 So far, then, in estimating the possible value of this 
 central and essential defect of experience, we have 
 found that it implies action and that it makes for, or 
 testifies to, real unity. Now, thirdly, perhaps only to 
 enlarge upon what has just been said, contradiction 
 is an absolutely effective correction of narrowness or 
 partiality or relativity or one-sidedness in life or 
 consciousness, and so it makes experience not abstract, 
 but realistic. This is in truth only another view of the 
 worth of contradiction to integrity and vitality, to 
 unity and reality, but it would emphasize, what is 
 very interesting at least to the metaphysician, and 
 cannot fail to be of some interest to the moralist and 
 the theologian, that where there is real unity there 
 
144 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 is also true reality. Only the One is. The One and 
 Being are the same. There can be but one substance, 
 as also but one God. So men have said in effect 
 throughout the ages, and where they have conceded 
 reality or substantial character to manifoldness, the 
 concession has simply concealed a reassertion, but with 
 fuller and deeper meaning, of the intimacy of unity 
 with reality. What makes for real unity or wholeness, 
 then, must impart realistic character, giving actual 
 contact and intimacy with just that of which, so to 
 speak, the world is made. Now individual things 
 or ideas always show life suffering in some measure 
 under tangential digressions from the circle of its real 
 wholeness, and only opposition can save them or can 
 preserve the reality to which they both belong and 
 contribute. Has not Emerson, among many others, 
 declared with a cogency and a depth of meaning 
 which quite defy the superficiality and levity attrac- 
 tive to a few, that mere consistency is narrow and 
 confining ? Any particular view-point or idea or ideal, 
 any particular thing or activity, simply needs an 
 opposite to balance the abstraction or digression which 
 being particular must always involve. Particularity, 
 specific individuality, is certainly a necessary condition 
 of real worth in life, but with an equal necessity there 
 could be no life, no conservation and wholeness of life 
 if the particular, individual things stood unchallenged 
 in the world, and no realistic experience, if experience 
 were not thus paradoxical and divided against itself. 
 Life, therefore, gets not only movement and unity 
 from the contradictions that lie at the very heart 
 of experience, but in getting unity it gets also contact 
 
POSSIBLE VALUE IN DEFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 145 
 
 with reality, and the three together may be summed 
 up in the one word poise. Montaigne marvelled at 
 the hopeless folly of mankind as compared with the 
 wisdom of God, but man's folly is divided against 
 itself and so imbued with God's wisdom; and with 
 countless others he saw the ideas of man to be only 
 subjective and unsubstantial and irresponsible, but 
 man's ideas, though fanciful and illusory, though sub- 
 jective and imaginative, work against each other for 
 what is real and substantial. Man's ideas co-operate 
 for their own correction and so for communion or 
 intimacy with a character that is not less substantial 
 or responsible than that of God himself. 
 
 And so, fourthly, the contradictions of experience 
 make experience supremely practical. They make it 
 practical just because they make realistic, or sub- 
 stantial, an experience which without them would be 
 abstract and only relative and "phenomenal." Possibly 
 this is the hardest thing of all to apprehend, or at 
 least to express satisfactorily. Yet the fact, to which 
 I keep returning, that only the both-sided in every- 
 day matters or in science or in any form of positive 
 experience can accord with reality and its wholeness, 
 is assuredly quite to the point. In practical life there 
 always are, and emphatically there always must be, 
 two sides to every thing, to every question. In practi- 
 cal life, too, or at any rate in all effective activity, 
 there always is, and emphatically there always must 
 be, something very like to leadership ; but any truly 
 practical leadership, any leadership that is all along 
 the lines of life, be it of things, ideas, persons, or 
 social classes or parties, can never be confined to a 
 
146 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 single individual representative, but must be instead a 
 leadership of many. No thoroughly practical leader- 
 ship, I say, can ever be on one side or the other, but 
 instead of being one-sided it must be both-sided, or 
 rather, infinitely many-sided ; it must be between or 
 among all the different and opposed individuals; it 
 must lie, perhaps in a sense sleep, in rivalry and 
 competition. There can be no visible leader, whose 
 leadership is wholly practical, whether of things or 
 realities for the metaphysician or of ideas or cate- 
 gories for the logician or of persons or classes for 
 the statesman or the moralist or the theologian. 
 Metaphysical reality, the truly practical and realistic 
 knowledge, the political supremacy which is complete 
 and inclusive, or the wholly moral life or the divine 
 life must forever be secured, not through a single 
 manifestation presiding over the others, but through 
 the divided labour of them all. Yes, real leadership, 
 like real unity in general, is a divided labour ; it is a 
 labour that effects successful co-operation through its 
 very differences and conflicts: for reality, a labour per- 
 haps of different " elements " or " entities " ; for know- 
 ledge, of different ideas and standpoints ; for morals, 
 of different standards ; for politics, of different parties 
 and platforms ; for divinity, of different Gods ; and for 
 life at large, a labour of infinite differences, which 
 means also a labour of opposites, that at once develop 
 and correct each other to the glory of that which is 
 real and practical. 
 
 It would be peculiarly interesting to examine 
 further this principle of a practical, truly realistic 
 experience ensured to human life through the inner 
 
POSSIBLE VALUE IN DEFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 147 
 
 conflicts of experience. The history of morals and 
 ethics, for example, notably of the perennial conflict 
 between hedonism and idealism, could not but cast a 
 good deal of light upon it ; and the history of political 
 struggles, or the history of the great controversies in 
 science such as that between vitalism and anti-vital- 
 ism or that between atomism and energism; or in 
 philosophy, between dualism and monism ; or in 
 theology, between naturalism and supernaturalism, 
 would also be most illuminating; while, also perhaps 
 appealing only to the few, in the logic of the negative, 
 as it has developed from the earliest times, or in 
 psychological theory for example, in the dispute of the 
 advocates of the innervation theory and the afferent 
 theory, or in Hering's theory of vision, or, again, in the 
 life and movement of any one of the time-worn para- 
 doxes of popular or scientific or philosophical ideas, 
 one might expect to find suggestive illustration. In 
 philosophy, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Zeno, Socrates, 
 Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel have all found negation, or 
 contradiction, necessary to any adequate account of 
 reality. Explorations, however, in their teachings or 
 along any of the paths that were suggested, would lead 
 us too far astray. 
 
 Fifthly, then, not only do the contradictions make 
 experience realistic and so practical, but also they 
 make it essentially social. A life or an experience 
 that is contradictory has (1) movement, (2) unity or 
 integrity, (3) reality and poise, and (4) practicality; 
 and then it has besides, as if the medium through 
 which these four things are sustained, (5) social char- 
 acter, society being only the visible expression, the 
 
148 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 oitter realization, of the both-sidedness, of the in- 
 finitely differential unity or the divided labour, which 
 an active, yet thoroughly self-controlled, truly realis- 
 tic, practical experience requires. In a former chapter, 
 it will be readily recalled, an impulse to social life 
 was found to be intimately connected with the attitude 
 of doubt, and here clearly we are confronted with 
 only another view of the same fact, since contradiction 
 has become our most cogent reason for doubt and is 
 now seen to require the social relations. An indi- 
 vidual whose experience is ever divided against itself 
 is, ipso facto, a social character, his social environment, 
 whether in its narrowest or broadest manifestation, 
 adding nothing to his nature or to the struggles of 
 that nature, but only making the division against 
 himself constantly and manifestly real. The social 
 environment, as it were, just proves the man, his 
 struggle and all, to himself. Some have agreed that 
 the individual consciousness contained nothing on 
 which to ground a positive case for society, for direct 
 positive social interest; but so long as man's experience 
 is necessarily paradoxical or contradictory, so long as 
 man is divided against himself, or as the labour of life 
 and reality is a divided labour, the case for society 
 and for personal interest in society is clear and con- 
 clusive. A basis for society lies in the very nature 
 of experience. Society is not something added to 
 individuality from without. 
 
 Let us here beware of easy sentiment. Let not our 
 thinking conjure false sweetness and light. Experience 
 is truly and essentially social ; the individual was not 
 meant to dwell alone ; but herein is no immediate 
 
POSSIBLE VALUE IN DEFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 149 
 
 cure-all, no promise of an unperturbed brotherly love, 
 of a life for one and all of simple peace and blissful 
 quietude. On such a plan society would hardly suit 
 the individual with whom, and with whose natural 
 experience, we have become acquainted. To speak 
 with the extravagance of a counter-sentimentalism, 
 the individual of our present acquaintance is forever 
 spoiling for a fight. In the life of the society to which 
 he belongs, in the life where he watches for his in- 
 coming ship, there must always be hate and evil in 
 all their forms, lawlessness and destruction, illusion 
 and error; but and just here sentiment, the senti- 
 ment of a really searching optimism, called once before 
 a sacrificial and heroic optimism, may find some assur- 
 ance never an unmixed hate, never a wholly idle 
 destruction, never an unmeaning error. Can anything, 
 indeed, that has another thing against it that has, in 
 short, an opposite ever be itself unmixed ? The good 
 or the evil in society, being always opposed, is always 
 also shared. So few people recognize, or appreciate, 
 what a great mixer opposition is. Death is the 
 passing only of inadequate or unworthy life. Hate 
 witnesses only a false love; sin, a pharisaical righteous- 
 ness. Destruction marks an imperfect construction. 
 And in all its forms, evil is not so much something in 
 and by itself as an exposure and reproach of what is 
 supposed to be unmixedly good. Public crime, for 
 example, is not so local as it appears ; it is only a 
 generally, widely private vice made locally manifest, 
 and the respectable and law-abiding, who adjudge it 
 evil, are bound to feel as if adjudging and condemning 
 themselves. In a word, the individual's natural society 
 
ISO THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 is never without evil, but in all its forms the evil 
 has somewhat of good in it ; and although social life, 
 not less than individual life, must be one of conflict 
 and discord, nevertheless, because the various factors 
 or factions, however opposed, can never be unmixed, 
 because the members of society must all be good and 
 bad, right and wrong I almost said living and dead 
 together instead of being hopeless for having evil in 
 it, the life of society is so much the more worth living. 
 Shallow sentimentalism may not so esteem it, but we 
 need give little thought to shallow sentimentalism. 
 
 So our use of the word " society " is not senti- 
 mental. Society means conflict. It is just the natural 
 sphere of life and reality as for ever a divided labour, 
 as for ever divided and laborious divided even be- 
 tween the powers for supposed good and for adjudged 
 evil, and through the conflicts, in which the division is 
 expressed, what is true and good and vital is being for- 
 ever kept real. Or, to repeat, society is the natural 
 medium through which movement, unity or integrity, 
 poise and reality, and practicality are secured and 
 realized in human experience ; it is that which makes 
 the individual's division against himself manifestly 
 real and positively and progressively effective for a 
 life, yes, for his life, at once of vitality and perfect 
 wholeness. 
 
 But now that the five things are said, now that the 
 contradictions of experience have been seen to serve 
 experience by giving it movement, unity, poise, prac- 
 tical reality and social character, somebody is sure to 
 remark facetiously that on the evidence contradiction 
 is something we should all cultivate assiduously, and 
 
POSSIBLE VALUE IN DEFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 151 
 
 that henceforth to face both ways, the butt of so much 
 opprobrium, should be one of man's greatest ideals ; in 
 brief, that the inconsistent creatures in politics, morals, 
 and theology are the coming examples for mankind. 
 Verily the devil has been given his promised "char- 
 acter." But, alas ! in the spirit of such startling 
 humour one would have to conclude also that because 
 crime has beyond all question been a means of social 
 development, being all-important to the awakening of 
 the social consciousness and conscience, all men should 
 at once take thought and find it their duty to turn 
 criminals; or, again, that because death has a funda- 
 mental part in the order of nature and is, moreover, of 
 greatest spiritual worth and significance, we should all 
 morbidly seek it, being successfully righteous only by 
 being suicides. True, we do need to recognize the 
 positive function of crime in the progress of civiliza- 
 tion, or in the history of law, and also to be aware of 
 crime as a possibility in our own lives, and we need to 
 be ready to die and to feel besides that dying we are 
 far from losing all that is worth having, but to court 
 crime or to seek death would certainly be to deprive 
 either of the very worth which has made it significant. 
 And in much the same way we may very profitably 
 recognize contradiction or controversy, whether per- 
 sonal or social, as a necessary condition of all valid 
 experience, but not on that account are we to culti- 
 vate what is contradictory, to be always blindly spoil- 
 ing for a contradiction. Like crime or death, if directly 
 courted, contradiction would lose its peculiar effective- 
 ness. The both-sidedness or the all-sidedness, which 
 at once develops and conserves human life, is only 
 
152 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 that which is maintained with a tenacious, even with a 
 would-be consistent loyalty to each and every side. 
 
 So, although grossly misused if directly courted, this 
 defect of experience has its place, even its ideal value, 
 in experience, and what on the surface seemed an 
 almost if not quite hopeless reason for doubt, has 
 truly become all but transfigured, seeming now a 
 source of real assurance. With Heraclitus of old, 
 only perhaps seeing even more than he saw, we can 
 glory in a world of strife. Doubting all things, we 
 can yet believe that all things work together for what 
 is real, for what is good. 
 
 But let me now put the result, so far secured, of 
 our confession of doubt in a new way. For a life 
 in which every thing has an opposite, every idea a 
 counter-idea, truth very plainly, as has indeed been 
 frequently said, cannot be a specific consciousness nor 
 reality a fixed thing. Truth is not a creed, but a 
 spirit. Keality is not a thing, but a life. And for 
 being a spirit truth is only the more realistic? For 
 being a life, reality is only the more substantial. 
 Perfection, too, even the Perfect One, with whom we 
 associate the true and the real, is no particular 
 separate being in a certain established exclusive 
 status, at once infinitely and passively excellent, but 
 a power ever dwelling in the strife that makes for 
 movement and poise. For being such a power, too, 
 he is only more surely perfect, only more certainly 
 infinite and excellent. 
 
 Such terms as spirit, life, and power are confessedly 
 somewhat dangerous terms to use. Especially the 
 first is liable to misunderstanding. Yet, whatever 
 
POSSIBLE VALUE IN DEFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 153 
 
 common usage may be, when I say that truth is not 
 a creed but a spirit, that reality is not a thing but 
 a power, the reference is directly to that agent or 
 principle of validity which has been found to hold 
 our experience, naturally so faulty, to contact and 
 intimacy with the real world. A spirit of truth, a 
 principle of validity there is, to which the very faults 
 of experience give witness, and in view of this we 
 who doubt, who doubt the particular things, the creeds 
 and the objects generally, the definite forms and ideas, 
 the habits and standpoints of our everyday life or 
 our scientific theory, may yet believe ; we may believe 
 in the real spirit, or power, which makes all things 
 parties to the divided labour of a real life. 1 
 
 1 The worth assigned in this chapter to the contradictions of ex- 
 perience involves a standpoint which apparently is at variance with 
 that of Mr. F. H. Bradley, whose book, Appearance and Reality, has 
 occupied such an important place in the philosophical study and 
 controversy of the last ten years. Of course, here is not the place for 
 final criticism of Mr. Bradley, since the present examination of doubt 
 is no such scrutiny of experience as his ; it is far short of what would 
 make a complete philosophical argument. Nevertheless, a word 
 or two expressing the nature of the difference between his view and 
 the view advocated here can hardly be impertinent. Thus, if I read 
 him rightly, Mr. Bradley has argued from the paradoxes of ex- 
 perience to the complete, hopeless phenomeuality of experience, 
 while in this study of doubt the argument has been from the 
 paradoxes of experience to a thoroughly realistic experience. Again, 
 Mr. Bradley 's Absolute is able to include the phenomenal, the relative 
 and contradictory, only because this is so unsubstantial as to offer no 
 resistance, while here there has not even been any question of inclusion. 
 All experience, our position has been, is informed with reality ; its 
 very contradictions hold an otherwise phenomenal, relative, changing 
 experience close down to a real world; and this position, I repeat, is 
 at variance with what Mr. Bradley has seemed to say. See, however, a 
 short article, " Relativity and Reality," in the Journal of Philosophy, 
 Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. I, No. 24, November, 1904. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE PERSONAL AND THE SOCIAL, THE 
 VITAL AND THE FORMAL IN EXPERIENCE. 
 
 CONTRASTS such as those in the title of the present 
 chapter, the personal and the social, the vital and the 
 formal, or instrumental, are always dangerous to clear 
 thinking, and yet in spite of the danger no thinking 
 can avoid them. They can be only relatively true ; 
 the terms in which they are couched cannot fail, 
 sooner or later, from one standpoint or another, to 
 make an exchange of the very things to which they 
 apply, since opposition, as must be remembered, is 
 always a most effective mixer, and therefore they can 
 only punctuate the naturally chiaroscuro character 
 that belongs to all articulate thinking. Neverthe- 
 less, used with self-control, they are distinctly service- 
 able. 
 
 In our recent discussion of the value of the essential 
 defects of experience, and particularly when we came 
 to associate social character with the habit of con- 
 tradiction, a contrast of the personal and the social 
 was very plainly implied, and some special attention 
 to this contrast, I feel sure, will help us to comprehend 
 more fully what was said at the time, and will be of 
 great advantage also to our general purpose. It was 
 
THE PERSONAL AND THE SOCIAL. 155 
 
 said that society was nothing alien, or additional, to 
 the nature of the individual, that a basis for society 
 lay in the very nature of experience, that so long as 
 man was divided against himself and the labour of life 
 and reality was necessarily a divided labour, the case 
 both for society and for personal interest in society 
 was clear and conclusive; but this was not fully to 
 define the parts that are played by the individual 
 person and the social group in the development and 
 maintenance of human life. Some, for example, would 
 fear more for the safety of the individual or the 
 person than for that of society ; and just in recognition 
 of their fear, we honest doubters, who are now also at 
 least potential believers, must look to our defences. 
 
 Long ago Plato drew an analogy of the soul or self, 
 of the human individual, to society, and so, too, Aris- 
 totle, though not to society, but much more broadly to 
 all nature, and the one analogy or the other has had a 
 good deal of fascination, not to say intellectual in- 
 spiration, for thinking men ever since. Yet, so far as I 
 am aware, at least one of the implications of the idea 
 has never been fully stated or appraised, and this is 
 much to be wondered at, since there is involved a 
 strong case for both the personal and the social in the 
 maintenance of experience. 1 
 
 Plato found reason, will, and sensuous nature in the 
 individual and analogously a thinking or law-making 
 class, an official or military class, and an industrial or 
 
 1 This paragraph, and many of the paragraphs that follow it, 
 except for considerable revision and adaptation, were published some 
 time ago. See an article, "The Personal and the Factional in 
 Society," in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific 
 Methods, Vol. II, No. 13, 1905. 
 
156 THE WILL TO DQUBT. 
 
 appetitive class in society ; and Aristotle, in very much 
 the same way, found the parts of the individual soul 
 analogous to the vegetable, animal, and rational king- 
 doms of nature, and either of these analogies is simple 
 enough and reasonable enough to be formally under- 
 stood, if not at once wholly appreciated, with its mere 
 statement. Still, in order to be sure of appreciation, 
 in order especially to get the reflected light on the 
 relation between individual and society, we must look 
 to the facts and conditions which are presented very 
 closely. 
 
 To begin with, such an analogy, dealing as it does 
 with the relation of a part to the whole, has and 
 should have, for a reason not hard to find, the freedom 
 of the city of logic. Other than logical approval 
 of it might be cited. Biology and sociology and 
 psychology might be called in to give testimony. And 
 out of the past, the more recent past at least as 
 known to the historian of philosophy, Leibnitz with 
 his lex analogice, or for that matter with the general 
 import of his monadology, might be appealed to. But 
 without tarrying for assistance from these quarters, 
 highly respectable though they are, I make a simple, 
 yet perhaps timely and with apologies for so much 
 emotion soul-satisfying reference to the logic in 
 the case, for after all biology and sociology and 
 psychology are always under the restraints of logic, 
 as well as alliterated with it; nor does the evidence 
 of logic depend on mere technical acquaintance 
 with given sets of facts. Thus, in these en- 
 lightened days, to say nothing of Plato's time or Aris- 
 totle's, how can the true part of anything ever dare 
 
THE PERSONAL AND THE SOCIAL. 157 
 
 not to have an analogy, even a " part-f or-part " or 
 " one-to-one " correspondence to the whole in which it 
 is comprised ? And this being, as in due time will 
 appear, quite as important how can a whole, be it 
 society or nature or anything else, ever have parts 
 without having also, actually or potentially, parts 
 within its parts ? In fact, given any divided whole, 
 and the division, however far it may be carried, will 
 always involve at least these three typical factors : (1) 
 The individual as the part still undivided, though at 
 the same time necessarily inwardly alive with' the 
 self-same differential operation to which it has owed 
 its origin; (2) the group-part or class, which for 
 the convenience of the adjective form may be known 
 also as the faction, and which was so important to 
 Plato in his analogy of the individual to a class- 
 divided society ; and (3) the all-inclusive whole. And 
 among these factors in all possible ways that is, 
 even between individual and individual, or individual 
 and group or group and group, as well as between 
 either individual or group and whole an analogy in 
 terms of all the various elements of the original 
 differential operation will persist. Such, almost tru- 
 istically, though also perhaps somewhat subtly for 
 ordinary purposes, is the logical condition of division 
 or differentiation. Difference, like its limit opposition, 
 is thus a great mixer, and division can be no mere separ- 
 ation or isolation of parts. The saying comes to my 
 mind from somewhere, that though division may reveal 
 distinct vertebrae, the vertebrae always conceal a spinal 
 cord. 
 
 Analogy, however, although thus universal, although 
 
158 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 applicable, as said, in all of the possible ways, must 
 itself share in, must be quite under the spell of, the 
 differentiation ; it must have as many various forms as 
 it has expressions. In every expression the relation 
 must indeed be one of analogy, but it can never be of 
 the same order or degree. That of the individual to 
 the group or faction must be qualitatively distinct 
 from all others, say from that of the individual either 
 to another individual or to the all-inclusive whole. 
 Nor can the much used and frequently abused distinc- 
 tion between small and large writings, as when history 
 is taken as a large writing of personal biography or a 
 social institution of some special phase of personal 
 character, adequately represent the differentiation here 
 in mind. Consider how various, internally and exter- 
 nally, are all the terms among which the analogies 
 obtain. Thus, as of direct interest here, factional 
 differences are bound to be sharper or wider, they are 
 inevitably more deeply set and more openly exclusive 
 of each other than individual differences, and in conse- 
 quence the faction is, not indeed absolutely, but charac- 
 teristically special or particularistic. Perhaps because 
 of its intermediate position between the individual, 
 which is the whole implicitly and potentially, and the 
 completely inclusive environment, which is the whole 
 actually and definitely or explicitly, it is, so to speak, 
 significantly only one among many, instead of being, 
 as in the case of each of the extremes, many in one. 
 It conspicuously appropriates a particular character, 
 and while not excluding any of the other characters 
 which are incident to its own special production, it 
 includes these on the whole only in a negative way, in 
 
THE PERSONAL AND THE SOCIAL. 159 
 
 the way in which opposition includes what opposes it 
 or action the reaction it always implies or in general 
 any different thing the thing or things from which it 
 is different. The extremes, however, as was said, are 
 each "many in one," though in different ways. The 
 individual, being still only potentially divided and 
 being, as it were, the latest residence of the primary 
 operation, is always in some measure directly and 
 positively active with all the different factors of the 
 operation, and this in spite of the restraints of any 
 particular class-affiliation, and the whole, though macro- 
 cosmic with respect to the microcosmic individual, is at 
 the same time qualitatively distinct, as distinct at least 
 as the explicit from the implicit, the actual from the 
 potential. Whatever a merely formal logic might say, 
 a real logic requires that at most microcosm and 
 macrocosm are only metaphors of each other. Even 
 their difference of size would be quite enough to differ- 
 entiate them at least as sharply as the difference of size 
 differentiated imperial Eome from her prototype the 
 Greek City-State. Can the whole and the part be one or 
 many or many in one, can they be real or alive or con- 
 scious, can they be material, can they be personal, can 
 they be anything whatsoever in qualitatively the same 
 way ? Men have often seemed to think so, but without 
 any good reason. The faction, then, the individual and 
 the whole, are qualitatively different expressions of the 
 elements of the operation that has made them ; and 
 their relations, always dependent on analogy, must be 
 various accordingly. 
 
 But now, to leave these questions of logic and to 
 turn directly to the case for both personality and 
 
160 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 society, no idea can be more immediately useful to us 
 than that of what is often styled the unity of experi- 
 ence. Of course this unity, as it is real, must meet 
 just those tests of reality, or of a real unity, that we 
 have already remarked, but within the limits of a 
 definition the unity of experience is neither more nor 
 less than the totality of human relations. It is the 
 experience-whole comprising all the phases of human 
 nature; in other words, all the actual or possible 
 relations of man to nature in general, or all the mani- 
 fold states and activities, stages and events, however 
 different, however seemingly contradictory, in human 
 life. A real unity, as we know, being denied local 
 habitation and a name, is necessarily a thoroughly 
 differential unity; and human nature is analyzable 
 in an indefinite number of ways. It is, to illustrate, 
 physical, mental, and spiritual, or more elaborately, 
 it is athletic, industrial, political, intellectual, moral, 
 aesthetic, and religious, and in its social life has de- 
 veloped institutions answering to these different 
 phases of itself. It is, again, lawful and lawless, old 
 and young, conservative and radical, sympathetic and 
 selfish. But whatever the mode of analysis or division 
 or dichotomy, the unity of experience embraces all the 
 elements, aspects, or relations that are discovered. In 
 a word, even in the language of the simple logic 
 indicated above, the unity of experience is only the 
 all-inclusive whole, but here without regard to any 
 distinction between what is actual or explicit and 
 what is potential or implicit, out of which has sprung 
 the differential operation that has made human society 
 and human history, that has given rise to a manifest 
 
THE PERSONAL AND THE SOCIAL. 161 
 
 social life, to the social class or faction and to the 
 individual person. 
 
 And the person as the real individual, as the part 
 that is still undivided, and that is therefore in itself 
 quick with the differential operation, is thus the living, 
 integral exponent of the unity of experience. He is, 
 above all, its unformed or untethered vitality. In 
 him every phase or part of what is possible in human 
 nature moves with some power. He is religious, 
 political, industrial; or spiritual, intellectual, and 
 physical; or good and bad, conservative and radical, 
 all in one; and characteristically he is each and 
 all of these without the restraints of such visible 
 forms or rites as now and again may become in- 
 strumental to their expression. Hence the familiar 
 idea of the universality, which is identical with the 
 indeterminate character, of any side of human nature ; 
 of the political side, for example, or the religious or 
 the physiological, of the lawful or of the lawless. Not 
 any particular political status, nor any particular 
 religion, nor any particular body is universal, but the 
 political or the religious or the physiological is uni- 
 versal as universal, to repeat, as it is indeterminate. 
 Not any particular lawfulness or lawlessness, but the 
 lawful or the lawless is universal. Personally, just to 
 sum up what has been said, all individuals are all things 
 in one, and this idea, as it is understood, should correct 
 that erroneous treatment of individualism, whether as 
 a movement in the life of society or even as an incident 
 of the scientific method of induction, to which reference 
 was made in the discussion of the rise of science. 1 
 
 1 Chap, iv., p. 72. 
 
162 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 But the story of personality cannot be told by 
 itself. Whatever the person may be characteristically, 
 he is never that alone, and before any estimate of all 
 that he is or of all that enters into his life can be 
 attained, attention must be turned to society, the 
 other horn of our present interest, and particularly to 
 the social class or faction. If the person in his 
 peculiar character is general or all-inclusive with re- 
 ference to the unity of experience, the factional life is 
 special, particular, or partial ; it is one-sided and out- 
 wardly exclusive. Sociologically as well as logically 
 factional differences are, as has been suggested, wider 
 and sharper than individual or personal differences. 
 Personally all men are free, socially approachable, 
 liberal in thought and act ; not so factionally. Judged 
 from its classes society is even a hot-bed of specialism, 
 its classes always tending to become castes, and of 
 hostility, its differences inducing open conflict. An 
 illustration of this we have already seen in the rise of 
 the profession of science. 
 
 Whence, to emphasize at once a most important 
 conclusion, the typical relation of the person to the 
 class is not, as so often said or implied, that of the 
 particular to the general ; instead it is that of 
 the general to the particular, of the whole to the part, 
 and significantly that of the vital to the instrumental. 
 Yet, to say no more than this would be a serious 
 mistake, for at least in two ways this statement must 
 be modified. Doubtless the required modifications are 
 directly consequent upon the nature and origin of the 
 relation, but nevertheless they need to be carefully 
 observed. Thus, logically and sociologically fac- 
 
THE PERSONAL AND THE SOCIAL. 163 
 
 tional differences are not merely wider and deeper; 
 just because more definitely set, they also imply 
 higher development. Factional life may be special, 
 but through the strength that union gives and the 
 power and efficiency that spring from repetition and 
 imitation, it attains a high degree of skill and insight. 
 Again, factional life, like that of corporations, lacks 
 soul ; it tends to become formal and mechanical and 
 in the sense that this indicates it is static. Hence its 
 instrumental character. Between individual and class 
 there is a difference very like that between impulse 
 and habit, or organic life and mere physical process, or 
 function and structure, or say human nature in terms 
 of its life-principle, of its distinctly dynamic character, 
 and in terms of its establishments or institutions. 
 Accordingly the relation of the person to the class is- 
 indeed that of the whole to the part, but of the whole 
 in a state that is formally undeveloped to the part 
 more or less highly developed, and of the whole as a 
 living, functional activity, the differential operation of 
 the unity of experience, to the part as an institution 
 or instrument. 
 
 From all this it appears that the labour involved in 
 the maintenance and development of human life is 
 divided between the person and the social classes in 
 some such way as follows. The class life stands for 
 analysis and special development and establishment; 
 personal life for synthesis and vitality. The factional 
 life of the class is specialistic, and reaps for human 
 nature all the familiar advantages of specialism; the 
 personal life is general or universal, and saves human 
 nature from the disruption and the stagnation to 
 
164 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 which specialism and its formal establishment always 
 tend. The factional life is mediative and instru- 
 mental; the personal life is initiative and purposive. 
 And while so to define the distinction between person 
 and class, or in general to regard their relation as one 
 of whole to part, even with the qualifications that 
 were promptly added, may involve some unavoidable 
 abstraction, and so some limitation of the view; never- 
 theless the view is as real and significant at least as 
 the conditions upon which it rests. Even though per- 
 sons may be differentiated from each other in an 
 indefinite number of ways, no two being personal, 
 materially, in the same way, no two having the same 
 factional restraints, still the relation of whole to part, 
 subject only to the distinctions of development and of 
 dynamic or static character, remains significantly the 
 typical relation of the person to the class. The person 
 may be only a part of the class, as parts are merely 
 counted, but in interest and possibility, in the fullest 
 reach of his vitality, the person is larger than the 
 class. And, if this be the typical relation, then not 
 only is the story of the person seen to be inseparable 
 from that of the class, but also there is clearly a real 
 place in social life at once for the person and for the 
 class. Factional life lacks completeness and vitality, 
 and personality, the living, integral expression of the 
 unity of experience, supplies these defects. True, a 
 conflict of classes or factions may always be counted 
 on, since the unity of the total life, which of 
 course includes the classes, will prevent their ever 
 being indifferent to each other, and this conflict will 
 make for both completeness and vitality, but nega- 
 
THE PERSONAL AND THE SOCIAL. 165 
 
 tively, indirectly, always as if from outside. Only 
 through the person can vitality and completeness be 
 secured positively and directly and immediately. Per- 
 sonality, on the other hand, lacks defmiteness and 
 practical efficiency, and only the special mechanical 
 life of the class can supply these needs. So in the two 
 together we see a most indispensable co-operation. 
 
 The person, furthermore, because of his particular 
 class affiliation, with the attainment in the way of 
 skill and insight which this imparts, is always 
 naturally under constraint not merely to overcome 
 the specialism, but also to apply the special training 
 beyond the immediate sphere of its development 
 to all sides of the nature that is within him. Out 
 of the depth and breadth of his personal character, 
 bounded only by the unity of experience, he must 
 ever react against the narrowness and the fac- 
 tional ritual, and taking this ritual or special pro- 
 fessional technique to be valid mediately rather than 
 immediately, in spirit rather than merely in letter, 
 must ever seek to translate his factional experience, 
 its skill and its insight, to all parts of human life. 
 Only so can he be true both to his special classifica- 
 tion and to his personal wholeness. 
 
 But an insistent question : Is such translation 
 possible? On the possibility the case for either 
 personality or a class-divided society must finally 
 depend. On the possibility hangs also the worth 
 of this case to the general argument of this book. 
 Logically, there certainly can be but one answer, 
 and that an affirmative one, since analogy, the 
 primal condition of translation, must be universal 
 
1 66 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 among the parts of any unity as well as between any 
 part and the whole. No two parts, it is true, can 
 be literal, prosaic reproductions of each other, but 
 metaphors of each other all parts are bound to be, and 
 any part and the whole must also have this relation 
 of the metaphor, so that any acquired, more or less 
 highly developed power of thought or action, however 
 special and however technical, may and must have 
 meaning throughout the whole life of the person or 
 of humanity. Accordingly, with the acquired freedom 
 of any part, the metaphors, relating part to part, may, 
 if not must, flash to the remotest regions of the 
 person's experience-world. The left hand, with its 
 unconsciously developed power, of course usually un- 
 exercised, of mirror-writing, affords only a very crude 
 illustration of what this implies, and a very imagina- 
 tive illustration is in the flashing of the morning 
 light as it reaches height after height of the be- 
 holder's outstretched world. 
 
 The conclusions of logic in this matter have some- 
 times been questioned, if not defied. Quite properly, 
 it may be, many people, and particularly many among 
 scientists, have been in the habit of distrusting the 
 leading of mere logic in the solution of their problems. 
 But in this particular matter I think that no scientist 
 has ever succeeded in making out a negative case. 
 A few have tried to do so, have thought themselves 
 for a time successful, and then in the end, though 
 not without some reservation, have gone over to the 
 other side. Probably their undertaking has been in- 
 spired by the extravagant views sometimes enter- 
 tained, as when money-getting is supposed to educate 
 
THE PERSONAL AND THE SOCIAL. 167 
 
 people to an appreciation of music and art, or a ready 
 memory for one class of things to imply the same 
 facility in acquiring a memory of another class of 
 things, or skill in the use of tools to make a good 
 dentist, or physical self-control or intellectual sincerity 
 to ensure moral truthfulness. Whereas, if it could be 
 remembered that no special training could ever be 
 literally applicable beyond the particular sphere of its 
 attainment, the relation of part and part of human 
 nature being only analogous and metaphorical, and that 
 in any scientifically observed case special training, when 
 artificially acquired, or when a result only of a suggested 
 and merely imitated routine, can hardly count as con- 
 clusive evidence, the problem would lose much of its 
 interest, and science would be ready even to accept the 
 logical solution. Logically, then, the translation is 
 possible, and scientifically there is no real evidence 
 against its possibility. 
 
 As to the translation being positively natural or 
 necessary, as well as possible, the suggestion may not 
 be impertinent that whatever is truly possible must 
 be also real; that is to say, certain of realization or 
 rather somehow and somewhere, in some manner and 
 in some degree already in expression. Even the 
 possible can never have been made out of, or sprung 
 up out of, nothing. Moreover, the translation here 
 spoken of, wherein one developed side of life flashes 
 its message, more spiritual than literal, to another side 
 or the other side of life, plainly can require nothing 
 unnatural. It exacts only that all the different 
 elements of our nature and experience, whether as 
 personally or as factionally manifested, shall be for- 
 
168 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 ever true to their origin. The apparent obstacles to 
 translation certainly cannot be obstacles on the ground 
 of the analogies of the various parts being only meta- 
 phorical instead of literal, for already in the original 
 differentiation that has made person and faction, that 
 has separated the parts, these have been overcome. 
 The very nature of the person is their overcoming. 
 The unity of experience must persist assertive and 
 inviolable, whatever the divisions of experience. The 
 distinct vertebrae must always contain a spinal cord 
 that has a common origin with them. 
 
 And it remains to be said that since the person 
 is thus at once the living integral exponent of the 
 unity of experience and the member of some class or 
 faction, translation is his most characteristic activity. 
 In this translation, too, we see him a leader, or 
 a party to real leadership, by nature. In it lies his 
 true genius. Indeed, this translation is just that 
 which makes the great leader or the great genius, for 
 through it the person is ever showing himself superior 
 to his class and training, and to the formal institu- 
 tions that have brought him up. Factional life, as we 
 know, develops through imitation and repetition, but 
 personality through invention under guidance of the 
 flashing analogies. Invention, too, the application 
 of special development beyond the sphere of its 
 origin, is only the psychological term for what socio- 
 logically is leadership. In the theory and in the 
 practice of art, morals, religion, politics, science, and 
 all the other special sides of experience, the factional 
 and the personal are ever to be distinguished in this 
 way the one imitative, the other inventive. Witness 
 
THE PERSONAL AND THE SOCIAL. 169 
 
 the familiar antitheses between the typical and the 
 vital in art-expression, the formally ideal and the 
 really pleasant in morality, the legal and the sovereign 
 in politics, the orthodox and the spiritually alive in 
 religion, technical skill and originality in science, and 
 so on. These antitheses are all very important to the 
 understanding of human experience, particularly of its 
 history, but they are frequently seriously misapplied. 
 More than anything else they show the personal ever 
 asserting its superiority over the factional ; the living 
 whole, over the developed, established part; and 
 always in order that the whole, overcoming the ex- 
 clusiveness of the part, may translate and appropriate 
 its acquirements. 
 
 There is thus a case for personality hidden in that 
 historical analogy of the individual to its group- 
 divided environment, whether society or nature, and 
 there is also an equally strong case for society as 
 something distinct, as something that has its own 
 peculiar work to do. The roles, too, that belong to per- 
 sonality and society are as distinct and as real, besides 
 being as organic to each other, as in general are whole 
 and part. But the person, at once a corrector of par- 
 tiality and a leader, a distributor of special develop- 
 ment, holds a conspicuous place and moreover takes a 
 part that just because of his essential superiority to 
 the definite and formal is of the greatest moment to 
 our conclusions as to the nature of all positive 
 experience. All positive, formal experience we found 
 defective even to the extent of paradox or contradic- 
 tion, bat personality, characteristically, must be 
 superior to this defect. Personality must bridge all 
 
170 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 the divisions of experience, all the gaps in society, 
 all the chasms of history. It must be, though perhaps 
 one may not safely use the word, the very incarnation 
 of that spirit of truth, that principle of validity and 
 power for adequacy, which has already come to our 
 notice more than once. Factionally experience is rela- 
 tive, phenomenal, divided against itself ; factionally, too, 
 it is at once formal and contradictory ; but personally 
 it reaches beyond the forms and contradictions, and is 
 directly in touch with what is true and real. So 
 the contrast between the personal and the social, the 
 vital and the formal, shows itself quite parallel to that 
 between the real and the phenomenal, the true and 
 the paradoxical. 
 
 A business man says to a friend: "Personally, as 
 you know perfectly well, I should prefer to do what 
 you ask, but professionally I simply cannot, for you 
 know also that business is business." A preacher 
 declares : " Personally I should just like to speak out 
 clearly and without restraint, but my church will not let 
 me." Personally the soldiers in opposite camps ex- 
 change many courtesies, but factionally, professionally, 
 they meet with rifle and sword on the battlefield. The 
 father punishing his offending child says : " This hurts 
 me more than you." And, in general, personally there 
 are no divisions of life all are all things together, and 
 restraints that separate man and man are lacking ; but 
 factionally there is always restraint, and open conflict 
 and inner inconsistency are unavoidable. The person 
 is thus the medium, not of an abstract universality, 
 but concretely, through his factional training and his 
 leadership, of the universal life. 
 
THE PERSONAL AND THE SOCIAL. 171 
 
 And, finally, the life of the person is gifted with a 
 great faith, for it is in touch with an untethered 
 reality; but, factionally, life is a constant doubting, 
 for it is constantly narrow and it is a constant con- 
 tending. So are faith and doubt as close to each 
 other, as inseparable, as whole and part, as person and 
 class, and with this conclusion we seem to have won 
 for the doubter the right to say confidently: "My 
 doubts cannot destroy me ; I am ; even in me there 
 dwells the power that makes for reality ; even in me, 
 in spite of the very defects that the conditions of my 
 social life impose, there lives the spirit of truth. 
 Nay, even the social life itself, when mine as well 
 as social, is also real and true." 
 
CHAPTEE VIII. 
 AN EARLY MODERN DOUBTER. 
 
 I REFERRED in an earlier chapter to the great French- 
 man who boldly declared that his doubting was all 
 that he could be certain about, but that this, being so 
 very real, being indeed universal, left him a belief in 
 himself, although only in his always doubting self. 
 Descartes' belief in himself has interest for us, for 
 while his thinking followed lines somewhat different 
 from our own, he seems to have reached nearly, if not 
 quite, the same very personal conclusion, namely, the 
 right of the doubter to say : " I am." 
 
 Descartes was born in Touraine in 1596, and for the 
 larger part of his life he was at least nominally a 
 resident in the Paris of Louis XIV, Montaigne, and 
 the earlier Jesuits. He was educated at a school of 
 the Jesuits in La Fleche, and in the course of his 
 mature life he published works of importance not 
 merely in philosophy, but also in science and mathe- 
 matics. His Meditations and Search after Truth are 
 easily first among his contributions to philosophy. He 
 died in 1650. 
 
 Yet not exactly with the Descartes of positive 
 history, but with Descartes as a doubter, as perhaps 
 the most notable progenitor of the modern confession 
 
 172 
 
AN EARLY MODERN DOUBTER. 173 
 
 and the modern use of doubt, are we now directly con- 
 cerned ; for without the license of this broader view 
 we might lose a large part of the advantage of the 
 centuries that lie between Descartes' time and our 
 own. He had many disciples, and these disciples un- 
 covered much in the Cartesian philosophy that Des- 
 cartes himself failed to see, or saw only imperfectly. 
 He was not without faults, too, some moral and some 
 intellectual, if the two are separate, and these faults 
 we shall not consider, though the conscientious his- 
 torian should never play to the sentimentalist by dis- 
 regarding them. But with our present task we can 
 afford to forget the faults ; just as we cannot afford to 
 lose the interpretations and corrections of the disciples. 
 With interests as vital and personal as ours, we seek 
 something more than matter of fact. Our interest 
 is very near to that of the historical novel, but 
 needless to say, this book is an essay in philosophy, 
 not a novel. Past men and past times can be really 
 useful to us, only if, belonging as we do not to the 
 seventeenth but to the twentieth century, we really 
 use them. What we ourselves are able to find in any 
 period or in any human career is always truer or 
 realer, possibly in a sense it is also better history, 
 than what lay on the surface at the time or than what 
 was seen, however profoundly, even by contemporaries. 
 So much better did Descartes and all really great men 
 build than they knew or even willed. 
 
 Descartes came into European life at a crucial 
 moment. The period of the Eenaissance, with its 
 rediscovery of the old world and its stirring vision of 
 the new, had culminated in the Eeformation, not 
 
174 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 merely in the religious reformation that set Protestant 
 against Catholic, but in the reformation that appeared 
 in every department of man's life in art, literature, 
 and science, in morals and in politics, as well as in 
 religion. Man asserted his independence of estab- 
 lished authority in any form. Man, not king, not 
 pope, not even God, became the real centre of the 
 universe. Justification by his own faith was simply 
 overflowing with a meaning that knew no bounds in 
 his experience. 
 
 But the birth of Descartes was fifty years after the 
 death of Luther, and by the time he had reached 
 his intellectual majority, as might well be expected, 
 the Eeformation had changed from a spiritual en- 
 thusiasm whether among those who were its great 
 leaders or among those who, not less devoutly, were 
 bent on summarily checking its progress into a prac- 
 tical, thoroughly worldly situation. The two opposing 
 parties, without exaggeration, seem to have settled 
 down to real business, and not less in the thought of 
 one than in that of the other the end justified any 
 means. 
 
 The society of Jesus was definitely organized and 
 began its notable career in 1640, and although its 
 members, the Jesuits, have given to history many 
 wonderful examples of devotion and heroism, Jesuitry 
 itself is synonymous with the extreme materialism to 
 which the Roman Church resorted in its desperate 
 defence against the Protestants. And on the other 
 side, men became not less sensuous and worldly, giving 
 as good as they got. They simply met, or opposed, 
 like with like. Eeading the history of the time with 
 
AN EARLY MODERN DOUBTER. 175 
 
 its controversies and jealousies and intrigues and 
 persecutions, one can only conclude that the honours 
 were about even. If Catholicism felt justified in her 
 acts of sensuous brutality, of almost hellish violence, 
 which culminated in the massacre of St. Bartholomew, 
 Protestantism was made the specious, yet not less wel- 
 come, excuse for worldliness, general materialism, and 
 sensualism out of the Church and in it. Any religious 
 reform, or reform of any sort, must always bring an 
 unscrupulous lawlessness with it, and the great Ke- 
 formation was by no means an exception to this rule. 
 Extreme humanists, naturalists, atheists, sensation- 
 alists, social and physical atomists, Machiavellists, 
 sceptics and opportunists of all sorts, swarmed in 
 every capital of Europe, and especially in Paris. 1 
 
 But the extravagant, more or less unconventional 
 things of any time are often the best signs of its inner 
 life, since in them we see a few men boldly, if not 
 prudently, stepping over the bounds of custom, and 
 sometimes even of decency, and giving expression to 
 what is actively present, though often suppressed or 
 concealed, in the lives of all. Thus contemporary 
 with Descartes, and from one side or another express- 
 ing the materialism of his day, there were at least 
 three very significant movements, all of them endorsed 
 by parties, of course under different names, from both 
 of the contending churches, or from their outside 
 echoes or reflections, and all of them at least in some 
 degree when not in great degree beyond the bounds of 
 common conventional respectability. These move- 
 
 1 See an article by H. C. Lea in the American Historical Review, 
 January, 1904, "Ethical Values in History," especially p. 238 seq. 
 
1 76 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 ments in one church or in the other, or in neither, as 
 the case might be, were, first, a scoffing scepticism; 
 second, a dogmatic mysticism ; and third, a most 
 visionary gnosticism. 
 
 1. Vanini (1585-1619) in Italy, Montaigne (1533- 
 1592) in France, and Bacon (1560-1620) in England, 
 among many others that might be named, were more or 
 less extravagantly, not mere doubters, but satirical, 
 often derisive, scoffing doubters of everything in human 
 life. Conceit of knowledge, whenever asserted, in 
 church or state, in everyday consciousness or in 
 science, was declared idolatry and held up to constant 
 ridicule. Could man's wisdom at its best be anything 
 more than a blinding folly ? 
 
 2. And religion, the religion of a few, as if in ac- 
 knowledged sympathy with these sceptics, surrendered 
 everything but God God being more a longing than 
 an actual fact ; a spirit than a positive thing or person. 
 Even within the Catholic Church the Oratory of Jesus, 
 a society energetically opposed for good and sufficient 
 reasons by the Jesuits, was organized in the interests 
 of a purified, truly spiritual Christianity ; and among 
 those who had broken with the Catholics appeared new 
 sects of many names, such as the " Friends of God," 
 " Collegiants," and the " Brotherhood of the Christian 
 Life," but with one ideal, the direct, untrammelled 
 worship of God. "God is," they proclaimed in so 
 many words ; " and God, just God, is all. Church and 
 creeds and rites and priests are hindrances, not helps, 
 to true religion." This attitude, commentary as of 
 course it was on the conditions of the day, had almost 
 more satire in it and more doubt than any of the words 
 
AN EARLY MODERN DOUBTER. 177 
 
 of the most active scoffers ; it was so unconscious ; so 
 quietly and so piously it picked up the crumbs that 
 the scoffers left. Indeed, the sceptics and their devout, 
 pure-minded contemporaries, Pierre Charron (1541 
 1603) and Jakob Boehme (1595-1624), both advocates 
 of religious purity against theology and sensuous ritual, 
 must be said not to have engaged in separate activities, 
 but to have shared the labour of a single activity. 
 Scepticism and such mysticism are but two sides of 
 the same shield. 
 
 3. But with the scoffing scepticism and its comple- 
 mentary counterpart, the dogmatic mysticism of re- 
 ligion, there was associated also a most visionary gnos- 
 ticism. Thus the science of mathematics was heralded 
 as a key to all the secrets of the universe. A few 
 simple applications of mathematics to physical phe- 
 nomena had been successfully made by the scientists 
 for example, by Galilei and ere long certain men in 
 the world of the intellectual life went wild over the 
 possibilities of mathematics. Obliged, as soon they 
 were, to abandon every other field of knowledge the- 
 ology, politics, material science, tradition, and conven- 
 tion they needed but little encouragement to give 
 themselves heart and soul to this last resort. Their 
 enthusiasm for mathematics doubtless had a deeper 
 source than this simple account of its rise would sug- 
 gest, for an intellectual atmosphere in which just such 
 a purely logical, abstract science would develop was 
 the natural product of medievalism; but Galilei's 
 successes may be said to have precipitated the move- 
 ment, and in any case for many mathematics became, 
 both in its principles and in its method, an intellectual 
 
178 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 cure-all, and in consequence not only were remarkable 
 advances made in the science itself, but men went to 
 the extreme of applying the methods and the formulae 
 of mathematics in every conceivable direction. Ee- 
 ligion, morality, and politics, as well as natural science, 
 were all subjected to mathematical treatment. Among 
 the surviving monuments to this activity the Ethics, 
 so called, of Benedict Spinoza (1632-77) is certainly 
 the most noteworthy ; a work of five books on God, 
 mind, emotions, bondage, and freedom each with its 
 special quota of axioms, propositions, corollaries, 
 scholia, and the like, and the procedure of the whole 
 amazingly consistent with that of Euclid. Excuse, 
 also, a personal reminiscence. I can myself recall how 
 in the enthusiasm of a first course in geometry I 
 formulated a Euclidean proof of the proposition : 
 Knowledge is power. I, too, had my axioms, my 
 special demonstrations, my corollaries, and my final 
 Q.E.D.'s. But any present-day resort to mathematics 
 or its methods is only a shadow, or an echo, of the 
 movement of the seventeenth century. At that time 
 it was a movement of last resort and all the passion of 
 a deceived intellect, of a mind given over to the most 
 far-reaching doubts, and a disappointed faith, once 
 more acquiring hope, was present in it. The truths 
 and methods of mathematics what but veracity 
 incarnate, the very mind of God made manifest to 
 mankind ! 
 
 Nor, furthermore, does it take much reflection to 
 appreciate that mathematics was after all a very 
 appropriate form for credible knowledge to take in a 
 time of scepticism and of religion turning to purism, 
 
AN EARLY MODERN DOUBTER. 179 
 
 Trustworthy knowledge of actual things that is to 
 say, real concrete knowledge being held impossible, 
 there was nothing left but knowledge of the strictly 
 formal relations of things. Formal principles, just 
 like those of mathematics, are altogether innocent of 
 the confusion in actual things and persons, in par- 
 ticular events and current issues ; and accordingly in 
 the seventeenth century, just by reason of this inno- 
 cence, they were peculiarly timely. Doubt seemed 
 quite unable to touch them ; controversy was turned 
 to agreement before them; and even a truth-loving 
 God, so to speak, could appeal to them in support of 
 his right to rule the minds and the lives of men. 
 You and I might question the reality of the things 
 we count or the justice of the ratio between our 
 wealth and the wealth of certain others in the world, 
 but we could not easily question that two and two are 
 four, or in matters of wealth that one thousand and 
 two thousand dollars are in the same ratio as two 
 million and four million. Such knowledge as this may 
 not settle any actual quarrels that we have, for ex- 
 ample, over the number of acres we own or the taxes 
 we pay or the prices charged by our butchers or 
 grocers ; but what of that ? The quarrels are idle any 
 way, and our mathematical wisdom, being exact from 
 the start and self-evident, is a basis of perfect agree- 
 ment between man and man and men and God. 
 
 In short, mathematics is exact and universally 
 credible just because it is so empty and so logically 
 formal, being always " in the abstract," in that ideal, 
 wholly blessed region, where there is no disputing, 
 where all men readily admit anything that can be 
 
i8o THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 suggested ; and its being exact for this cause made it 
 the only credible knowledge for Descartes' time, a 
 time at once of scepticism and mysticism. With 
 Vanini, then, and Charron, who were separately en- 
 gaged, as was remarked, in a single activity, we may 
 associate the mathematicians of the day, among whom 
 none were more distinguished than Descartes himself 
 and the members of the Cartesian school. To Des- 
 cartes we are largely indebted for the Analytic 
 Geometry, and Pascal did important work in the 
 Theory of Equations. 
 
 In rough outline we now have the times of Descartes 
 before us, and with deepened meaning I may say again 
 that Descartes came into European life at a crucial 
 moment. Materialism was rife, not merely theoreti- 
 cally among a few scientists and philosophers, nor 
 practically in some isolated class of dissipated human 
 beings, but really and more or less openly everywhere 
 in the whole life and feeling of society. Even the 
 devout played into the hands of the worldly by their 
 very purism. And an accompanying doubt, cropping 
 out significantly, now in positive irreverence, now in 
 mysticism, now in intellectual formalism, appears to 
 have thoroughly possessed the minds of men. 
 
 There was, too, in Descartes' day a growing sensitive- 
 ness to the paradoxes of man's experience which have 
 occupied so much of our attention. Nothing was what 
 it seemed. One writer boldly declared not much 
 later that France, nay, the whole world, could not be 
 happy until all should turn atheists. The boast of 
 Louis XIV, " I am the State," whether literally made 
 or not, was hardly less startling. The sensualism of 
 
AN EARLY MODERN DOUBTER. 181 
 
 the Catholic Church or the Pharisaism of the Protes- 
 tant was flagrantly paradoxical, and was keenly felt to 
 be so on all sides. Men turned doubters perforce, 
 and in the fact that with their scepticism rose also a 
 movement at once of individualism and cosmopolitan- 
 ism, we cannot fail to see how the course of history 
 illustrates the conclusions of a previous chapter. The 
 time was one in which through its humanism, or its 
 cosmopolitan individualism, civilization was to reap 
 the harvest from the medieval organization of society. 
 
 Descartes, in spite of, or perhaps because of, his 
 training at a school of the Jesuits, seems to have 
 caught the spirit, the real meaning of his time, 
 getting behind the mere letter of their instruction 
 and of their point of view. Only mathematics gave 
 him any satisfaction, and he left the La Fleche school 
 in the first place conscious that he had learned little 
 or nothing, in the second place curious about the 
 possibility of men ever knowing anything, and in the 
 third place evidently through the influence of mathe- 
 matics strongly prejudiced in favour of introspection, 
 or of thought conducted independently of things, as 
 the only possible way to certainty. This education, 
 then, and its outcome, true as it was to the life of the 
 day, fitted Descartes for his life work, which was 
 nothing more or less than the erection of a system of 
 philosophy on the basis of a thorough-going confes- 
 sion of doubt. 
 
 Descartes entered upon his great task by taking his 
 day at its word. St. Paul, addressing the Athenians, 
 reminding them of one of their own temples, and 
 quoting their own poet Aratus, was not more tactful. 
 
1 82 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 Thus, as if speaking directly to the sceptics about 
 him, Descartes doubted everything, because he found, 
 not only in his own consciousness, become too reflec- 
 tive for implicit belief, but also in the wide experience 
 of his race, that everything was dubitable. He 
 doubted church and state, science and society ; and he 
 went even farther than this. Also he boldly doubted 
 mathematics, so long his own support and the re- 
 liance of many others in his time. He did not know 
 surely that there might not be an evil spirit in 
 the universe, a spirit of deception, which even in 
 mathematics was obscuring the mind's vision, making 
 it see things not as they are, but as they are not. 
 Deception was real enough and obvious enough in life 
 at large to make such a suspicion as this at least 
 plausible. Moreover, the notion of an agent of evil 
 in the world had been a commonplace for centuries. 
 It was just a part of that medieval training. So 
 although nothing could be said with certainty either 
 way, the plausible mischance had to be faced ; mathe- 
 matics went the way of all doubtful knowledge, and 
 man was left with literally nothing but his doubt, his 
 universal doubt. " Dubito" said Descartes ; " to doubt 
 is my inmost nature"; and speaking so he at once 
 marked the first step in his reasoning, so important 
 then and now, and in the simplicity and directness of 
 real genius reported a great, deep fact of his own 
 experience and of that of his time. 
 
 But universal doubt is a real experience, being real 
 just because universal. Nothing ever is real that is not 
 universal. What is always and everywhere is just the 
 mark of something that really is substantial. A real 
 
AN EARLY MODERN DOUBTER. 183 
 
 experience, however, real because universal, be it of 
 doubt or of anything else, means a real self, so that in 
 the always doubting self Descartes found reality, or a 
 real self; and this always doubting self he further 
 characterized as a thinking self. In other words, the 
 real thinker was for him the universal doubter, and, 
 contrariwise, the universal doubter was real, a real 
 thinker, a real self. Before Descartes' time, to speak 
 generally, men had identified reality with fixed con- 
 dition or possession, with specific knowledge or estab- 
 lished power or definite prerogative, divine or human, 
 and truth was an object of faith rather than thought, 
 say an unchanging programme for life rather than a 
 pure principle there is such a wide difference between 
 a principle and a programme ! But Descartes, as we 
 have seen, identified reality with loss or privation, 
 with such an empty-handed thing as doubt ; he recog- 
 nized no self but the thinker, and no thinker but the 
 doubter. We always feel the pathos of those who, 
 suffering constant privation, find and often declare 
 that life is very real, and yet the sense of reality that 
 comes in this way namely, in the way of a privation 
 that denies reality all residence in positive experience 
 is especially strong, and the pathos we feel is certainly 
 not all. Something else hard to name appeals to us, 
 too, and changes the pathos into a nobler because a 
 more positive feeling good will, perhaps, or honour 
 since the persistent holding to reality commands a 
 deep respect. Yet, putting this more positive feeling 
 apart, only the pathos of Descartes' real self, real 
 because a thinker and thinker because a universal 
 doubter, can occupy us now. Enough if we see that 
 
1 84 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 the reality was as indubitable as the universal doubt, 
 the self always being real up to the reality of its 
 experience, and that the pathos is not more for him 
 than for the sceptics and mystics and mathematicians 
 of his time. But, again, in the Latin words, burdened, 
 as so often the Latin has been, with the experience of 
 all Christendom : Dubito, cogito ; ergo sum. I doubt, I 
 think ; I as doubter and thinker am. 
 
 That " I am " seems a sort of epitome of the human- 
 ism, not to say of the pathos of the humanism of the 
 time. Man had lost everything but his own self, his 
 lacking, longing, always seeking self. Montaigne put 
 the situation plainly when he said in so many words, 
 that portrayal of self was the beginning and the end 
 alike of physics, the science of outer reality, and meta- 
 physics the science of all reality. Man had been left 
 with his mere self, robbed of beliefs and traditions, and 
 abandoned by everything but his doubts and the empty 
 companionship which these afforded, but to that, an 
 unshaped thing with an undefined activity, real only 
 for what it did not have, he clung tenaciously and 
 often enthusiastically. And Descartes spoke for him : 
 ^Knowing that I hav$ nothing, I am 
 
 But in this self that was real only because always 
 lacking, always doubting, Descartes found a priceless 
 treasure. Every one is familiar with the principle 
 of Christian theology, that the conviction of sin is a 
 real promise because the actual beginning of salvation, 
 and every one has some appreciation of this principle. 
 It is a principle, too, that no priest ever made or 
 could ever unmake, belonging as it does to the 
 very nature of conscious creatures. In like manner, 
 
AN EARLY MODERN DOUBTER. 185 
 
 then, Descartes recognized in the consciousness of 
 doubt, or say of intellectual error, the real promise, 
 because the actual beginning or even the very presence 
 of veracity in knowledge. The doubter, conscious 
 of error as he must be, was never without and never 
 by any possibility could be without a sense for truth, 
 an idea of veracity. (jDoubting all things he must yet 
 believe in truth.1 Plato said centuries before that 
 mere -opinion, however false, was nevertheless always 
 in love with true knowledge, and this Platonic love 
 Descartes found in the doubter's conviction of error. 
 In Plato's spirit (Descartes insisted that doubt was 
 a constant yearning for truthl a persistent faith in it. 
 Doubt was informed with truth, with the idea of 
 truth, very much as one has the "idea" of a thing 
 that one cannot master. Man might be a doubter 
 of all things, then, but in spite of his doubt he must 
 believe in the reality of things, not exactly in the 
 individual reality of each and every thing, but in reality 
 in and among all things. For him, doubting and self- 
 conscious, there must dwell in the world a realizing 
 nature or power, an agent of perfect veracity, check- 
 ing any experience from being altogether deceptive. 
 And, for the present, to narrow our attention to a 
 single phase of the doubter's natural idea of veracity, 
 as Descartes reasoned about it, truth and everything 
 that goes with truth, perfection and absoluteness in 
 all its phases, could not be solely human if to doubt 
 was human. They must, in consequence, be divine. 
 So God, a spirit of truth and righteousness, was real, 
 as real as the real self of always doubting but ever 
 truth-loving man. Dubito, coyito ; ergo sum : etiam 
 
1 86 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 Deus est. \ I doubt, I think ; as thinker and doubter I 
 am : and what is more, God, veracity incarnate, is also. \ 
 And here begins or began a great controversy, nor 
 can the issues ofjt be said to have been wholly settled 
 even to-day. ^What did Descartes understand when 
 in this way he proved to himself the existence of 
 God? jVas only the God he seemed to have lost 
 once more restored to him, and restored intact ? 
 Did he merely justify, and so return to its old 
 place of authority, the traditional theology of his 
 day ? Was his doubt, as some would view it, not 
 his own genuine experience, but simply the conceit 
 and pretence of method? These questions need an 
 answer, for their answer affects not only ^Descartes' 
 regained religion, but also his regained real world 
 m~general. STTmany have been disposed almost to 
 laugh outright at the simple-minded Descartes for his 
 doubting everything from matter and mind to God, 
 only in the end to get everything back. They have 
 seen him as one chasing the verities out by one door 
 only to welcome them with outstretched arms as they 
 run in at another that had been left open for their 
 return; and this view of him has been strengthened 
 by the fact that conservatives in religion the world 
 over have made Descartes their victim by appealing to 
 his proof, borrowing for themselves his philosopher's 
 robes, as if these could be easily assumed and as easily 
 put off. But as to the justice of such a view there is 
 little if any good evidence. Matter-of-fact history is 
 not our first concern here, as was said ; yet, whatever 
 may or may not have been uppermost in Descartes' 
 mind, the doubt of his day was both general and very 
 
AN EARLY MODERN DOUBTER. 187 
 
 genuine, and the final worth and validity of his think- 
 ing lies wholly in that, not in his or any one's mere 
 logical gymnastic or verbal strategy. Moreover, for 
 reasons which hardly need to be given, the strong 
 probability is that, notwithstanding his well-known 
 lack of courage in openly living up to or even think- 
 ing up to all the consequences of his reasoning, he did 
 feel in his philosophy not a mere recovery of what 
 had seemed lost, nor a cunning apology for the old, but 
 the birth of a new point of view; and, if this 
 possibility should be verified, among other things the 
 conservatives, who have been borrowing so much 
 support, have been little if any better than parasites. 
 Still, even the probabilities in the case are relatively 
 insignificant to us, since the people of the time and of 
 later times, and we ourselves from the scepticism and 
 mysticism of the seventeenth century, have learned 
 to think of God with a fulness of meaning never 
 attained before, as what shall I say? not a 
 definite truth, but the living spirit of truth; not a 
 passive perfection, but a perfect activity ; and not even 
 a divine person, in the sense of one more separate 
 being of consciousness and will to inhabit the universe, 
 but the moving and conserving power of all personality 
 the very active principle of reality present in the 
 vicissitudes and conflicts of our existence. And, such 
 being the outcome of history, we have to take it 
 as really the meaning of the great Frenchman's 
 formulae. "We put aside the controversy, then, with 
 the simple reflection that results in history or any- 
 where else are at least very hard indeed to conceive if 
 they are anything more or less than realized motives 
 
i88 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 perhaps the realized motives of a man or men building 
 somewhat beyond their clearest knowledge. What- 
 ever has come about must always be what more or less 
 clearly men have been feeling after. 
 "The God whom Descartes really proves to his time, 
 and still more positively to us, must surely be the 
 God not of a satisfied unquestioning believer, but of 
 the universal doubter who loves truth and whose 
 doubting and loving make him the always curious 
 thinker ; a God without visibly or even quasi- visibly 
 fixed or specific character of any sort, since with his 
 nature set to such a character, tethered like a beast to 
 a stake or like the sun bound to an orbit, he would not 
 be and could not be divine enough which is to say, 
 veracious or perfect enough for a universal doubter's 
 curiosity ; a God, then, who has the divine character of 
 true infinity, who is, too, a spirit in fact as well as in 
 word. Infinity certainly cannot belong to a being that 
 is apart ; such a being would at once belie his nature ; 
 and " spirits," divine or human, must not be supposed 
 to be, like Elijah, the merely translated beings of this 
 visible and tangible world, for they can belong only to 
 the invisible and the intangible, which is in this world 
 and of it, in its knowledge, in its love and strife, in its 
 changes of all kinds, in its work and in its suffering. 
 Yes, a truly living God, living here and now, is the 
 God of Descartes' proof ; the God of just that world of 
 movement and conflict, of poise and reality, to which 
 the differences and above all the contradictions of 
 experience, as examined by us in preceding chap- 
 ters, have already borne witness. Let us recall how 
 we were able to say that the very conflicts of human 
 
AN EARLY MODERN DOUBTER. 189 
 
 experience were the wisdom of God. And if this all 
 amounts to saying, as apparently it does, that only 
 Descartes' universal doubter, who loves truth too 
 much ever to claim its final possession, can believe in 
 a real God, then we have reached something that will 
 surely repay the most careful reflection. 
 
 Some have criticized Descartes for what they regard 
 as a fallacy in his reasoning. I He jumped, they claim, 
 without any real warrant, from the idea of a thing as 
 his premise to the actual existence of the thing as his 
 conclusion, from the idea of veracity, so necessary in 
 the consciousness of the doubter, to the substantial 
 existence of a perfectly veracious being, as if, to use 
 their time-worn analogy, the idea even of the very 
 smallest sum of money would make the money itself 
 materialize in somebody's pocket. But, whether or 
 not Descartes fully understood his own thought, this 
 criticism is very superficial, and it gets only a specious 
 cogency from the same matter-of-fact history that we 
 have already pushed aside. No idea, however clear, 
 however necessary even to the consciousness of a 
 doubter, of perfect truth could ever conjure into exist- 
 ence the unworldly, independently existing, spiritually 
 and intellectually isolated God of the Middle Ages; 
 and for that matter one might say, I think quite per- 
 tinently, that money not in the pocket is something 
 less than real money, or which comes to the same 
 end that the idea of money, if the pocket be indeed 
 empty, must imply some sense of the emptiness as 
 well as of the money; and with such an implication 
 the idea taken for its full meaning is no such conjurer 
 as Descartes' critics have chosen to imagine it. After 
 
THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 all the "mere" ideas, or the "mere" things in general, 
 that appear in controversies, are only ingenious ways 
 of packing the jury. An adequate idea that is to say, 
 an idea taken just for its full meaning, for what it 
 denies as well as for what it affirms, for the complete 
 universe of its discourse does and must answer to 
 existence; yes, and to substantial existence too. So, 
 again, the God that Descartes by the doubter's idea of 
 veracity proved to his time and to us, if not also as 
 clearly to himself, can have been no mere substantial 
 existence wholly outside the doubter's life and con- 
 sciousness. In such case the universal doubting would 
 indeed have been only the insincere verbal strategy of 
 a conservative, the conceit of purely artful method, 
 and the jump objected to would have been quite 
 necessary. But Descartes' God answered to just the 
 idea of truth which a universal doubter could honestly 
 entertain; to truth realized only in and through 
 doubt; a God, living in and with the seeking, strug- 
 gling consciousness of the doubter. 
 
 Furthermore, for a being, call him doubter or 
 thinker or what you will, whose very nature in deed 
 and in word is awake to a sense of lack and is in 
 consequence making a continued outcry : " Never this, 
 but always something else, something fuller and realer, 
 something including and using this, something main- 
 tained by the very conflicts of this," for such a being 
 very plainly there never can be anything that 
 is wholly and hopelessly beyond, that is not potentially 
 and so actively real in him; there can be no outer 
 nature, but an including and developing nature, and 
 no transcendent God, but an indwelling, ever uplifting, 
 
AN EARLY MODERN DOUBTER. 191 
 
 forward-bearing God. Exactly such a being was Des- 
 cartes' real self, the self of his / am "I as thinker 
 and doubter am" and this self had need neither 
 of struggling with nature nor of wrestling with God 
 in order to get one or the other on its side, for in its 
 doubt, in its constant confession of incompleteness, 
 even though this is a flagrant paradox of its own 
 reality as in a sense always outside or beyond itself, 
 it had won the supreme victory at the start. Nega- 
 tives are always such very sweeping, comprehensive 
 things ; and to be, so to speak, one's own negative, to 
 be real and lacking, is somehow to include all things 
 within one's own life and interest. If I may apply 
 an ordinary phrase in an extraordinary way, to be 
 always "beside oneself," always doubting, always 
 wanting, always striving, or to be, in the words of 
 earlier pages, ever and always divided against oneself, 
 is to have enlisted man and nature and God for ever 
 in one's service. 
 
 There is truly such a difference between programme 
 and principle ! It is the difference between medieval- 
 ism and modernism, between supposed finality and 
 recognized and asserted movement, between super- 
 natural authority and the authority of natural growth. 
 Enthrone a programme, and it is arbitrary and exclu- 
 sive ; it claims, as it must, the sanction of another 
 world ; it hopelessly divides human nature as person- 
 ally embodied or as socially organized; it makes life 
 and its sphere irrational and so dependent on a blind 
 faith: but a principle, enthroned, draws all things 
 into itself, using to its own constant realization even 
 the changes and differences of life, making faith 
 
1 92 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 and reason lie down together, and transfiguring both 
 a brutal nature and an inhuman God by revealing 
 them as not indeed formally but vitally rational, and 
 not indeed mortally yet humanly alive. In Descartes' 
 proof of God we see the birth of modernism; the 
 programme deposed ; the principle set in the place of 
 authority. 
 
 Finally, then, Descartes did not simply restore what 
 had been lost. Though we have been regarding only 
 the religious aspect of his philosophy, we can see in 
 general that, just as not the old God, but nevertheless 
 God, remained to the doubter's life, so also not the old 
 verities at large, yet nevertheless the verities, or not 
 the old reality, yet nevertheless reality, remained also. 
 Man, after all his doubting, even because of it all, was 
 enabled to return to the world of all those " isms," the 
 all-pervading materialism, the scoffing scepticism, the 
 dogmatic mysticism, and the intellectual formalism, 
 with a new spirit, a spirit of real confidence, a spirit 
 of hope, a spirit of life, that just by reason of its 
 wants and conflicts believes itself not only very real 
 but also fully worth while. 
 
 And travellers to-day visiting the streets of Paris 
 or going anywhere the doubting and despairing world 
 over, would do well to imagine Descartes, as the 
 modern doubter, travelling and thinking with them. 
 
CHAPTEE IX. 
 THE DOUBTERS WORLD. 
 
 THE doubter's world is a world in which, as we journey, 
 we shall discover four features that are especially 
 noteworthy and that accord fully with the principles 
 of Descartes as well as with the findings of our own 
 confession of doubt. Thus, in the order, or suppose I 
 say in the itinerary, here to be followed : (1) Eeality, 
 without finality, in all things; (2) perfect sympathy 
 between the spiritual and the material; (3) genuine 
 individuality; and (4) for whatever is indeed real, 
 immortality. 
 
 I. REALITY, WITHOUT FINALITY, IN ALL THINGS. 
 
 Doubt is only a particular state, or phase, of con- 
 sciousness, and it is worth while to observe that any 
 state of consciousness whatsoever, any attitude of 
 mind, must assume or postulate something real. In- 
 deed, this assumption of reality is so positive that no 
 consciousness is ever without some will to believe, 
 while no will to believe is ever without some real 
 object believed in. Can there be smoke without some 
 fire, or a seeming without some being ? Were either 
 of these things possible, then by the same token there 
 could also be a willing without some doing or a want- 
 ing without some having. To be conscious of some- 
 o 193 
 
194 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 thing, then, means not only that something is assumed 
 and, if assumed, willed to be, but also that something 
 really and truly is. Of course, the consciousness is ; 
 but, however subjective, the consciousness must have 
 more than its mere subjectivity, than its mere seem- 
 ing or wanting or willing, being in some way genuinely 
 objective or grounded in reality. In a word, all 
 consciousness implies and demands, postulates and 
 possesses, a real world; possibly not just the world 
 formally presented to it, but nevertheless reality, and 
 reality, too, in which somehow the presented world 
 has a place and part. 
 
 This may or may not be axiomatic, but at the very 
 least it is very near to being axiomatic, and, near or 
 far, it quite agrees with the conclusions to which, 
 although along somewhat more specific lines, our own 
 thinking and Descartes' thinking have been constantly 
 pointing. As Descartes might have said, there is no 
 consciousness without a thoroughly warranted " I am," 
 and no " I am " without an also thoroughly warranted 
 " The world of my consciousness is and is objectively 
 real." But in implications about reality the doubter's 
 consciousness differs from the believer's conscious- 
 ness ; not by any mere denial, for unqualified denial 
 must be wholly alien to honest doubting, and the 
 doubter is himself a believer, but by a peculiar as- 
 sumption as to what the reality is. Simply doubter 
 and believer, so far as they may be taken as inde- 
 pendent characters, do not live in the same real 
 world. Thus, for the distinct believer that is to 
 say, for the specifically dogmatic believer, for him who 
 is, or who for the moment may be supposed to be, 
 
THE DOUBTER'S WORLD. 195 
 
 tenaciously and immovably loyal to some specific body 
 of doctrine and to some specific manner of life reality 
 is always tethered to some stake; while for the 
 doubter it is too real and too free to suffer any 
 such bondage, being infinite and all-inclusive. For 
 our doubter, at once fully self-conscious and honest, 
 no possible experience can ever be in itself real and 
 final, nor, on the other hand, can any possible ex- 
 perience ever be altogether unreal and illusory. His 
 reality, I say, must be at once free and all-inclusive. 
 Indeed, it could not be either of these without being 
 the other. For him nothing is the reality, just because 
 all things must belong to reality. For him, again, 
 the world's reality is nowhere, just because every- 
 where; in no defined thing fixedly and completely, 
 just because in all things in them not merely dis- 
 tributively, it is true, but as they work together ; and 
 invisible and intangible, indeed generally unknowable, 
 just because any consciousness is necessarily limited 
 to the definite and inadequate mediums, or forms, of 
 positive knowledge. 
 
 So the doubter has a real world, but his own real 
 world. Moreover, in the great freedom of its reality we 
 see how all things taken individually or distributively, 
 must be, as the word is used, only " relative " ; and in 
 the perfect inclusiveness, how nothing, however " rela- 
 tive," can ever be unreal. Kelativism and scepticism 
 have been perenially associated, but relativism is not a 
 nihilistic, but a deeply realistic philosophy ; it is just 
 the sceptic's natural realism. All things are " relative," 
 but only because reality is at once free from anything, 
 and yet inclusive of all things. What is relative is 
 
196 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 thus not flatly unreal, as is often supposed, but sig- 
 nificantly both real and unreal or neither real not 
 real to itself alone nor unreal not without its part 
 and place in whatever is real. The sceptic, though 
 always a relativist, is thus also a most profound realist, 
 and the nature of his realism must help us greatly to 
 our view of the doubter's world. 
 
 Moreover, Descartes and his followers were also 
 nativists or intuitionists, and, at least for the freer 
 interpretation here permitted, their nativism was 
 of a peculiar order, and it involved, accordingly, a 
 world which was real in a peculiar way. Usually 
 nativism has stood for the assertion of certain in- 
 born and so necessarily valid and unchangeable ideas 
 or characters or powers; as when men contend that 
 particular ideas of God are unassailable because 
 immediately intuited as a part of man's very being, or 
 again when men declare a particular genius to be born, 
 not made, or insist that a voice of conscience born, not 
 bred, in them, tells them explicitly to do and even to 
 make others do this or that specific thing, to live and 
 make others live in this or that specific way, to accept 
 and make others accept this or that specific programme 
 of politics, morals, or religion. Furthermore, nativism 
 of this prevalent type not only has claimed final 
 validity for what is thus inborn or given indepen- 
 dently of the changing conditions of experience but 
 also has commonly punctuated this claim by viewing 
 the inborn, or the intuited for example, the dictates of 
 conscience as direct, immediate, unequivocal signs 
 and mandates of God himself. Genius has been 
 not human, but divine. The intuition at large has 
 
THE DOUBTERS WORLD. 197 
 
 passed for nothing more or less than a supernatural 
 revelation. But such an understanding of the innate, 
 though serviceable beyond measure to the " specifically 
 dogmatic believer," and though implying too, as of 
 course it should, the natural, appropriate world of 
 such a believer, does not agree with the principles of 
 Descartes. 
 
 Such an understanding of the innate can imply only 
 a world not merely of definite, substantial reality, but 
 also of definite, substantial unreality. How real to 
 some people, how definite and substantial the "un- 
 real " is ; how brutally fixed and yet how alien to what 
 they are given to finding real. They are nativists of 
 the conventional type, and for them the negatives of 
 all things are as fixed and as really or as substantially 
 not this or that as the positives to which what is 
 innate for them bears its special witness. Their 
 world, in short, is a world of tethered error as well as 
 tethered truth, of hopeless, unmixed evil as well as a 
 wholly untainted, unassailable and why not say also 
 hopeless ? virtue, of absolute and effective lawlessness 
 as well as an unswerving law, of a free and omni- 
 potent devil as well as a free and omnipotent God; 
 for, in simplest language, the rule is a very poor one 
 that does not work both ways. A world, however, 
 which is so constituted, calls emphatically for revision 
 of the view that imparts its character to it. Where 
 the unreal is as real as the real, the evil as effective as 
 the good, the false as conclusive as the true, there is 
 certainly need of some second thinking. As some 
 good Irish philosopher might put the case, if just this 
 is wholly good or true or real, and just that is wholly 
 
198 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 evil or false or unreal, then the good or the true or the 
 real cannot be exclusively just this, the evil or the 
 false or the unreal cannot be exclusively just that, and 
 the innate, responsible for a world so made, cannot be 
 just in terms of certain fixed ideas or characters or 
 powers. When, forsooth, has the manifest existence of 
 evil in any form, of intellectual or moral error, of 
 political anarchy, of religious heresy, or even of natural 
 violence, not shaken man's conceits about what is and 
 what is right ? The very conceits and this the more 
 as they are definite and assertive help to make the 
 manifest evil, very much as a definite law has its part 
 in making a particular crime, and the evil so arising, 
 as it is distinctly manifested, cannot fail to assail and 
 unsettle the conceits. 
 
 According to the Cartesian nativism, on the other 
 hand, particularly as it was developed by such men as 
 Malebranche and Spinoza, the innate, which is always 
 at once the final appeal of man's conceits and the con- 
 clusive witness to what is absolutely real, was indeed 
 one with the divine or supernatural, but it was perhaps 
 just by reason of its truly divine or supernatural 
 character and origin untethered. How could the 
 universal doubter be born with a specific knowledge or 
 a specific programme of anything, when the definite or 
 fixed, the specific in any quarter whatsoever, must 
 always be a possible object of doubt? Only the 
 purest principle, or spirit, is impregnable against the 
 attacks of the sceptic. To doubt such a principle is 
 indeed only to enhance its importance. The sceptic, 
 then, the universal doubter, is born only with, and 
 what is more he cannot be born without, a real 
 
THE DOUBTER'S WORLD. 199 
 
 interest and constant faith in truth, in true knowledge 
 and right action, but no special experience can ever 
 compass the length and the breadth, the depth and the 
 height of this interest or this faith. He has a native 
 love for truth and righteousness, a belief in them, as real 
 and as inviolable, as universal and as necessary, as his 
 doubt ; but the very doubting in him forever saves both 
 the truth and the righteousness from being destroyed 
 by satisfaction or crucified by any final embodiment. 
 He loves and he trusts with all his heart, and he lives 
 in a world that forever serves the truth and the 
 righteousness of his love and faith. 
 
 So, taken at least for what he promised, or for what 
 he said between the lines, Descartes was a nativist 
 without the nativist's disastrous bondage to form and 
 creed, to fixed character and specific programme. He 
 was a nativist, but for him the innate lacked its self- 
 destructive definiteness ; it was just a spirit or principle, 
 or what I have also called a life or power, ever present 
 not in some, but in all experience, and so at once 
 sanctioning all things, and, because able to find perfec- 
 tion in none alone, each single thing being relative, 
 sanctioning also a constant conflict between things as 
 good or true or real, and things as bad or false or un- 
 real. Whatever is relative is necessarily, so to speak, 
 both-sided or divided against itself. The relativity is 
 such conflict. Before the judgment-seat of the innate, 
 in short, all things, being relative, must be parties to 
 conflict both individually and collectively, nor is their 
 conflict anything but an old story to us. All the 
 paradoxes of experience have been evidences of it. 
 The conflict apart for the present, however, the mean- 
 
200 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 ing of Descartes' nativism is just this : truth in all 
 experience, reality in all things, and reality, or truth, 
 a principle, not a programme. Just this, too, discloses 
 to us the nature of the doubter's real world. 
 
 In the last chapter we saw in particular the idea of 
 God which the universal doubter would naturally and 
 consistently entertain and cherish. We saw how in 
 the proof of God Descartes, deposing the programme, 
 set the principle in the place of authority, and how in 
 consequence God became identified with all that was 
 human, with all the seeking and striving, the hoping 
 and despairing, the erring and the suffering, of man's 
 life. God's nature just drew all things into itself ; the 
 very conflicts of life were his perfection; the in- 
 congruities of experience were his infinite wisdom. 
 But the doubter has a metaphysics, or cosmology, 
 as well as a theology; Descartes lost and regained 
 a world as well as a God; and the doubter's meta- 
 physics, or cosmology, proceeds from this simple creed : 
 Reality in all things. So runs the creed's supreme 
 article, and its two important clauses are these, equally 
 familiar to us : Reality without form or residence real 
 as a spirit, not a programme, and : Nothing finally and 
 fixedly real in itself, yet all things working together for 
 what is real. With this creed clearly in mind, more- 
 over, we may look out upon the world and see things 
 that possibly we have never seen at all, or not seen so 
 clearly before. 
 
 We see that just because reality is so profound, so 
 spiritual, and so inclusive, just because nothing can be 
 absolutely real in itself, all things must be " relative " 
 this we saw before, but have we ever quite under- 
 
THE DOUBTERS WORLD. 201 
 
 stood the meaning of relativity? and must be 
 relatively at once real and unreal. Perhaps I am 
 still adding little, if anything, to what has been said 
 already, but distinctly and emphatically the real world 
 can comprise only things that individually are re- 
 lative, relatively real or good or true, and that being 
 thus relative secure their place and part in absolute 
 reality only by being also relatively unreal or evil 
 or false. The very conflict of the relative ipso facto 
 puts it in perfect unity with the absolute. And so, 
 seeing this, we see not only a world of relativity and 
 consequent conflict, but also a world whose universal 
 relativity makes for a genuine absoluteness, and whose 
 conflict can never be in vain, but instead is always 
 realizing and effective. Thus, all things relative, 
 that is to say all things at once real and unreal, 
 good and bad, true and false, are in the constant 
 service of the absolute; and then, only employing 
 again the language of religion and, if not exactly 
 interpreting, at least adapting some well-known lines : 
 
 All service ranks the same with God 
 Whose puppets, best and worst, 
 Are we ; there is no last or first. 
 
 All things, serving reality, are whatever they are 
 together; yet could not be that, were there not a 
 constant conflict in and among all things. All men 
 serving God are whatever they are together; yet, in 
 like manner, could not be that were human society 
 not a sphere of conflict harsh and unceasing. 
 
 So we find ourselves well upon our way in the 
 world of the doubter and what a world it is ! No 
 
202 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 finality, because so much reality. Conflict, forever 
 necessary to its effective realization. Relativity, that 
 is to say finiteness, of all things, of all things in it, 
 just for the sake of its own true absoluteness, just to 
 conserve its own actual infinity. 
 
 And, also, in such a world human life, individually 
 and socially, gets new interest and vitality. There is 
 given to human life so much fellowship, and yet, at the 
 same time, so much hostility and competition. Society 
 and the individual, though neither loses its own 
 peculiar importance, are so vitally intimate with each 
 other. We cannot, however, enlarge now upon this 
 point. Another consequence of the peculiar realism 
 of the sceptic has a more pressing interest. 
 
 Is our universal doubter naturally and honestly an 
 evolutionist or a creationalist ? Of course, he may be 
 neither, or he may be one or the other with a meaning 
 different from that usually recognized. Terms like 
 these are so very hard to control. Conceivably the 
 doubter, a very versatile character always, might even 
 be both evolutionist and creationalist. But, as the terms 
 are commonly used, he must be said at least to have his 
 face towards an evolutional and away from a creational 
 view. The difference, again, is seen in that between 
 principle and programme. An evolutional world is 
 the working out of a principle ; a created world, of a 
 programme the fixed design of some specified being. 
 True, one may speak with much significance of per- 
 sistent, continuous creation, of a creation active at all 
 times and in all things, and it is to the point that the 
 Cartesians made much of a doctrine that was very 
 near to such a notion ; but a truly continuous creation 
 
THE DOUBTERS WORLD. 203 
 
 could be only an orthodox substitute, or disguise, for 
 evolution. A truly continuous creation could be bound 
 by no programme ; by definition it could have neither 
 date in time nor location in space. And, what is of 
 even greater moment, a continuous creator, ever pre- 
 sent and ever active, could never be more or less than 
 the persistent reality of the world itself. How could 
 he be aloof or different ? So have we come, once more, 
 to the immanence of God as a necessary idea of the 
 sceptic. 
 
 The doubter's world, then,' is the scene, as realistic 
 as you will and perhaps we may say, too, without un- 
 warranted enthusiasm, as bright beneath the morning 
 sun, of the ever present, ever active life of God or 
 with the same meaning of an evolution which we 
 may call God or nature as we please. From this 
 thought, too, if only we remember that nothing is un- 
 real and no experience is without some contact with 
 reality, there is but a step to the idea that God and 
 man are actively parties to one and the same life. To 
 repeat from above, the conflicts of human life are the 
 perfection, the perfect living of God. God is, nay, 
 God's life is, not what some, but what all men do, and 
 the doubter's world is just the world, the world of 
 things always relative, the world of constant conflict, 
 in which alone this can be true. 
 
 II. THE PERFECT SYMPATHY BETWEEN THE 
 SPIRITUAL AND THE MATERIAL. 
 
 But we pass to the second feature of this world in 
 which we are journeying, namely, to the sympathy of 
 the spiritual and the physical. 
 
204 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 As a matter of course the sceptic, by his peculiar 
 attitude of mind, must imply something with reference 
 to the relation of the two worlds, or the worlds com- 
 monly supposed to be two, the spiritual and the 
 material, and because for him the reality cannot be 
 exclusively one definite thing or any number, small or 
 large, of definite things, all of them independent and 
 exclusive, he must imply in the world of things, be 
 these two or as many as you please, that they always 
 work together for whatever is real. Such an implica- 
 tion at first hearing may or may not appear to be a 
 pregnant one, but at least it suggests that in some 
 genuine way there must be sympathy between the two 
 things, the two worlds spirit and matter, mind and 
 body. These two must work together for whatever is 
 real. 
 
 But by this necessary sympathy between the 
 spiritual and the material is not meant a mere paral- 
 lelism so called. Thinkers, present and past, have 
 tried to be satisfied with such a meaning. To be quite 
 real, however, sympathy must be substantial even to 
 the point of unity, not formal. Some friends, and 
 even some married people, are parallel, life matching 
 life at each and every point, but not positively and 
 vitally sympathetic. Still, in parallelism, the very 
 name for which is fairly indicative of its import, there 
 is a convenient approach to the meaning here intended. 
 Moreover, our Cartesian philosophers were much given 
 to a theory of parallelism in their views of the relation 
 of the two spheres of mind and matter ; their specific 
 doctrine of continuous creation, already referred to, 
 was parallelistic ; and they found the human mind and 
 
THE DOUBTER'S WORLD. 205 
 
 the human body, though distinctly two, still " parallel." 
 Then, too, in more recent times, parallelism has been 
 in evidence, figuring conspicuously at least as a work- 
 ing standpoint in the psychological laboratory, and 
 figuring also, I venture to add, as an important assump- 
 tion in philanthropic work. Accordingly, although 
 the term itself does convey a good deal of its meaning, 
 I shall try, in words as simple as possible, to show 
 exactly what the theory of parallelism is. This done, 
 we shall be able to see, or think through parallelism to 
 sympathy of a more genuine and a more vital sort. 
 
 As was said, the doctrine of continuous creation, 
 holding as it does that the mental and spiritual life of 
 God and the constant changes in the natural world, 
 the world said to be of his creation, are always in 
 accord, God in his relation to the world being, so to 
 speak, always up to date and having his attention on 
 every place and part, is distinctly a parallelistic 
 doctrine ; but, quite apart from any theological refer- 
 ence, parallelism asserts that all states, or events, in 
 the two spheres of body and mind, of spirit and matter, 
 are (1) equally real and substantial, and (2) perfectly 
 harmonious and consistent, in just the sense that 
 always in connection with any condition or change in 
 one realm there is an accompanying condition or 
 change in the other, although (3) between the two there 
 exists and can exist no causal connection whatever. 
 Obviously to make either, whether by what is known 
 as causation or in any other way, the producing and 
 wholly determining condition of the other, or of any- 
 thing in the other, would be at once to unsettle the 
 equivalence or balance of their reality, and equally real 
 
206 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 they must be. Thus, in more detail, mind is denied any 
 independent part in the production or determination 
 of anything in the material realm, and matter is in no 
 way the source of what transpires in mind. Each is, 
 so far as the other is concerned, quite its own master. 
 Each is absolutely without any arbitrary influence, 
 any influence not natural or sympathetic or co-opera- 
 tive, upon the other. So to speak, neither imposes on 
 the other a "must" that is not at the same time 
 already the other's " would." In other words, any 
 state in one is always the occasion, but, so far as an 
 independent causation goes, the wholly passive occasion 
 of something quite pertinent occurring in the other. 
 Is there an idea, a state of consciousness ; then, corre- 
 sponding, there is some real thing, some physical object 
 adequate to the idea. Is there an act of will; then, 
 corresponding to it, some movement in the material 
 world. Were the relation different from this, were 
 mind and matter ever independent causes, not merely 
 coincidents or perhaps co-operative causes, of each 
 other, then, as is worth adding, besides the disturbance 
 of the equivalence of reality, already referred to, there 
 would be implied a fixity of plan, or manner of action, 
 and a defmiteness of possessed power in the nature of 
 the supposed causes, and these implications would also 
 give offence. 
 
 Yet in the world of our journeying there must be 
 causation on some plan of some sort. Parallelism, 
 though sometimes supposed to be more sweeping, is 
 really and consistently a denial only of isolated, in- 
 dependent causes. It denies, not causation, but causa- 
 tion as ever localized or with an exclusive residence. 
 
THE DOUBTERS WORLD. 207 
 
 In very much the same way certain political ideas, 
 growing to explicit expression contemporaneously, 
 have denied, not sovereignty or power, but an ex- 
 clusively localized sovereignty or power, as in the 
 case of absolute monarchy or of an absolute institu- 
 tion, whether church or state. Parallelism, or at least 
 the inner meaning of it, simply imposes certain con- 
 ditions on a still real causation. These conditions, 
 too, necessarily involve a significant, even a revolu- 
 tionary change in the nature and value of any cause, 
 but beyond peradventure they are unavoidable con- 
 ditions. Thus, every active thing having any part in 
 the causation of the world must always be only one 
 among other active things, each also with some part. 
 Then, secondly, all active things must co-operate, 
 in, if not actually through their differences working 
 together and harmoniously for what is real. In short, 
 they must be "parallel." And, lastly, as something 
 not formally asserted by parallelism but still far from 
 incongruous with it and, as seems to me, even de- 
 manded by its inner meaning, all active things must 
 be always acted upon as well as acting. 
 
 To give a single illustration, though this may be 
 quite superfluous, parallelism would view the life of a 
 skilled labourer at work in his shop as a process in 
 two parts. On the one hand, the environment, com- 
 prising not merely all the tools and materials, but 
 also the body of the workman, moves as a mechanism, 
 each part flying to its appointed task consistently 
 with the particular thing to be done ; and then, on the 
 other hand, the mind and the will of the mechanic, 
 not by any independent ab extra causation, but never- 
 
208 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 theless at every thought or sensation coincidently and 
 pertinently accompanies the environment's mechanical 
 movement. Each process is consistent within itself, 
 not following nor yet preceding, but accompanying 
 the other in perfect step. What makes the environ- 
 ment so tractable or the mind so practical? The 
 credit here has usually been given to a tertium quid, 
 to God, who js so made more a mediator than a 
 creator. God is the Great Paralleler. But the third 
 condition that was to be met how about that ? Are 
 the workman's mind and his environment each at once 
 acting and acted upon? Are their two processes 
 virtually one instead of two? and is the mediation 
 accordingly, just in the fact of such unity instead of 
 in seme being acting as if from without ? So far as 
 the formal theory goes, as was said, this third condi- 
 tion is not fulfilled, but the theory cannot be under- 
 stood as opposed to such unity; rather it is a first 
 step and a long step towards an appreciation of it. 
 The formal theory, alike in its assertion of the 
 parallelism and in its view of God as mediator rather 
 than positive creator, is an effective attack, consis- 
 tent, as we have seen, with the demands of an honest, 
 thorough-going scepticism, upon the fixed, independent, 
 arbitrarily creative cause in any form. It does not 
 openly assert causation in any other sense. Seeming 
 quite oblivious, for example, of causation as action 
 with an accompanying reaction, or of what I should 
 style an organic or differential causation. But, besides 
 making and needing to make no denial of this, it all 
 but opens the door to recognition of such a view. 
 In such manner, then, as simply and as briefly as 
 
THE DOUBTER'S WORLD. 209 
 
 I find myself able to put the case, runs the theory of 
 parallelism ; with its equal reality and its non-inter- 
 ference of two distinct but thoroughly correspondent 
 agencies or substances, certainly a theory of a formal, 
 rather than genuine and vital, sympathy. Metaphy- 
 sically it is dualism still persistent. But one needs 
 only a little insight, and perhaps also a slight leaning 
 towards the gruesome, to see that it is dualism at 
 least the dualism of the medieval type already in 
 a shroud. Even dualism demands, and should always 
 be allowed, its funeral service and a decent burial. 
 With the passing of dualism, however, the sympathy 
 becomes more than merely formal. Two things always 
 equally real cannot be really two, and a perfect 
 parallelism, though satisfying to certain cherished 
 traditions in philosophy or theology, is so saturated 
 with unity as to be almost, if not quite, at the point 
 of precipitation. Without attempting, therefore, any 
 further appraisal of parallelism metaphysically, we 
 may turn to what will seem more practical. 
 
 Looking or thinking through this metaphysical 
 theory we can see that it is equivalent to a declara- 
 tion that the physical and the spiritual in human 
 life, or in life at large, are meant for each other. 
 Perhaps in a somewhat stilted fashion, but never- 
 theless beyond any chance of question, it is a philo- 
 sophy that makes man and nature always accordant 
 and adaptable, and coming as it did in the history 
 of thought near the beginning of the modern period, 
 it can lay claim to this meaning on historical as well 
 as on logical grounds. Its value to philanthropy, too, 
 perhaps only another sign of its modernism, is easily 
 
210 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 detected, since it supplies just such tangible means as 
 the material conditions of life for the accomplishment 
 of philanthropic ends, and its service to scientific 
 psychology, plainly an indispensable service, lies in its 
 making the physical nature a medium, not merely for 
 the expression, but also for the study of what is 
 psychical. As for its relation to the argument of this 
 book, it is simply dualism meeting, or trying to meet, 
 the demand, in the first place, that reality itself should 
 be indeterminate always a tertium quid and, in the 
 second place, that the things that are definite, be they 
 material or spiritual, should work together for reality. 
 Under the same demand, be it said, atomism could 
 stand only if supplemented by some doctrine of 
 assumed unity or co-operation among all the ele- 
 ments as, for example, by Leibnitz's doctrine of 
 pre-established harmony. 
 
 But, furthermore, looking and thinking through the 
 theory of parallelism, we can see something of special 
 significance for the doubter's world. Men often forget 
 that new relations of things mean new things, or at 
 least new characters for the old things. Thus, mind 
 and matter, or man and nature, if become, or found to 
 be, parallel, are no longer the mind and the matter, 
 the spiritual man and the physical world, that they 
 were. The two things, just by their complete corre- 
 spondence, are changed in a most important way. 
 That they must be changed is quite evident, but how 
 to state exactly what the change is is not easy. That 
 the change, too, must be in the direction of their more 
 vital union is evident to us, but again the precise 
 description of it is difficult. Still, I submit that the 
 
THE DOUBTER'S WORLD. 211 
 
 effect of correspondence, whether this be natural or 
 imposed, is to make the things concerned, in the pre- 
 sent instance the spiritual and the material, at once 
 dynamic and teleologic in character and function. 
 Moreover, they are dynamic with the same reality 
 and teleologic for the same end. To correspond to 
 something, as parallelism makes matter and mind 
 correspond to each other, is not, and cannot be, simply 
 to have a certain character, self-contained and gene- 
 rally static ; it is, and apparently it must be, to have 
 a constant call to action, a constant motive to go 
 beyond self, and so to make one's nature mediative 
 or instrumental. Wherefore, if this be in truth the 
 effect of correspondence, in our doubter's world mind 
 appears as a thinking, not a mere knowing, and matter 
 as a moving, not a mere being ; and the thinking and 
 the motion are instrumental, or mediative, to the same 
 end, to the same reality. All of which, moreover, 
 being translated, means, on the one hand, that in our 
 doubter's world man is free to think to some practical 
 purpose, and, on the other hand, that the material 
 world will serve both his thinking and his purpose. 
 
 As to the first of these, the freedom of thought, 
 mind by being relieved from all danger of any 
 arbitrary interference from the physical world, has 
 at once the conscious right of independent pro- 
 cedure and the positive assurance of its thinking, 
 thus free and independent, being quite practical or 
 applicable ; for plainly the freedom is in, not from, the 
 material world. Nothing possible to thought, no 
 consistent chain of reflections upon experience, how- 
 ever abstract, can possibly fail to be exemplified in the 
 
212 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 natural world, or as Hegel said, giving more direct 
 expression to the same idea the real is rational and 
 the rational is real. The applicability of thought to 
 life, therefore, the real utility of looking well before 
 leaping, the ultimate service even of the most techni- 
 cally scientific theory is what we see from our present 
 observation-tower, and the splendour of the view 
 hardly calls for remark. Man is free to think, to 
 think in his world and about it; and his thought is 
 always incarnate ; it is an unfailing mediator between 
 him and the life of the material world about him. 
 "Well begun is half done" is an old saw, and for 
 human conduct a great truth, but "Well thought is 
 well done" is even greater, if not older. Think 
 clearly, and the fulfilling act, the overt expression of 
 your thought, is already ensured. A thoroughly de- 
 veloped plan finds its execution, as it were, already 
 provided for; such is the perfect sympathy between 
 the mental and the physical world. 1 
 
 Now, however, that we have observed the complete 
 freedom of the thinker in the doubter's world, now 
 that we see the thinker free, not only to develop his 
 thought abstractly, but also to expect that the con- 
 clusions which he reaches will be exemplified in his 
 
 1 The last few sentences seem like a paragraph from some 
 psychologist of the day. My colleague, Professor W. B. Pillsbury, 
 for example, has just published a book on the attention, in which 
 appears the following statement: "It seems that the problem of 
 voluntary activity is largely, if not entirely, a problem of the atten- 
 tion. . . . The processes which are effective in the control of a man's 
 ideas are ipso facto in the control of his movements," and this, 
 besides being the current psychology, is quite in accord with our 
 doubter's vision: *' Well thought is well done." (See Attention, 
 chapter ix. London, 1907.) 
 
THE DOUBTER'S WORLD. 213 
 
 world and so to be able to apply them there, we are in 
 great danger of serious misunderstanding. Thought 
 is indeed free, but the truly free thinker is no single 
 individual developing some particular point of view, 
 although even such a one must always have some part 
 in the freedom of thought. Free thought is deeper 
 than any of its formal expressions and broader than 
 the positive experience of any of its exponents; it 
 belongs to the life of mind as present throughout the 
 whole sphere of all conscious life; and the single 
 individual has part in it only when his actual, articu- 
 late thinking is supplemented by his conscious doubt- 
 ing of his own peculiar standpoint, his treatment of 
 this as only tentative and mediative, and his conse- 
 quent appeal to thought as always deeper and broader 
 than just what he sees, or amounting really to the 
 same thing only when his thought is mingled in 
 social conflict and mutual accommodation with that of 
 others. In the doubter's world the thought that is 
 at once free and fully applicable is social just as we 
 know doubt to be social; that perfect applicability, 
 so essential to truly free thought, simply cannot 
 belong to all thinking, or to all thoughts, distribu- 
 tively and indiscriminately, to all specific thoughts 
 and ideas, though all must be capable of some application 
 more or less enduring, but only in the first place to the 
 thinking that, like pure mathematics, is exact and 
 general simply because strictly formal and abstract, 1 
 and in the second place to the thinking that when 
 material and concrete, when dealing with actual affairs 
 and definite practical relations, makes up for its conse- 
 1 Chap, viii., pp. 177 seq. 
 
214 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 quent relativity and subjectivity by inner paradox or 
 contradiction, in so far as individual or personal, and 
 by open opposition and controversy, in so far as it is 
 social, and assumes accordingly only the value of a 
 means to an end. 
 
 Much has been said in earlier chapters 1 of the 
 paradoxical nature of human experience. There was 
 seen to be among men no knowledge without a contra- 
 diction, and the ever-present paradoxes of experience 
 were recognized as causes of thorough -going doubt. But, 
 although at first sight seeming to blast man's ordinary 
 experience, and his science also, these paradoxes were 
 eventually found also to give to experience movement 
 and poise, reality and practicality, and to involve the 
 individual in a life that was as social as it was real, 
 and thereupon they became as certainly reasons for 
 faith as causes of doubt; they were witnesses to a 
 principle of integrity and validity, a spirit of veracity 
 moving through all experience. Accordingly, once 
 more, our truly free thinker, the thinker whose thought 
 is thoroughly applicable to life, is such a one as lives 
 for and with this principle of validity or spirit of 
 veracity, having his every thought informed with it. 
 He is not the single individual, holding tenaciously to 
 some specific standpoint, but the doubter ever using 
 what he sees and knows, and in using appealing beyond 
 what he sees and knows, or he is even the social life 
 that only more directly and explicitly embraces and 
 uses the views of all individuals, these views always 
 working together for what is true and real ; or, lastly, 
 he is the truth-spirit itself which is ever superior to 
 
 1 Chaps, in., iv., v., and vi. 
 
THE DOUBTERS WORLD. 215 
 
 anything that is either merely individual or merely 
 social. The free thinker is just the honest doubter; a 
 believer in what he knows or thinks, but only as a work- 
 ing view to something else; and, consciously, a social 
 being, through controversy sharing with others the 
 practical experience of what is real. 
 
 With regard to the peculiar case of mathematics, 
 which is widely applicable because formal and as exact 
 as formal, it seems enough to say that while mathe- 
 matics has very properly become the ideal of all know- 
 ledge, not excluding such sciences as psychology and 
 sociology, the final value, the peculiar applicability of 
 mathematics, lies in its character as a general attitude or 
 method. It is not strictly a science, but the ideal method 
 of science. Doctrinally, that is, as to any specific in- 
 tellectual content, there can hardly be said to be any 
 pure mathematics, any final body of formulae absolutely 
 exact and fully applicable. Has not doctrinal mathe- 
 matics had a history? Has it now no promise of 
 future changes ? But whatever has a history can 
 this be quite " pure " ? Have even those axioms, which 
 once upon a time you and I learned to respect for their 
 self -evidence, been free from the criticism and revision 
 of the mathematical experts ? Then, too, taking any 
 particular formula from so-called applied mathematics, 
 such as that simple but altogether typical one of the 
 lever, what do we find ? An equation is said to exist 
 between the product of the weight by its distance 
 from the fulcrum, and that of the power by its 
 distance from the same point, but in application this 
 formula can never be fully exemplified. The fulcrum 
 never is a point. The perfectly homogeneous lever, so 
 
216 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 necessary to the equation, is unattainable, if not also 
 unthinkable. There can never be complete absence 
 of friction, nor perfectly ideal suspension of the weight 
 or application of the power. And the necessary 
 atmospheric disturbances, even in a " vacuum," to say 
 nothing of the difficulties of absolute measurements, 
 are not less fatal. Only as method, therefore, which 
 really means as procedure according to standards of 
 strictest accuracy and of highest logical consistency, or 
 as closest, most constant loyalty to a spirit of truth, 
 not as doctrine, can mathematics be said to be freely 
 applicable. Mathematics seems to me to be at the 
 very heart of the working hypothesis. Its tests of 
 accuracy are such as forever save science from any- 
 thing like doctrinal dogmatism. Historically there 
 is much significance in the fact that our doubter, 
 Descartes, was almost the inventor of the Analytic 
 Geometry, and that this and the Calculus, which came 
 afterwards, and which we owe chiefly to Leibnitz and 
 Newton, comprise rather a methodological than a 
 doctrinal mathematics. With their invention and 
 development the application of mathematics to 
 material facts, or it would be better to say to the in- 
 vestigation of material facts, took tremendous strides. 
 So Descartes, who doubted mathematics only because 
 it was not satisfying doctrinally, regained in this case, 
 as in that of his God or his material world, not exactly 
 what he had lost. Alike in mathematics and theology 
 he lost doctrine and creed; he won method and life. 
 And, to return, with reference to the relation of 
 mathematics to the free thinker, nothing can be clearer 
 than that this science, at least sometimes so called, as 
 
THE DOUBTER'S WORLD. 217 
 
 a method or attitude exacting clearest possible pro- 
 cedure and highest logical consistency, is the very 
 principle of veracity, upon loyalty to which the 
 freedom of thought must always depend. Like this 
 principle, too, mathematics so much more truly than 
 any other discipline is superior to anything that is 
 either merely individual or abstractly social. 
 
 So, looking and thinking through the theory of 
 parallelism, we see how thought is set free. Man is 
 free, as was said, to think always to some practical 
 purpose. Secondly, then, with regard to the material 
 world, said to serve his thinking and his purpose, this 
 in its turn is liberated also ; it is liberated for a life of 
 its own law and order. Nature, the material world in 
 general, is no longer the victim of arbitrary changes. 
 Such changes as spring from the occultly creative acts 
 of the spiritual world, or more exactly the spirit- 
 world, represented by God in the character of an 
 extraneous being, by a personal devil or by those 
 minor spirits or powers of light or darkness, often if 
 not usually described as objects of superstition, no 
 longer interfere with nature's orderly course. She is 
 left, unmolested, to be just her natural self, consistent 
 and persistent in the way prescribed by her own inner 
 being. And then, while subject to no arbitrary inter- 
 ference, she is herself never given to interference, but 
 is, on the contrary, in her own right, essentially at 
 one with that other world, the world of the thinker. 
 Poets have ever fondly sung of nature's sympathy 
 with man, and her sympathy deep and abiding is 
 exactly what we now observe, nor can any poem too 
 loftily give expression to it. 
 
218 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 And what, in more detail, of this sympathetic nature 
 of this ideal world, or perfect home, of thinking man ? 
 With much interest we certainly might trace all the 
 aspects of its character corresponding to the different 
 phases of the thinker's life, but discussion of them all 
 would take too much of our space and might seriously 
 tax an already tried patience. So we shall confine 
 ourselves to one thing alone. The truly free thinker 
 was said to be one who believes in what he knows or 
 thinks, but only as a working view to something else. 
 No thought of his could ever compass the fulness of 
 truth within him. What, then, of nature ? 
 
 Corresponding to the thinker's positive knowledge, 
 to the specific law or order, which at one time or 
 another he finds manifest in his world, there is the 
 well-known, but often misunderstood, character of 
 nature as a great mechanism, moving of course under 
 the law. But corresponding to his only tentative ac- 
 ceptance, though always trustful use of what he 
 knows, there is the much neglected character of nature 
 as not an idle, unproductive mechanism, always doing 
 exactly the same thing, but, if I may so speak, a 
 moving, developing, ever-productive one, serving some 
 end larger and deeper than the known law. Nature 
 must indeed be a machine if the thinker's knowledge 
 demands uniformity or law, but an instrument of 
 something other than her mechanical self, in short, not 
 a merely revolving, but an evolving, always productive 
 machine, if the knowledge itself is never final. 
 
 The material, mechanical character of nature, as I 
 have said, is often misunderstood. The real meaning 
 of it is lost, and with serious results. In the first 
 
THE DOUBTER'S WORLD. 219 
 
 place, it is taken as if it involved a wholly external, 
 physical nature, and in the second place it is taken as 
 if it represented this nature only as moving through 
 its changes according to a certain law and as having in 
 consequence nothing to do but keep up the dead, 
 strictly " mechanical" existence of its law-fixed char- 
 acter and incidentally involve man in the tireless 
 turning of its fatal wheels. But nothing could be 
 more superficial, or even more needlessly superstitious, 
 than this. Obvious facts are overlooked or, if seen, 
 forgotten. The simplest demands of a truly scientific 
 mind are slighted so inexcusably. Could any law of 
 an alien, external nature ever be an actual or possible 
 object of knowledge? And could such law as is known 
 of a nature not alien ever have any but a relative 
 value, a provisional mediate character ? Nature may 
 be a machine, but the law of her moving is never 
 identical with any law in positive knowledge, though 
 what is known is always informed with the law of her 
 moving; and this is to make her more than a mere 
 machine. Again, no known law is ever the law, and 
 under the law nature must be qualitatively different 
 from what under the known law she appears to be. 
 To neglect this difference, then, is seriously to mis- 
 understand the mechanical character of nature. 
 
 Yet some one promptly objects that I am not at all 
 fair to the common understanding of mechanicalism. 
 I am told that no one ever thinks of nature as revolving 
 strictly in accord with any known law. All men who 
 give any thought to the matter concede that the 
 really ultimate law must be not anything that is 
 known, but only what is yet to be known, and is 
 
220 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 merely like in kind to such laws as men have cogni- 
 zance of. This interesting concession, however, quite 
 fails of its purpose, since it does not meet the real 
 difficulty here in question. It shows mechanicalism, 
 not indeed bound to any particular knowledge, but 
 nevertheless still conceiving the final lawfulness of 
 nature after the analogy of a particular law, the 
 merely known or unknown or unknowable character of 
 which matters not at all. The analogy is what misleads. 
 The analogy only serves to deaden what really lives. 
 
 When will men cease to think of the whole after 
 the analogy of the part ? Of the, as if it were a ? 
 When will God cease to be only another person ? And 
 the universe only another thing ? And the lawfulness 
 or unity of all nature only another formula ? This or 
 that formula may show nature a mechanism as 
 smooth running and as blindly given to dead routine 
 as could be imagined, but nature is ever more and 
 other than known formulae of men, and as more and 
 other, or say as answering to the free spirit of truth 
 that moves in the thought of men, she is as free in 
 her real lawfulness as she is infinite. By reason of 
 her infinity there is no law that she may not break. 
 A law may make her a mechanism, dead and idle ; the 
 law makes her an organism living and productive. 
 How a positivistic science, making all knowledge wait 
 on actual experience, and accepting all knowledge only 
 tentatively, can ever be mechanicalistic or appeal to 
 the ordinary understanding as an argument for the 
 mechanicalistic view of things is hard to conceive. If 
 one reasons from known forms to uniform activities, 
 must one not also reason from the always provisional 
 
 \ 
 
THE DOUBTER'S WORLD. 221 
 
 and developing knowledge to productive activities? 
 Must not the mechanism evolve into something more, 
 adding something to man's life, realizing something 
 for all life, enlarging even the nature of God himself ? 
 Once more, therefore, corresponding to the law that 
 men may know and that they can know only as their 
 working hypothesis, there is nature, a mechanism 
 moving and herself at work, while corresponding to 
 the great living fact of nature's final lawfulness, or 
 to the thinker's sense of truth as a spirit or principle, 
 not a form or creed or programme, there is the con- 
 stantly, genuinely productive life of nature, the 
 mechanism, as has now been said several times, ever 
 evolving beyond its form and law. Her law is not 
 a law, any more than the thinker's passion for truth 
 can be finally satisfied by a formula or than God's 
 continuously creative life can ever culminate in a 
 single finishing act. The doubter's world, in short, or 
 so much of it as is said to be material, is not law-bound, 
 but law-free : l an organism, not a mechanism ; and 
 upon the value of this vision of nature, upon the 
 theoretical or the practical value, whether to science 
 or to philosophy, to morals or to religion, to politics 
 or to industry, it seems hardly necessary to dwell. 
 But, to add a word or two in very general appraisal 
 of it, such a nature, served as it is by every law, by 
 every mechanical action, yet bound to move, is active 
 always from design ; its life is essentially purposive. 
 Not that it serves the purpose of anything, or any 
 being, beyond itself, but in every part and movement 
 it is itself always maintaining an end, the end of its 
 
 1 See also an earlier discussion in this book, chap, in., pp. 49 seq. 
 
222 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 its own untethered reality. In words used before, and 
 applied alike to the spiritual and the material, it is at 
 once dynamic and teleologic. 
 
 Such a nature, be it especially observed, is the basic 
 condition, if not also the very inspiration of our modern 
 industrialism. This industrial age, struggling against 
 the old-time militarism, in its religion, in its art and 
 in its literature, in its leisure and in its labour, in city 
 and in country, is an age of machinery ; of machinery 
 in all the manifold forms demanded by all the various 
 departments of human life, not of wheels and belts 
 alone ; an age of the conscious employment, for human 
 purposes, of the resources of all sorts, the materials 
 and the forces which the natural environment affords. 
 Freedom, not slavery, is recognized as man's ideal 
 portion, and in order to ensure the freedom, not human 
 nature, but physical nature is mechanicalized ; or, with 
 the same intent, all the formal means, or instruments, 
 of life are taken as incidents of environment, not as 
 essential to man. So is industrialism supplanting the 
 old-time militarism that sought, in all the relations of 
 life, to identify the human with the instrumental. 
 Witness the values now put upon theories and creeds, 
 upon rites and institutions, upon personal habits and 
 social laws. All of these, to begin with, are means, 
 not ends ; and, further, they are means whose devising 
 so man is insisting, as never before must be, as 
 near as possible, true to nature. The sovereign con- 
 viction of this age of industrialism appears to be that 
 the only sure way to human freedom is the way of 
 nature; employment of such instruments as she can 
 supply ; obedience to such law as she may disclose. 
 
THE DOUBTERS WORLD. 223 
 
 But many have found this age of industrialism in- 
 sufficient. It seems to them so materialistic. It 
 would view things so much from the standpoint of cold 
 naturalism. The attitude of laissez faire as meaning 
 " Let nature do the work," has so widely possessed the 
 minds of men. If only we could get back some of 
 our former idealism and regard nature as once more 
 subject to some supernatural will ! Despair like this, 
 however, is blind and as needless as blind. Dependence 
 on a lawful, mechanical nature can bring to human 
 life no loss of what is truly ideal and personally 
 worthy. Instead, it brings constant gain, for the 
 knowledge of law and the making of machinery do not 
 rob men of personal opportunity, but rather make 
 the opportunity for personal achievement only the 
 more manifest. A mechanical nature is always for man, 
 not man for a mechanical nature ; and its movement 
 is always productive for man. If, then, industrial 
 life has tended, as it has been supposed to tend, to- 
 wards materialism and fatalism, the reason can lie only 
 in the blindness of such as refuse to see clearly this 
 visible fact. Not merely something always doing, but 
 something always that man is doing is the definite 
 message of a nature that ever manifests herself under 
 the form of law. To the thinker, in no uncertain 
 syllables, she says : Go forth and do. And our age 
 of industrialism, if hearing this bidding, will lose its 
 unnatural materialism, and find itself quick with a 
 moral and religious instead of a narrowly practical and 
 commercial motive. 
 
 So in the doubter's world are the spiritual and the 
 material genuinely sympathetic. 
 
224 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 III. A GENUINE INDIVIDUALITY. 
 
 Besides the reality, without finality, of all things in 
 experience, to which we gave our first attention in this 
 chapter, and the perfect sympathy of the spiritual and 
 the material, which we have just seen to give new 
 dignity to the intellectual life, making thought free, 
 and new worth to the life and movement of nature, 
 making nature not lifelessly mechanical, but mechanic- 
 ally productive; besides these two features of the 
 doubter's world, there still remain two others to be 
 observed by us. For the first of these there is the 
 fact of a genuine individuality. Different persons, as 
 well as different things, possess a substantial worth to 
 the real and the true. No one may be either real or 
 worthy by himself, but no one is unreal for being 
 dependent on others. The persons, like the things, 
 that work together for what is real, find the service its 
 own reward. Keality, having no exclusive resting- 
 place, must itself be dependent. It is dependent on 
 an infinite multiplicity of differences. Therein lies 
 the person's chance for individuality; nay, it is his 
 right to it and assurance of it. 
 
 Before the days of Descartes, to speak generally, 
 the typical individual in human society and let me 
 say also, though at the expense of running into a 
 rather violent metaphor, the typical individual in any 
 class or group whatsoever was the soldier, a creature 
 of another's will, doing only another's work, and having 
 reality only by virtue of characters so apart from 
 individual peculiarities as actually to imply existence 
 in another world. The individual, in other words if 
 
THE DOUBTER'S WORLD. 225 
 
 at once real and worthy was then an unearthly 
 being. For a being so constituted, or living as if he 
 were so constituted, the creationalistic theology and the 
 analogous monarchical politics were of course largely 
 responsible, since in their different ways they took 
 individual independence of action from the general 
 run of mankind. They imposed on men at large a 
 certain uniform of life and belief, and then, as it were, 
 appeased them for this suppression with a doctrine of 
 another life in a world yet to come. Plainly, then, 
 the time was not one when personal individuality, 
 except as it was referred to the other world yonder 
 and apart, was recognized as of much positive worth. 
 Under the regime of prescribed routine, of life with 
 regard to the hereafter, and of mysterious powers of 
 all sorts, more or less in good standing in the realm of 
 the unworldly, personal individuality, though in itself 
 not without some honour, was valued chiefly and 
 primarily for the different conditions, the different 
 relations to the things of this world, and the different 
 views of these things, which men succeeded in over- 
 coming, or rather in completely denying and eschewing. 
 A worthy individuality was thus secured rather 
 through self-denial than self-expression ; through the 
 vassal's devotion to his lord, the gallant's submission 
 to his lady, the courtier's humility before his king, or 
 the saint's self-abasement before church and heaven. 
 Just think a moment of resting your claim to distinct 
 personal worth on the mere fact of what you have 
 eschewed or escaped being in some way different, 
 perhaps more worldly, more dangerous, and more 
 powerful, from what some others have eschewed or 
 Q 
 
226 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 escaped, and you will be able to appreciate the main 
 ground of the ideally significant distinction between 
 man and man in the days before Descartes. 
 
 But with the advent of the doubter's view of life 
 absolutism and its appropriate other-worldism melted 
 away like snow beneath a noonday sun, and upon their 
 going self-denial ceased to be the cardinal virtue and 
 the chief ground of an approving self-consciousness. 
 Authority came to be placed not in a visible form, but 
 in an abstract principle. Law became superior to 
 laws ; monarchy to monarchs ; divinity to Gods ; truth 
 to truths, and righteousness to rites and habits. The 
 abstract principle, too, instead of being, as many might 
 imagine, a wholly shadowy thing, real only to the 
 logician, stood for something vital and substantial, for 
 something wholly real, for an inner spirit or life or 
 power in the very things of experience. Authority, 
 henceforth refused to any specific thing, whether 
 person or manner of life, institution or formal belief, 
 became a prerogative of all things together, of all 
 persons or all manners of life or all creeds ; and, resid- 
 ing in the working together of them all, it made 
 personal worth consist no longer in the denial of 
 individual characters and relations, but in honest 
 assertion and open use of them. As some have liked 
 to describe the change, the " universal individual," the 
 individual as an authoritative and heaven-made type, 
 that dictated a life and a belief to others generally, 
 passed away, and in its stead, instead of unity as itself 
 an individual, instead of an incarnate type, came unity 
 as in the relation, or the activity maintaining the rela- 
 tion, of all individuals. Instead of a single planet, for 
 
THE DOUBTER'S WORLD. 227 
 
 example, as the controlling centre of the heavenly 
 bodies, came the unity of the solar system through the 
 force or the law of gravity. Instead of a monarch or a 
 book or a city the self-sufficient ruler of human life 
 and human thought, came unity through the ballot ; 
 through freedom of thought always loyal only to a 
 real unity and in being thus loyal also always tolerant ; 
 and through all sorts of like means to individuality. 
 The " universal individual " died, and there arose, as it 
 were, out of his grave the living unity of manifold 
 individuals, each one different, yet each quite essential. 
 And the change brought a transfiguration. It was as 
 if the human soul had entered a new body, or as if the 
 human body had received a new soul. Not least 
 among the significant evidences of the new life were 
 the rise of the study of history and the awakening of 
 a keener and more practical interest in men and 
 things the wide world over. With its valuable 
 accounts of the manifold experiences of different 
 peoples and different times, at last seen to be real 
 parts even of the life present and at hand, the study 
 of history became wonderfully absorbing and inspir- 
 ing; and not less valuable than this travel in time 
 was the travel in space, the real travel or the 
 imaginary, which accompanied it. Furthermore, such 
 ideas as balance of power and preservation of the 
 worth and integrity of the individual nation, and 
 division of labour and right of free speech and of 
 political and religious liberty, developed into most 
 powerful influences in the life and consciousness of 
 society. And, to return definitely to the single person, 
 he found himself, not in spite of, but because of his 
 
228 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 special place and special standpoint, an active partici- 
 pant in the effective life of his time. Instead of being 
 a mere soldier as before, he found himself a mechanic; 
 certainly the proper inhabitant of a mechanically 
 productive nature. 
 
 Doubtless the term soldier lends itself more readily 
 to philosophical generalization than the term mechanic. 
 Perhaps, too, distance in time lends enchantment to 
 the view, for the day of the soldier was, while the day 
 of the mechanic is. The day of the soldier has reached 
 the stage of romance and reflection, while the day of 
 the mechanic suffers from what is commonplace and 
 prosaic, from the associations of a particular life, from 
 dust and smoke and factories, from tools and utilities. 
 Yet the mechanic must be the romantic figure of the 
 future. He is the typical individual of these modern 
 times, of these times of the free because practical 
 thinker, and of a nature not lifelessly mechanical but 
 mechanically productive. Forget the grimy hands 
 and the noisy machinery, the overshadowing smoke 
 and the apparent absorption in mere utility, and think 
 only of the man, who in his best moments feels him- 
 self individually responsible and capable, who believes 
 in himself as having at once a peculiar and a neces- 
 sary part in the real life of his time, and who ex- 
 presses himself through some skilful mastery over the 
 resources of nature, applying to them the principles 
 his own thinking has uncovered, and using her 
 machinery to the ends of his own nature, which, as 
 we have seen, is bounded only by the "unity of ex- 
 perience." 
 
 Kemember, too, the mechanic of our modern world is 
 
THE DOUBTER'S WORLD. 229 
 
 not the factory labourer alone. Wherever in social life, 
 whether in political activity or in industrial manage- 
 ment, in educational methods or in religious effort, 
 there appears a man who appreciates the need first of 
 observing natural conditions and finding natural laws, 
 and then of acting only in accord with the suggestions 
 of the laws discovered, just there is the mechanic, the 
 responsible agent of a law-free but always lawful 
 nature. The soldier as creature of this world was 
 only a passive, wholly material part of a mechanism 
 which depended for its movement upon some outside 
 power or will; but the mechanic, be he humble 
 labourer skilful in the use of tools, or political leader 
 supporting no law that is not, so far as can be known, 
 in accord with natural life, or religious reformer loyal 
 to life as it is, shares positively in the activity that 
 makes the machinery go and in whatever this activity 
 produces. 
 
 And yet one thing more must be said. Just as 
 before we had to view free thought in the light of 
 a divided labour, the individual sharing in it only as 
 he treated his own peculiar experience as hypothetical, 
 as a means to an end, not merely an end in itself, or 
 as he was subject to the restraint and correction of the 
 different experiences of others, so now we must recog- 
 nize that effective activity, not less than true thinking 
 or than realistic experience, is also necessarily the 
 labour, never of one alone, but of many. The success- 
 ful mechanic in other words, the fully responsible 
 agent of a law-free nature is never an isolated crea- 
 ture with merely such a sentimental concern for his 
 neighbours as might spring from the recognized chance 
 
230 THE WILL TO POUBT. 
 
 of meeting them in that world of the hereafter, where 
 all are to be equal and where love and peace are to 
 supplant the present hate and rivalry ; he is, on the 
 contrary, one among others, different from him, it is 
 true, and often very positively at variance with him, 
 but engaged with him in a single activity and achieve- 
 ment. His difference works not against, but with 
 their differences for thoroughly controlled, truly effec- 
 tive activity. As things are real, though never final, 
 so men, at work in the world, are individual and 
 individually important, but never alone. 
 
 The facts in the case, logically and practically, 
 appear to be somewhat as follows: The individual's 
 view-point, and the special machinery by which he 
 undertakes to realize it, can be only tentative or 
 provisional; they have the character, and usually 
 he knows that they have the character, if I may use a 
 somewhat extravagant term, of makeshifts ; and, such 
 being the fact, he is bound always to be in a state of 
 constraint or tension, in a relation of suspense towards 
 them and towards the environment to which they 
 refer or belong. He feels a positive resistance, a 
 something disposed to counteract what he would do, 
 and of course the feeling means that he is really party 
 to a growing life, not established in a completed life. 
 Suppose a view-point, or a machinery that was per- 
 fectly applicable, that worked perfectly, that never 
 did and never could give out, that might not even very 
 suddenly go all to pieces, and that therefore put no 
 strain nor uncertainty upon him who held or em- 
 ployed it ; could such a view-point or such machinery 
 be of any service to a growing life, to productive 
 
THE DOUBTER'S WORLD. 231 
 
 activity ? Most certainly not. Tension, or a strained 
 relationship, is necessary to every individual's conduct 
 and to every individual's ideas. But this strain, to 
 be real, just to accomplish its own purposes must be 
 not merely of a person with his own ideas or with the 
 outer world to which the ideas refer, but of a person 
 with other persons; not merely of conscious man 
 with a mechanical nature, but of conscious and 
 mechanically active man with other conscious and 
 mechanically active men. 
 
 It is now an old story for us, but an important one, 
 that there must be society. A genuine individuality 
 requires society. Society is a medium not by which 
 something is added to individual life, but by which 
 something in individual life is kept real and manifest. 
 By maintaining, as it were always from without, the 
 natural tension of individual life, it ensures to the in- 
 dividual the constant growth that is his legitimate in- 
 heritance. The doubter is a social creature. The free 
 thinker accepting his ideas only tentatively, though at 
 the same time using them hopefully, sure that they will 
 lead somewhere, is a social creature ; and the mechanic 
 is a social creature, being one with others for whom life 
 is not routine but growth, and among whom the growth 
 in which each has his part induces constant tension, 
 the tension of difference, the tension of opposition and 
 competition, the tension of mutual correction and 
 compensation, the tension, finally, of reality refusing 
 to be bound. Not the individual's provisional stand- 
 point, nor yet the machinery that he employs and 
 that sooner or later must go to pieces, not these alone, 
 I must therefore reiterate, make the individual effec- 
 
232 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 tively active in a growing world, make him a worthy 
 creature doing the work of nature or of God; these 
 have their place and part; but constant relation to other 
 individuals, the objects not less of hate than of love, 
 not less of rivalry than of friendship, is also essential. 
 
 In the so-called material world all things, in and 
 by themselves unreal, get reality, yes, get individual 
 reality, only as through their very differences they 
 work together for what is real. In the world of 
 mind, or thought, if this can be imagined apart 
 from the world of things, all thoughts or ideas, 
 in and by themselves untrue for being subjective, 
 relative, and partial, get truth only as also through 
 their differences, so tense and interactive, they work 
 together for what is true. And, likewise, in the world 
 of persons, if indeed this can be imagined apart from 
 the world of thought, all individuals, call them now 
 mechanics or what you will, though in and by them- 
 selves without personal worth or real individuality, 
 without freedom or immortality, get genuine worth 
 and are assured even immortality only as shoulder 
 against shoulder they work together for a life that is 
 true and real, worthy and genuine. 
 
 But in an earlier chapter, dealing with "The 
 Personal and the Social, the Vital and the Formal 
 in Experience," a different argument for individuality 
 was insisted upon. Then the person was individual 
 because of his independence of particular form; now 
 he is so because a real life demands the particular and 
 different, with which he is assumed to be necessarily 
 identified. Then he was the "living, integral ex- 
 ponent of the unity of experience," free with the 
 
THE DOUBTERS WORLD. 233 
 
 genius of universality, now he is one among all the 
 particular conflicting elements of that unity or at 
 least of the reality to which that unity refers. So 
 there appears to be even an inconsistency in my 
 thinking. Yet, I venture still to think, the in- 
 consistency is only apparent. Certainly it should 
 be remembered that the person's asserted genius 
 for universality was not for the universal in an 
 abstract sense, in the sense of the universal as some- 
 thing by itself and apart from particulars ; rather it 
 was for a constant enriching of the universal through 
 particulars, for the translation of any one particular 
 relation and experience, which had reached a higher 
 state of development, to all the other actual or 
 possible relations of life ; and this can mean only that 
 the universal, in which the personal individual has a 
 place, is not denying or betraying, but always holding 
 and lifting up to itself all particular factors or 
 elements in the unity of experience or of reality. 
 Simply, though perhaps abstrusely too, the universal 
 is just all the particulars ; unity is always in and 
 through difference; and there is, therefore, without 
 inconsistency, a case for individuality from either side. 
 Indeed, the life of the individual being, as was said, 
 always in a tension or strain of difference, of opposition 
 and competition, is bound to have, it can be real only 
 as it has, both a particular form and a genius for 
 universality. Not in the sense of that conventional 
 theology, crudely dualistic and unthinkable, but in 
 a sense that is not to be gainsaid and that may give 
 some meaning even to the conventional theology, 
 every individual is real only in having a body and a 
 
234 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 soul. The soul of a man is only his genius for 
 universality, but for a universality that works through, 
 not that is independent of, the particular. 
 
 So the difference between this chapter and the 
 former chapter is merely one of emphasis. The 
 double character of the individual, however, as it is 
 now before us, starts an inevitable question. Is the 
 individual as immortal as real? If he is immortal, 
 does the immortality belong to both sides of his 
 character, to his body and to his soul, or only to one ? 
 And, admittedly, this question offers more serious 
 difficulties than the suspicion of inconsistency. How 
 can it be met ? 
 
 IV. IMMORTALITY. 
 
 To write a useful essay on immortality has long been 
 one of my ambitions, and, as regards the views in that 
 essay, my faith and my reason alike have so far 
 brought me to this thesis : Whatever is real is immortal. 1 
 "A most meagre contribution to the subject," I hear 
 some one exclaim. But is it so very meagre after 
 all? "A most gloomy contribution," says another, 
 " for evil, and above all death, are real." But is it so 
 gloomy ? Eemember, not even death can be real alone. 
 Possibly, too, the meagreness will seem less and the 
 gloom will be illuminated if the need of the real 
 being also the ideal, is brought to mind. That the 
 real must be ideal, that the world must be so 
 
 1 Two preliminary efforts have already been put in print. See 
 the Appendix, "A Study of Immortality in Outline," to a book: 
 Dynamic Idealism : An Introduction to the Metaphysics of Psychology 
 (McClurg, 1898). See, secondly, an article: "Evolution anoL 
 Immortality," in the Monist, April, 1900. 
 
THE DOUBTERS WORLD. 235 
 
 constituted that the law of whatever is good will 
 prevail in it, has been a faith manifested among all 
 men and expressed through history in countless ways. 
 True, no particular experience ever satisfies it. Not 
 even the particular things we adjudge to be best are 
 adequate to it, and the things we think evil, the 
 suffering and the hardships of all kinds, the always 
 tragic death and the too often offensive life, seem its 
 eternal rebuke. Yet the faith remains, and you and I 
 and all others are forever calling out to it. Our very 
 doubts are its altars; our honest, rational thoughts, 
 as they are uttered, are prayers; perhaps the only 
 prayers to which we have any right. 
 
 So the real, which must be also the ideal, is im- 
 mortal; and this, quite apart from any particular 
 questions about the body or the soul, makes a world 
 to live in and to hope in, whatever happens. Of body 
 and soul, too, it says something, These, in just so far 
 as they are real, are immortal, and any real relation 
 between them is immortal also, for the conclusive test 
 of immortality is just reality, reality here and now. 
 Whatever is real in your life or in mine, whatever 
 reality our present personality may possess, be it 
 physical or spiritual, be it both or neither of these, 
 that and only that is immortal. That and only that, 
 however, let it be said again, is now or never. The 
 most serious error, so it seems to me, in all the con- 
 troversy about immortality, is the notion, or the super- 
 stition, that something that is real now can pass away, 
 or that something real in the future is not real, not 
 freely real now. With this error corrected, of course 
 at the expense of certain attempts to bind reality to 
 
236 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 something that is visible, if not to the natural eye, at 
 least to the eye of the mind, man has nothing to fear. 
 Reality will hold him to itself, will support whatever 
 truly inheres in his friendships or his family ties, 
 in his best hopes or in his personal conceits, for ever 
 and ever. Reality can never betray what it has ever 
 harboured. 
 
 And the whole trend of thinking in this book has 
 been to make the reality here spoken of a most 
 hospitable harbour. So innate to all experience is the 
 spirit of truth, the principle of veracity, that life can 
 have no absolute illusions. True, life also can have no 
 positive knowledge final and exact, so that all things 
 definitely manifest are only relatively true or real. 
 All things definitely manifest, whether to the con- 
 sciousness that looks without or that looks within, 
 are mixedly true or false, real or unreal. But just 
 this impossibility, now so familiar to us, at once 
 of absolute illusion and of absolute knowledge, is, as 
 said so often, a condition of the true and the real, and 
 it means in this place that nothing which is ever 
 defined, which is ever hypostasized or apotheosized, 
 which in any way is erected into a thing or nature 
 quite by itself, possessing determined or determinable 
 qualities, can ever be said to be either mortal or 
 immortal, since it must be as truly one as the other. 
 It must be significantly, but never purely and ex- 
 clusively either. Not this hand of mine nor that 
 picture on the wall, not this body which, so to speak, 
 I seem to wear, nor that soul, which you or I imagine 
 to be in the body and more or less loosely connected 
 with the body, is unqualifiedly immortal. Nor yet 
 
THE DOUBTER'S WORLD. 237 
 
 is any of these unqualifiedly mortal. Still, again, 
 there is immortality, and an infinitely hospitable im- 
 mortality, which the hand and the whole body and the 
 soul, be it yours or be it mine, all have a place and 
 a part in. There is immortality, and, besides those 
 things that were just named, divinity is also immortal. 
 But even a God dies, this being just one of the things 
 that make him God. Any man, then, or any being, 
 or any thing, may say, "I am immortal." No one, 
 however to speak now only in words directly appli- 
 cable to man may say, " My body is immortal," nor 
 even, " My soul is immortal," if, so speaking, he means 
 only what he seems to say. Body and soul alike, 
 if two separate things, are loth of them at once living 
 and dying. They are equally mortal or immortal, for 
 only so, as two things, can they belong to the real self. 
 Can parts, be they two or many more, ever be un- 
 mixedly what the whole is? There is immortality, 
 then, yet nothing, not the body nor the soul, is wholly 
 or selfishly immortal. Eeflect, to take an illustration 
 from the practice, if not from the conscious thinking of 
 men, how through the centuries of the dualistic view 
 of human nature, the saving, or the losing, of the 
 separate soul has been a keen human interest, and 
 how the separate body, living, has been neglected and 
 despised, and, dead, has been cherished and honoured. 
 Yes, man's immortality is deeper, and it is more 
 hospitable, than any distinction, be this invidious on 
 one side or on the other or be it not, between the 
 physical and the spiritual. Even in the case of the 
 spiritual, the cannot be a. 
 
 The soldier and the mechanic have been mentioned 
 
238 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 as types of personal individuality appropriate re- 
 spectively to the medieval and the modern period, 
 to the period of the " universal individual," on the one 
 hand, and of unity realized, not through a type, but 
 through the working together of different individuals, 
 on the other. The type was of another world; the 
 living unity is here and now in this. For the 
 mechanic, then, death is not what the soldier has 
 found it, and immortality is different too. But how 
 fully to describe the difference, and how above all 
 really to appraise it, I do not clearly know. Perhaps 
 there is not enough of the poetic in my nature. The 
 soldier, as the political historian or as the philosopher 
 sees him, has had his appreciative poets, but the 
 mechanic has been little sung. The mechanic's death, 
 however, and the life following it, afford a theme that 
 some poet of the future, let me hope, will be able to 
 do justice to. The soldier leaves this for another 
 world, by his violent death only fulfilling his extreme 
 subjection here. The mechanic, somewhat like the 
 tools which he employs, actually continues with the 
 always productive life of this world, by his death, 
 natural rather than violent, even contributing to, as 
 well as sharing in, what is produced. Not less than the 
 soldier's is his after-life an appropriate fulfilment of his 
 earthly career ; each gains through death the natural 
 reward of his life's service. But though I find myself 
 so unable to say what I would, to express either in 
 prose or in poetry all that I seem to feel, there is just 
 one thought that I must try to articulate, and that will 
 certainly assist the understanding of the difference 
 between the two deaths or the two after-lives. 
 
THE DOUBTERS WORLD. 239 
 
 Soldiers are companionable, of course, but they live 
 less in and with each other than in and with the will 
 which they serve or than in and with the separate 
 world which at any moment may suddenly take them 
 to itself. Their lives, accordingly, or their deaths, are 
 aloof from each other, and are brought together only 
 through their common subjection or their common 
 destiny, through something which is without. But 
 the mechanic is social in his own nature, in his own 
 right. The very reality, too, of the world in which he 
 works is, as in so many ways we have seen, maintained 
 only by a divided labour. It is, then, a reality, or a 
 labour, that bridges the chasm between one man's life 
 and another's, as well as between all separate lives 
 and the unity of all life. It makes the many lives 
 "parallel" and harmonious nay, it makes them 
 actively and vitally sympathetic. Not, as is certainly 
 true, at the expense of any one's real individuality, 
 for each man has his place and his part, real and 
 immortal, and not one falls unnoticed or unguarded to 
 the ground ; but, nevertheless, whatever all have and 
 do, they have and do together. They live-and-die to- 
 gether. There is, in a word, but one death, as well as 
 but one life, the life or the death, which all share, and 
 which accordingly is definitely and specifically nowhere 
 and nobody's. And in the light of this supreme 
 unity, while any live, none can be merely dead, or 
 while any die, none can be merely alive or living to 
 themselves or their time alone. And, living and dying 
 together, in and with each other, all are parties to the 
 immortality of what is real. 
 
 So, again, there is immortality for mankind the 
 
240 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 immortality of him whom I have called the mechanic. 
 There is immortality, mine and yours and ours. We 
 die, but not as dies the soldier, who leaves this life for 
 another quite apart, securing there a companionship 
 denied him here ; we die a death that is never death 
 alone, and we die as we live, in a companionship that 
 is real now and throughout all time. Furthermore, our 
 death is always, or always may be, self-denial, and 
 self-denial, too, in its supreme moment, the moment 
 of its greatest achievement, but our self-denial is also 
 very different from that of the soldier. 
 
 There is immortality, then, but what results has 
 all that has now been said for the interpretation of 
 history, for our feelings about the life and death of our 
 fellows, and for the relevant doctrines of Christianity ? l 
 
 We commonly think of history as the passing of 
 persons, nations, and civilizations. Men come and go, 
 but history goes on for ever. To be sure, history 
 accumulates, as if its gifts from humanity, innumer- 
 able treasures, books, relics, institutions, buildings, 
 machinery and the like, but the donors, as we are 
 wont to think, are lost to it, remaining as ideal in- 
 fluences perhaps, but not as vitally active in the life 
 they once assisted. This common view, however, must 
 now seem wrong. The past must ever persist in the 
 present, and not as an aside in some other world, nor yet 
 as merely so much ideal influence, but vitally as a party 
 to the present. Those that were must also live now. 
 Have we their literature ? Yes, and their conscious- 
 
 1 Except for a few changes, the next few paragraphs are taken 
 from my article, "Evolution and Immortality," in the Monist, 
 April, 1900. 
 
THE DOUBTER'S WORLD. 241 
 
 ness too. Their institutions ? And also their life. 
 Their achievements ? And their power and will. 
 Altogether too fanciful, some one thinks; but give 
 it meaning from what has been said here especially 
 about individuality. In the real world there can be 
 but one life and one death, and we individuals, what- 
 ever our century, divide the labour of them both. 
 Even our present life and consciousness and our will 
 must be said to belong, in return, to those who have 
 gone before ; for it is wrong, it must be wrong, to 
 think of the life of the past and the life of the present 
 as two lives, as independent and perhaps even different 
 in kind. Not those that are now gone once lived and 
 we live, but they and we are living, they in us, and we 
 with them ; they in the world of our life, not in a 
 world yonder and apart. They live in us, to suggest a 
 simple analogy, that is perhaps more than a mere 
 analogy, very much as our own past selves, our infancy 
 and our youth, are alive with us and in us to-day. If 
 a physical scientist can see the same force in the 
 military weapons and engines of ancient times that he 
 sees in those of our own time, if a sociologist can find 
 the same social phenomena then and now, may not the 
 historian regard the older life in general and the newer 
 life as not less intimate ? Did different winds blow in 
 1492 from those that blow to-day ? Was it a different 
 sun that shone in 500 B.C: from that which shone in 
 A.D. 500, or which shines, or tries to shine, to-day ? We 
 do not deny that the animal nature is still alive in us 
 as well as around us, although at the same time we 
 suppose it to belong to a very early period in our 
 development. Why, then, should we exclude what is 
 
242 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 so much more recent ? Because it is too distinctly 
 human to be so robbed of its temporal independ- 
 ence, of its own date and place ? That is certainly 
 a strange reason in view of the fact that men have 
 insisted on erecting, in their minds, for the human 
 nature that has passed away, a place which is alto- 
 gether timeless and eternal. Why not dignify human 
 nature, then, by making it, and all that it bears, eternal 
 in its own natural life, not in a sphere that is un- 
 natural ? It is sheer materialism, in letter or in spirit, 
 either to entomb the historic past, as some would, in 
 books and monuments of all sorts, or, as others would, 
 to lay it aside in a so-called immaterial world. Who 
 does either of these things forgets how the books are 
 written and how the monuments are erected, and how 
 in general the things of the past come to be. The 
 future is always a party to whatever is done. The 
 men who have ever achieved anything have always 
 been, in their character and in their work, as if made 
 by the future, "ahead of their times." An uncanny 
 phrase, unless one can think of the deeds and men of 
 any time as in a vital unity with the deeds and men 
 of all times. A man is great only as he identifies 
 himself with some social force, with some actual move- 
 ment of his day, fulfilling it out of a long past, bringing 
 it to focus and so making it definite and manifest, and 
 as the life around him which gave him birth, adopts his 
 will and repeats his achievement. History has many 
 cases of human societies repeating in their lives as a 
 whole the careers of great men. Only it is not repeti- 
 tion exactly ; it is resurrection and continuation. Great 
 men make history, but they make it only because they 
 
THE DOUBTER'S WORLD. 243 
 
 are alive in it before their birth and survive in it, in its 
 doing and in its thinking, after they die. 1 Would 
 history be even thinkable without such continuity ? 
 Could we honestly call it history? What good 
 American to-day is not convinced that he has a share 
 in what Washington and Lincoln accomplished years 
 ago, and also and this one may, or may not, regret 
 in the doings of Benedict Arnold and Booth? And, 
 to put a very practical question, would it not be well 
 if in the popular consciousness great men, good and 
 bad, were really identified with history instead of 
 being treated as fixtures outside of it ? Make them 
 separate fixtures and you make them oracles, the spirits 
 of quite another world, with which the demagogue, as 
 if a medium, can excite the people ; but identify them 
 in a vital way with history and they must grow 
 with it, speaking quite as much out of the present 
 conditions as out of the past. Hero-worship is too 
 often idolatry, and for my part the literalism of it is 
 only "spiritualism" trying to be respectable. Every 
 extravagance, of course, has to have its lawful or con- 
 ventionally respectable expression. 
 
 But what, now, of friendship and family ties ? Can 
 we view these in the same light ? I think we would ; 
 I think we can ; I think we must. True, it is easier 
 to speak in this large, " philosophical " way of history 
 and of the men who have had part in it, inventing and 
 effectively using the machinery that has enabled its 
 progress, than of such matters as friendship and 
 
 1 In a small book, Citizenship and Salvation, or Greek and Jew, 
 published some years ago, I have tried to show this of Socrates and 
 Christ. 
 
244 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 family. In these latter matters the heart more than 
 the mind is addressed. Still, the relations of friend- 
 ship and kinship are not themselves born, nor do they 
 die and all friends abroad and kin at home live and 
 move and have their being only in these. Does it 
 destroy or even weaken the meaning or the reality of 
 friendship to have it said that the relation is as 
 universal as particular or local, and as eternal as 
 temporal ? Is a relationship worth less than any one 
 of its manifestations ? Why, the universality of the 
 relationship gives meaning or reality to any manifesta- 
 tion. Friendship, then, or kinship, for this person or 
 that, cannot be separated from the experience in 
 general. Separate it, and one's friends or kin surely 
 do die, remaining after death, like the characters of 
 the older history, as only ideal "influences," or as 
 unearthly spirits that sometimes idly chatter. But in 
 reality, friendship, or kinship, is one, not merely many, 
 all of its members labouring together for, and forever 
 surviving in, what it truly is. The friends, then, or 
 the kin that lived, live still. In others about us ? 
 Yes ; and in ourselves too ; or rather in the relation of 
 man to man or in the unity of all that lives. Not 
 literally in others, then, although the meaning in- 
 tended was a genuine one, nor yet literally in our- 
 selves, for nothing crudely like transmigration of souls 
 is in my mind, but to repeat in the living relation- 
 ship of friends or kin. There is indeed a truth in 
 transmigration, as also in other related notions; wit- 
 ness all the facts of inheritance, of historical succes- 
 sion or continuity, of social growth and personal 
 character, of evolution ; but it is the truth, or is near to 
 
THE DOUBTER'S WORLD. 245 
 
 the truth, of a reality that is conserved even in its 
 changing. The soldier of the past, let me say, at his 
 death was " translated/' but the mechanic of to-day is 
 transmuted. The latter word may be stranger and 
 harsher in sound than the former, but there is truly 
 less violence and more honour in its meaning. So, 
 again, friends and kin that ever lived, live still. 
 Friendship and fatherhood and motherhood and all the 
 relations of kin, nay, all the relations of life, that 
 make our individuality real, that make it personal, that 
 make it social, that make it natural, have been from 
 the beginning, live now, and must survive forever, 
 and by their survival hold for the present and the 
 future life all who have ever been. Where would 
 faith go, and where worth and responsibility, if birth 
 really created and death destroyed, or if birth were a 
 coming from no one knows where, from a realm unlike 
 and apart, and death the return? Birth cannot 
 create or introduce ; it can only express, revealing and 
 realizing. Death cannot destroy or "translate"; it 
 can be only fulfilment at a crisis. 
 
 The mere wordiness of a philosopher ! Possibly. 
 And yet Christianity has very nearly implied, if in- 
 deed it has not actually said, and said or implied 
 again and again, exactly the same thing. To science, 
 I know, we are peculiarly indebted for the conception 
 of the organism, or the organic, which enables us to 
 bring together the universal and the individual, the 
 eternal and the temporal, the omnipresent and the 
 local, without losing the worth or the reality of either, 
 and of course for so they would not be together 
 without erecting separate quarters, or worlds, for their 
 
246 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 occupation; but, when all is said, science has only 
 applied at large the very special and personal doc- 
 trines of Christianity, and has therein helped Chris- 
 tianity to a better consciousness of itself. The Resur- 
 rection, the Immaculate Conception, the Divinity, the 
 Immediacy of the Kingdom, the Sacrifice, and the 
 Brotherhood of Man are doctrines which one and all 
 testify quite directly that our real individuality, our 
 real being, lies not in a separate existence of any sort, 
 here or hereafter, but in the abiding relations of the 
 actual life now. In these the Christ resides, the 
 always living Christ. What else can the following 
 mean ? " In as much as ye have done it unto one of 
 these, my brethren, even these least ye have done it 
 unto me." And again : " For whosoever shall do the 
 will of my father which is in heaven, the same is my 
 brother and sister and mother." The living Christ, 
 one of the dogmas of our day, is more than a fancy 
 and more than a dogma, and for no one so truly as the 
 scientist, the evolutionist. Christ was too great, too 
 deep-lying, too far-reaching in human history not to 
 be more. The letter of Christianity, we are often 
 told, has got to go, but it is quite as true that the real 
 letter of Christianity has got to stay, has yet to come : 
 the real letter, I say, not the parody of a mere 
 physical appearance and reappearance nearly two 
 thousand years ago. If Christ was really not born as 
 men are born, if he did not really die, if truly he still 
 lives in and with our lives to-day, if Christianity 
 honestly means the brotherhood of humanity and the 
 divinity of man, then simply the Christ was more 
 than a pagan's messenger from another world, and 
 
THE DOUBTERS WORLD. 247 
 
 more than the creature of a single moment in history 
 or a single place; also he reveals to us more in 
 ourselves than any of these things, and instead of 
 resorting to such notions as parthenogenesis and 
 trance to explain the birth and the resurrection, we 
 must rather recognize in him, and in ourselves, an 
 individuality that has, not in spite of, but because of, 
 birth and death, a share in, a place and a part in the 
 immortality of what is real. Now I am not a good 
 preacher, plainly, nor am I exactly a sympathetic 
 theologian, and also I know too well the defects of 
 argument through scriptural quotation ; but I have to 
 hope, as personally I believe, that in the foregoing para- 
 graph, given in conclusion to the discussion of immor- 
 tality in the doubter's world, I have suggested what at 
 least is not an unchristian appreciation of Christianity. 
 
 Our journey in the doubter's world here comes to 
 an end. All things are real, yet none final. The 
 spiritual and the material in life are sympathetic 
 even to the point of being vitally at one with each 
 other, thought being free and practical, and material 
 nature being lawful but law-free, and mechanical but 
 productively so, and being in her productiveness 
 definite opportunity, not blind necessity, to human 
 life. And, the "universal individual" being dead, 
 having returned to the other world from which 
 he came, all particular individuals have real and 
 personal shares in the life that is, in the work that 
 is ever to be done. Living or dying, the individual, 
 as we have found him, is the mechanic of to-day, not 
 the soldier of yesterday. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 DOUBT AND BELIEF. 
 
 There was once a brook that ran, at times slowly, at times 
 more rapidly, through fields and woods, under trees and over 
 rocks. At every chance, whatever the obstacles in its course, it 
 fell, much or little, as it could ; but impatience and uncertainty 
 filled its life as the minutes and the hours passed. Had life 
 nothing more in store for its troubled waters 1 Was this groping 
 downward all ? Were the memory and the accompanying hope, 
 which haunted every thwarted move, of no avail ? Would true 
 fulness of life never be attained ? 
 
 But a great moment for the brook came, rewarding it at last, 
 bringing assurance in place of threatened despair. A precipice 
 intervened, and the waters fell hundreds of feet ; a glorious fall 
 spray, sunlight, colour,, eloquence. 
 
 "Now," spoke the brook from the deep, smooth pool below 
 " now I have lived ; now I know that my life was real 
 and that my life was good, for I have found myself, I have 
 found my world ; and I have found them where I thought 
 them not." 
 
 And, speaking so, the brook flowed on contented. 
 
 THE confession of doubt, which we set out to make 
 with all possible candour, is now nearly concluded 
 even to the harvesting of the promised fruit. The con- 
 fession began, as will be remembered, with recognition 
 of certain general and easily demonstrated facts, of 
 
 248 
 
DOUBT AND BELIEF. 249 
 
 which there were five, as follows : (1) We are all 
 universal doubters. (2) Doubt is essential to all 
 consciousness. (3) Even habit, though confidence be 
 the horse, has doubt sitting up behind. (4) Like 
 pain or ignorance, doubt is a condition of real life. 
 (5) And the sense of dependence, so general to 
 human nature, gives rise to doubt, although also, 
 like misery, it always seeks company the company 
 of nature, of man, of God. Then, after this beginning, 
 which left us by no means so hopeless as might 
 have been expected, we proceeded to try the doubter, 
 nay, to try ourselves, first before the court of 
 ordinary life with its ordinary views of things, and 
 secondly, before the court of science, and, in both 
 trials, we found the doubting justified. Alike in 
 ordinary life and in science, even in science where 
 such a result was perhaps hardly to be expected, we 
 found what at least seemed like illusion and what 
 certainly was paradox, and almost against our will we 
 had to conclude that a spirit of contradiction and 
 duplicity and vacillation dwelt at the very centre and 
 the very heart of our human experience. This spirit 
 of violence, too, as the evidence of its presence 
 accumulated, bade fair to dispel whatever hope our 
 confession had left us. Yet out of the evidence there 
 gradually did appear a reason for deepest assurance, 
 and in the end our fear, not our hope, was dispelled. 
 Contradiction was seen in its very nature to possess 
 positive value. It was seen to protect experience, even 
 while experience was specific and concrete, definite 
 and individual, against any fatal digression or partiality 
 of view. It was deeply conservative, corrective, and 
 
250 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 compensative in its effect, but it was all this without 
 ever being merely negative or destructive towards 
 anything, since its own efficiency required persistent 
 individual differences. To experience it gave move- 
 ment, constant unity or wholeness, realistic value and 
 poise, practicality, and, lastly, social expression. And 
 wo were able, accordingly, to conclude, in so many 
 words, that both ordinary life and science, so given to 
 duplicity in their standpoint and in their ideas, were 
 really building well, far better, indeed, than they 
 seemed or than they clearly knew. Contradiction, in 
 short, as we came to see it, meant unity, but not an 
 empty, abstract unity; it meant unity rich and real 
 with an infinity of differences ; and so what had at 
 first appeared an uncompromising reason for doubt 
 turned, right before our doubter's eyes, into an un- 
 assailable ground of belief, making the very world 
 which we had been so uncertain about a world for an 
 inviolable faith. But truth, we saw at once, could no 
 ^ longer be identified with a formal idea, known or un- 
 known or unknowable ; reality could no longer have 
 the character of a fixedly constituted thing, whether 
 such a thing were present in experience or not ; and 
 perfection, even the perfection of God, could no longer 
 be a mere status, a passive possession of certain 
 characters, attributes, or prerogatives. Truth became, 
 as was said, in want of a better word, a spirit ; reality 
 was a life ; perfection was a power. And thereupon, 
 with the new view thus afforded us, coupled as it was 
 especially with the sense in which personally a man 
 could claim -reality for himself and yet be party to 
 the factional life of society, we were able to turn to 
 
DOUBT AND BELIEF. 251 
 
 Descartes, an early modern doubter, a father confessor 
 of many doubters, and, overlooking some of his short- 
 comings in thought and character, to appreciate both 
 the use that he made of doubt, the intimacy that he, 
 too, found between doubt and faith, and the world of 
 reality, of most vital sympathy between the material 
 and the spiritual, of genuine, personal individuality, 
 and of immortality, through which he led us, doubter, 
 universal doubter though he was. That great French- 
 man, as we were enabled to understand him, got back 
 the world, the self and the God which he seemed to 
 have lost, but he got them all back transfigured. He 
 got them back, not by denying and excluding what 
 appeared negative and treacherous in their nature, 
 but by facing this and using it, by accepting it and 
 turning it even against itself. The very Paris to 
 which he returned as believer was the same Paris, the 
 Paris of doubt and of evil in all its forms, that earlier, 
 hopeless and despairing, he had put behind him. And, 
 once more, his experience was ours, and so helped us 
 to interpret and deepen ours, quickening the value of 
 our own previous discovery that ^within the very 
 sources of doubt lay the real bases of belief. Our" 
 ~own doubted world of what was relative and artificial, 
 and above all contradictory, had already turned, with- 
 out loss of anything that was in it, into a world of 
 reality and belief. 
 
 And so, for this concluding chapter, as but a sort of 
 focussing of what almost from the beginning has been 
 borne in upon us, but especially at the close has been 
 rich in reality and meaning, we have a sixth general 
 fact, which may now be added to the original five. 
 
252 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 We believe through our doubts ; we believe, not in some- 
 thing apart, but in the very things we doubt. To this 
 fact really inclusive of all the others, or if not to this 
 fact at least to this conviction which we have 
 achieved here, we shall now turn, and in our conclud- 
 ing chapter we may even forget, or retain only as the 
 appropriate background, many of those more special 
 or more technical details that from time to time have 
 occupied us. After so much, that to some, if not to 
 all, who have followed me to this place, may have 
 appeared open to the charge of being mere theory, 
 certain simple, very practical considerations, appealing 
 quite as much to the emotions as to the reason, can 
 hardly be out of place. Those who are already 
 satisfied, who foresee only repetition, who are them- 
 selves without emotion, or who consider anything 
 like the drawing of a moral to be as useless as it 
 is inartistic, need read no further. 
 
 We believe in the very things we doubt. Doubt, 
 this is to say, can destroy nothing. It only calls for 
 closer scrutiny, for wider and deeper view, for greater 
 achievement. Its effect is only to make over, renew, 
 - or fulfil what has already been and must ever remain 
 an object of faith, and so doing it keeps the old faith 
 alive. It questions all things, but properly, con- 
 sistently it raises, not questions of mere existence or 
 reality, but questions of meaning and worth, and 
 whatever it truly questions it always quickens. Have 
 
DOUBT AND BELIEF. 253 
 
 we not found that with its inborn and insatiable 
 passion for truth doubt must believe in everything, 
 and that to satisfy this passion, since all things must 
 work together for what is real and true, it must reject 
 nothing but seek even the universe in everything? 
 All things, from the momentary sensation in your 
 little finger, or the tree yonder on the lawn, to the 
 personality of God or the divinity of Christ as an idea 
 in the consciousness of millions of people, all things 
 are ; they are in experience ; they are unassailable 
 realities of experience ; but and just this is as far as 
 the truth-loving doubter, the doubter who is honest 
 with his own self-consciousness, can go what really 
 are they ? What are they ? is such an honest ques- 
 tion. In this question, too, there is more reality for 
 the things inquired about even than in any man's 
 assertion that they are this or that they are that. But 
 the question Are they ? would be downright treachery. 
 We doubters, then, believe, but would ever know what 
 we believe; we have, yet would realize every possi- 
 bility that what we have affords. 
 
 Doubt, I repeat, destroys nothing. From time to 
 time certain doubting people have called their pro- 
 phets impostors, and have imagined themselves able to 
 put the impostors out of the way, but, as history has 
 always shown, only with the result of reviving among 
 themselves and often of awakening in the minds and 
 hearts of others the sense and conviction of just that 
 for which the offensive impostors may have suffered 
 violent death. Even history's petty impostors, too, as 
 well as those who have proved heroes and great 
 leaders, have always had their justification. An ab- 
 
254 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 solute impostor has never been. Again, certain people 
 have cried illusion and unreality at things political 
 or moral or even at things physical, but only in 
 the end to feel, and to make others feel, first, their 
 evident narrowness, if not their actual dishonesty, 
 and then their need of a more hospitable idea of 
 what is valid and real. Nothing can be, or ever 
 has been, unreal. And, in general, doubt of a thing 
 or a person or a God only needs its own conscious 
 assertion to turn actually into an appeal from its par- 
 ticular object to the ideal or spirit or principle for 
 which the object had stood, and upon this appeal even 
 the object that has been for a moment condemned is 
 justified and glorified. Thus, doubt may deny or 
 depose or put to death, but as it is honest it also 
 realizes or restores or revives. Through doubt the 
 sensuous, which is the particular and visible, is ever 
 becoming spiritualized; even this corruptible puts on 
 incorruption and this mortal puts on immortality. 
 Or, in these words, if we doubt we may reject the 
 object, the letter, but we cannot reject the letter 
 without accepting and asserting the spirit, and we 
 cannot assert the spirit without recalling and exalting 
 and even worshipping the letter. The rejection makes 
 for universality by casting down the barriers of the 
 particular experience of time or place, of person or 
 nation, of the Greek perhaps, if again I may look to 
 history, or of the Jew or of the Christian, while the 
 recall and the worship make for definiteness. With- 
 out the previous rejection the worship could be only 
 idolatry. So, as Descartes will be remembered virtu- 
 ally to have said, doubt is innately loyal to reality in 
 
DOUBT AND BELIEF. 255 
 
 everything, and just through this loyalty the world it 
 spurns, the world of God and man and nature, is for 
 ever called back, a real world once more, because a 
 realized, a spiritually realized world. Why forget, as 
 so many seem to, that reality is an achievement; 
 achieved it may be, as with the brook, even by a great 
 fall? 
 
 But have you ever climbed a mountain up and up 
 and up, through thick woods, over rough, almost im- 
 passable trails, into clouds dense and chilling, stormy 
 and angry, over treacherous snows and frightful cliffs, 
 and come out at last on the very top to see both earth 
 and heaven, yourself between, the clouds dispersed, 
 the hardships and dangers all forgotten, the whole 
 world real and yours ? Well, that is doubt become 
 achievement. Have you worked at some problem 
 of everyday life, or a problem of science or philo- 
 sophy, patiently or impatiently applying all the rules 
 and precepts at your command, trying every resort 
 known to you, and in final desperation many you 
 only guess at, and then, when failure seems almost 
 certain, caught a glimpse of the real meaning and the 
 real way, attaining to an insight that reveals a 
 new world to you? That, too, is doubt rewarded. 
 Have you ever visited, perhaps more curiously than 
 reverently, some great Catholic cathedral, or, better 
 still, some temple of the far Orient, and watching the 
 worshippers there, suddenly had a vision of religion as 
 greater and deeper than any Protestantism or even 
 than Christianity? That, again, is doubt's achieve- 
 ment. Have you ever suffered a great heartrending 
 disappointment, let me say a great personal loss, and 
 
256 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 found it seemingly impossible to return to the routine 
 of your former life, but nevertheless, almost imper- 
 ceptibly, come into a sense of presence and gain from 
 the very thing that seemed taken from you? That, 
 once more, is doubt without its sting, robbed of its 
 victory. Doubt means sacrifice, often enormous sacri- 
 fice, but always a more than equal gain. The light 
 that casts the shadows of doubt, when one can face it, 
 and really does face it, as, for another example, in 
 this book we have been trying to face it, is so splendid 
 and so uplifting. 
 
 So, a third time, doubt destroys nothing ; it only 
 makes reality forever an achievement and belief a 
 constantly active life. The fact, now no stranger to 
 us, that doubt is social, also shows this. Doubt is 
 social, as has been said, since by its isolation it makes 
 the longing for company, and by its greater freedom 
 the larger opportunity for company; and since also the 
 very contradictions or controversies which arouse it 
 are never merely individual, being always social also, 
 and social relationship means effort and sacrifice, and 
 is accordingly a peculiarly interesting witness to the 
 losses that doubt must suffer for its greater gains. 
 Doubt, in short, shows belief, working not merely for 
 the reality of all things, but also for the love of all 
 men. As social, then, as working for the love of all 
 
 > men, doubt involves sympathy. Yet not an easy, 
 passive sympathy. A restless, labouring, always grow- 
 
 . ing sympathy is the sympathy of the doubter; a 
 sympathy that makes all it covers labour and grow 
 also. Does it hurt your business to doubt it sufficiently 
 to make you able to sympathize with the interests of 
 
DOUBT AND BELIEF. 257 
 
 another? To this question Adam Smith gave a timely 
 answer when at a critical moment in industrial his- 
 tory he found in sympathy a condition of successful 
 competition. Does it hurt your politics, if you can 
 lose enough of the partisan's conceit or the jingo's 
 bombast to sympathize with the other parties or the 
 other nations? The value of real independence in 
 politics is one answer, and the idea of federation 
 among competing states, or of international polity as 
 a basis of successful national life, is another. Does it 
 hurt your understanding to outgrow your own pro- 
 foundest ideas and see some validity in the doctrines 
 and f ormulse of others ? Does it hurt your Christianity 
 to make concessions to another's Christianity or to the 
 worship of any land or any time? The reading of 
 the last great book, or the visit to the pagan temple, is 
 an answer. Simply the doubter the world over, social 
 being that he is by nature, imbued as he is with a 
 living sympathy, must recognize, and must labour to 
 maintain or achieve, the unity of humanity. For him 
 just this is God, or truth, and it is worth far more than 
 anybody's religion or than anybody's rational formulae. 
 It must stand, too, both as the universal authority 
 which both religion and reason have over the lives of 
 men and as the motive or living principle, or spirit, by 
 which particular religions and particular formulae, 
 however serviceable, are forever unstable. 
 
 But doubt, which is thus social and imbued with a 
 living sympathy, and which though requiring sacrifice 
 does not destroy belief, but only makes belief active and 
 reality an achievement, may be viewed here in still 
 another way. It shows mankind using or spending 
 
258 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 instead of either hoarding or throwing away any of 
 the resources of knowledge and faith, of developed 
 habit and personal association, which life accumulates. 
 Some doubters, as men say in the business world, in- 
 vest what they have ; some speculate. Some are con- 
 servative, even timorous; some are very rash. Yet 
 doubt as expenditure is necessary to all who would 
 enjoy the proper, natural increase of their possessions, 
 and while the rash, be they transgressors or reformers, 
 sensualists or materialists, or equally impractical 
 idealists, at a throw may win or lose great riches of 
 mind or spirit, the timorous and ultra-conservative, 
 the " practical " and conventional, are not less depen- 
 dent on chance. There are the new rich, too, and the 
 aristocratic poor, and both remind us strongly that the 
 real use of what we have is not only a duty, but also a 
 very sober duty. To hoard blindly or spend rashly is 
 to risk unwisely, perhaps to lose all, or, if to win, to 
 win idly; while to use well, to doubt clearly and 
 honestly, to doubt even in one's belief, to doubt only 
 for fuller meaning, for broader and deeper life, for 
 richer companionship, is personally to earn lasting 
 spiritual treasure. 
 
 Modern science, whose knowledge comprises merely 
 working hypotheses, the means to truth, not truth 
 itself, or if truth, then only a living, growing truth, 
 affords one of the best examples of this. Modern 
 science is a great faith, a great belief, but only because 
 it is a life, not a status or possession, only because it 
 is a constant spending, a constant using of know- 
 ledge, that earns interest, even compound interest, as 
 regularly as the years go by. And experience in 
 
DOUBT AND BELIEF. 259 
 
 general, as well as science, is also a great belief, and 
 also only because always doubting and so always 
 using and always earning. 
 
 Doubt, in a word, is more than a necessity of ex- 
 perience ; it is distinctly a duty. Experience itself is 
 but another name for that hard master who says 
 to every unprofitable servant: "Thou wicked and 
 slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I 
 sowed not, and gather where I did not scatter ; thou 
 oughtest therefore to have put my money to the 
 bankers, and at my coming I should have received 
 back my own with interest. Take ye away therefore 
 the talent from him and give it unto him that hath 
 the ten talents." 
 
 II. 
 
 That doubt is only the expenditure of the treasures 
 of life for future gain human history bears witness in 
 a striking way. Times of a general scepticism among 
 any people have always been also times of conven- 
 tionalism and utilitarianism towards all things great 
 and small. To employ again a word used before, this 
 means that life has come to regard its establishments 
 of all sorts as only "instrumental," not final. Of 
 course, conventionalism and utilitarianism are com- 
 monly decried, just as the accompanying attitude of 
 doubt is commonly decried ; but the fears, though not 
 altogether idle, are usually short-sighted, for there is 
 gain ahead. In a certain community, for example, 
 patriotism, morality, and piety, long identified with 
 specific forms and customs and doctrines, have come at 
 last to seem quite unsubstantial. A rising cosmo- 
 politanism perhaps has undone the first, sensationalism 
 
26o THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 or naturalism the second, and mingled ritualism and 
 secularism the third. But however unsubstantial all 
 three may appear in consequence, they are nevertheless 
 retained as still useful, as means to some end, being at 
 least good things to wear or to assume in any way, and 
 from the change, though it appear so like decline, the 
 community in the end is most decidedly enriched. 
 
 How can this be ? In answer, let us beard the very 
 king of the race of the conventionalists and utili- 
 tarians in his forbidding den. Machiavelli, with his 
 teaching that the end always justifies the means, and 
 his open advice to the leader who would be success- 
 ful, to make a point of at least seeming loyal and 
 good and pious, shows a typical mingling of the sceptic 
 and the utilitarian in sacred things. Moreover, what 
 Machiavelli taught was also common practice in his 
 time, and soon became a principle of brilliant states- 
 manship all over Europe. And to add meaning to 
 his case by associating it with others, conspicuously in 
 Descartes' time, as we have observed, and also in 
 Athens at the time of the Sophists, and in Jerusalem 
 when the Pharisees nourished, the same standpoint 
 was much in vogue ; while in our own times we do not 
 need to look far to find it. Education, social life, 
 politics, religion abound in it, for the tribe of the 
 Machiavellists is no more a lost tribe than it is one 
 that began with him whose name it bears. If the 
 name is too offensive to some by reason of its con- 
 nection with a particular character and a particular 
 period in Italian history, for Machiavellism they may 
 substitute institutionalism, certainly a more innocent 
 term at first sight ; but the offensiveness, though hidden, 
 
DOUBT AND BELIEF. 261 
 
 or half-hidden, still remains a part of the fact with 
 which we have to deal. The meaning of institu- 
 tionalism is just that of some asserted end justifying 
 any available means, and so under cover of its peculiar 
 conceits sanctioning violence. Watch any institution 
 and see how one or another of life's objects of devotion 
 is become, or fast becoming, a mere utility. The 
 institution makes life mechanical, and doing this it 
 is as treacherous as it seems loyal to the treasured 
 things of life, the developed ideas and established 
 customs; it is even as sceptical towards them as it 
 seems faithful ; and in the spirit, if not in the letter, 
 of Machiavellism it shows them no longer implicitly 
 worshipped, but in use, which is to say, "put to the 
 bankers," and so robbed of their character of sacred 
 treasures. And as for Machiavelli himself, it may be 
 worth while to remember that with all his offensive- 
 ness he has undoubtedly been very much maligned, 
 and that to any student of history he seems only a 
 very apt though an unpleasantly outspoken pupil of 
 the most powerful institution of his time the Koman 
 Church for which things moral and religious had 
 certainly become effective instruments of very worldly 
 ambitions. So in Machiavellism or in institutionalism, 
 the name now being indifferent to us, we see worship 
 passing into use ; we see sacred things become secular, 
 or things supposed final becoming only instrumental ; 
 and we see, therefore, what appears like loss or decline. 1 
 
 1 As a positive eveut in history, belonging to the fifteenth and six- 
 teenth centuries, Machiavellism was symptomatic of the great change 
 of the period. Cherished institutes, whether of politics or economics, 
 of art or morals, of the spiritual life or the intellectual life, were 
 becoming instruments. Thus, democracy was supplanting monarchy, 
 Protestantism Catholicism, modern science scholasticism, etc. 
 
262 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 But can there be anything besides loss or decline ? 
 This again is our question, and the answer now comes 
 quick and decisive, whether we are thinking of 
 Machiavelli or the Sophists, of the old-time Pharisees, 
 or of those in our own life. Decline and even fall 
 never tell the whole story of anything, and just be- 
 cause they mean use, even secular use. That men 
 must worship is surely true, but also men must and 
 do use, and the use, in spite of the strain of the 
 offence and resistance which it is sure to arouse, 
 brings profit always. Use, secular use, may imply 
 sacrifice of the letter or the established form, but it 
 always leads to liberation of the spirit. In scepti- 
 cism, therefore, and the coincident conventionalism 
 and utilitarianism towards sacred things, in the insti- 
 tutionalism which harbours all these, though often 
 darkly and secretly, we may always read, what in 
 truth history has again and again exemplified, the 
 throes of birth, the birth of the spirit. Must it not 
 be that any visible institution, be it ecclesiastical or 
 industrial or political or educational or ceremonial, 
 just because an institution designed in some way to 
 serve an active, growing life, is always an out- 
 grown, falling institution ? As in the case of the 
 Eoman Church in the days of Machiavelli, an institu- 
 tion upon its establishment actually justifies its 
 enemies by its own practices, while the enemies, so 
 justified, do but lay it bare, exposing its hidden 
 thoughts and ways, forcing reform upon it, and per- 
 haps in the end themselves " remaining to pray." 
 
 So is the spirit born, and so do we see in the per- 
 sonnel of society what a wonderful triumvirate, work- 
 
DOUBT AND BELIEF. 263 
 
 ing for the real growth of human life with a power that 
 nothing can resist, is made by the avowed sceptic, the 
 loyalist, always secretly conventional and utilitarian, 
 and the reformer, the great spiritual leader. Even 
 Machiavelli in his most offensive pronouncements must 
 have felt something between his lines which expressed 
 would have transfigured their meaning, not to say also 
 his reputation, greatly, and, consciously or uncon- 
 sciously, he was certainly a party to the development 
 of what is best in modern life. As for the Sophists, 
 whether we see them as sceptics or conventionalists, 
 did they not have Socrates among them ? Between 
 them and him, when all is said, the difference was only 
 that between talent and genius, between great formal 
 ingenuity, which always means opportunism, and really 
 vital insight, which, shattering opportunism with its 
 own weapons, means loyalty, not to existing forms, 
 but to the spirit dwelling in the forms. Much in the 
 same way, too, the Jewish Pharisees had Jesus, a con- 
 temporary, who did but recognize and earnestly teach 
 what they were really practising, namely, the utility 
 of the law, or the law for man, not man for the law. 
 Only what for them was merely a selfish opportunity, 
 absorbed as they were in the vested interests of their 
 time and generation, was manifest to him who was a 
 genius and who used for real gain the talent which 
 they hoarded as a great spiritual fact, as a universal 
 truth, bringing opportunity and freedom to all men 
 under all law, not to some men under one law. Thus 
 they were institutionalists ; he, by merely turning 
 their narrowness into a principle of all life, became a 
 reformer, and, indebted to them as he was, he could 
 
264 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 forgive them even when they opposed him. Genius 
 always forgives ; the spirit always recalls and cherishes 
 the letter that has given it birth. 
 
 So the institution as an historical fact, whether we 
 see it with the eyes of Machiavelli or with those of a 
 pope, with the eyes of Protagoras or with those of 
 Socrates, with the eyes of the Pharisees or with those 
 of Christ, may show worship turning into use, the 
 sacred becoming secular, but it shows also the life of 
 society becoming enriched; it shows investment for 
 future gain ; it shows doubt, not destroying anything, 
 but achieving only what is real; it shows the life of 
 the spirit. 
 
 in. 
 
 No period of man's earlier doubting can be more 
 interesting than that of the centuries just prior to 
 the Christian era, when the peoples of the Mediter- 
 ranean contributed so much, directly and indirectly, 
 to the preparation for Christianity and to the dis- 
 covery, or revelation, which finally came and in due 
 time changed the ancient to our modern world. What 
 the preparation was has already been indicated, at 
 least partially, in the references that have been made 
 to the Sophists and to the Pharisees. Christianity 
 has been only the interest, the earned increment, or 
 rather should I not say the compounded principal, of 
 the scepticism, of the formalism and the utilitarianism 
 which beset the Greeks and the Hebrews, to mention 
 no others, as their peculiar civilizations were merging 
 into the larger and deeper life of a great empire. In 
 their several lives the demand came, and came, too, 
 from within, not merely from without, as in all life 
 
DOUBT AND BELIEF. 265 
 
 it must come, for use of their gathered treasures, 
 whether spiritual or material, and the rise of Borne 
 was but the result of that demand satisfied, of the 
 use realized. As for the scepticism, this with all its 
 incidents made the use possible, made it possible for 
 the peoples to give or relinquish what they had to 
 the larger life to which they all belonged, while the 
 religion of Christianity spiritualized for them all the 
 resulting empire. 
 
 Those wonderful races of the Mediterranean, who 
 achieved at least some of them such great things 
 in all that counts for civilization, became at the last 
 most extravagant sceptics, not only formulating, but 
 also very generally living up to, the conviction of 
 ignorance and forgetfulness of reality. Everything 
 which their long past had gathered for them they 
 resigned or let me say crucified and themselves 
 they threw, as if with an investor's recklessness, upon 
 a world of chance or fate, upon a world seemingly of 
 empty forms in all human relations, a world of dis- 
 guises for license and of mere conceits of moral power 
 and religious piety. Sensuous mysticism and panthe- 
 ism, formalism of all kinds, Stoicism, Epicureanism, 
 legalism, and cosmopolitanism were crosses upon which 
 one people and another, one class and another, nailed 
 their long-cherished devotions, their love of God and 
 man and nature, of temple and family and country. 
 A great doubting, then, was truly theirs. A great 
 sacrificial offering was their preparation for Christian- 
 ity. In a way, with a completeness that seems to 
 have no parallel in history, they put their talents 
 to the bankers despairing, of course, but hoping also, 
 
266 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 if only their doubting, when it came, may be supposed 
 as genuine as their earlier believing. From the North 
 and from the East and from the South their good men 
 came, and their rich and their wise, and laid what 
 they had at the feet of the life that was new born. 
 
 People read their histories so differently. The pagan 
 doubt, the Christian revelation and belief, the conver- 
 sion of the pagan world to Christianity, the Eenais- 
 sance, in which the conversion was in a sense reversed, 
 and the Eeformation mean such different things to 
 different people. Some must still have it that paganism, 
 or pre-Christianism, ended in absolutely blind despair, 
 in the avowal of complete failure as if such despair 
 or failure could ever find words for its own utterance ; 
 that Christianity came into a hopelessly pagan world 
 wholly from without, came into a world of nothing 
 but unmixed doubt, and brought with it nothing but 
 unmixed belief ; that the conversion was a sort of con- 
 quest, by a power all its own capturing the pagans, so 
 wholly unnerved as to be quite incapable even of a 
 futile resistance ; that the Eenaissance, restoration as 
 it was of the pagan life and thought, was at best a 
 great condescension on the part of Christendom and at 
 worst an unfortunate return to the pagan idols; and 
 that in the Eeformation the Christian Eeligion Mili- 
 tant did but retreat upon the Bible as its impregnable 
 fortress. But such history can hardly be our history 
 here. For us the rise and the progress of Christianity 
 have had quite a different character. To strike at the 
 foundation of that whole structure the pagan doubt- 
 ing was too articulate. It was, also, too earnest. It 
 was too genuine. The races did indeed resign, as with 
 
DOUBT AND BELIEF. 267 
 
 an investor's recklessness, all that they had, but their 
 recklessness was not unmixed. Their doubting had hope 
 in it as well as despair. It still loved the spirit of 
 what had been even when it betrayed the letter. It 
 had its martyrs, too, as well as its suicides ; its sense 
 of life as well as its enervating fear of death. Say 
 what you will, then, a great, warm, yearning belief 
 dwelt within it. And so, just because the pagan 
 doubting was too earnest and too genuine and too 
 articulate, because it was, in truth, a great sacrificial 
 offering, the crucifixion on Calvary was also too true to 
 life at Athens and Alexandria, as well as to life at 
 Jerusalem, and the resurrection of the spirit was too 
 true to life at Eome ; they were too true to mean any- 
 thing but fulfilment and achievement. Everywhere, 
 in every place and in every department of life, the 
 letter had been rejected; but everywhere also and 
 this, nothing else, was the true conversion to Chris- 
 tianity the spirit was accepted. Acceptance of the 
 spirit, too, meant that in good time the letter would be 
 restored, as indeed at the Eenaissance it surely was. 
 
 Christianity, therefore, came when the times were 
 ripe for it. It came not from without, but deeply from 
 within the pagan life of the Mediterranean. More- 
 over, if in this way, not in that other way, we must 
 read the rise of Christianity, then we must read both 
 the Eenaissance and the Eeformation under the same 
 light. The Eenaissance, as was just said, brought a 
 restoration of the letter; but, necessarily, of the 
 letter under the light of the spirit, of the letter trans- 
 figured. The Eenaissance, so dramatically manifested 
 in the Crusades, was only Christendom returning to its 
 
268 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 birthplace. With its crusades to Jerusalem, to all the 
 old capitals, to the pagan ideas and institutions, to the 
 ancient languages and literatures, Christianity redis- 
 covered itself in the past, winning back in this way 
 some of its childhood, curing a homesickness that 
 a worldly church had made it feel, securing for itself 
 such a deep experience as comes to a man who, after 
 years of wandering and forgetting, has returned to the 
 home of his infancy. And as for the Keformation if 
 indeed this was a retreat, shall we say, of a defeated 
 religion upon the Bible, its supposed impregnable 
 fortress we need only to remember the pagan origin, 
 the Hebrew and the Greek inspiration, and the Koman 
 atmosphere of that sacred book. 
 
 And of the relation of Christianity to paganism, just 
 one thing more. The Christian revelation, so wonder- 
 fully portrayed and enacted in the life and character 
 of Jesus, was only an idealization, a spiritual interpre- 
 tation, of the very present, the thoroughly actual life 
 of the time, of the life that the pagans, doubting but 
 believing, despairing but also trusting, resigning all 
 but hoping for more, had already brought upon them- 
 selves ; a life of self-denial, of common, universal 
 humanity, all men being "members one of another," 
 and of perfect faith. Perhaps the self-denial was 
 bravely concealed in an accepted subjection, but it was 
 not less real. Perhaps the common humanity was 
 military and imperial, yet it also was real. Perhaps, 
 too, the faith was blind and fatalistic, but it was 
 nevertheless faith. Can faith go farther or do more 
 than fatalism ? The pagans, then, had become Chris- 
 tians in fact or status, and Christianity came, breath- 
 
DOUBT AND BELIEF. 269 
 
 ing life into the bare fact, into the self-denial, and the 
 broad humanity and the faith, and made these not the 
 mere phases of bare fact or condition, but motives and 
 ideals, manifesting them heroically in a single human 
 life, and so in the form and with the power of a per- 
 sonal discovery of self. 
 
 Where genuine doubt is the God is always born. 
 
 IV. 
 
 To come down to more recent times, for open belief 
 in what they doubted, for doubt well controlled in its 
 expenditure, for doubt as raising questions of meaning 
 rather than the more radical questions of reality and 
 existence, perhaps no people of Christendom has been 
 so conspicuous as the English. Of course, as has been 
 remarked, expenditure may often become too conserva- 
 tive, and the question of mere meaning may encourage 
 casuistry; and into the pits of undue conservatism 
 and casuistry the English have certainly fallen more 
 than once, so that certain critics have even found them, 
 and in some measure the Anglo-Saxons generally, 
 given over to hollow disingenuous living. In English 
 political life, for example, the attitude during the con- 
 flict with the American colonies in the eighteenth 
 century affords a conspicuous illustration of this, and 
 intellectually and religiously English life has its chap- 
 ters of an unfortunate reserve. But although no good 
 and honest American can fail to find objectionable 
 solecisms, some of them decidedly British, in the formu- 
 lated and manifested life of the Anglo-Saxons ; never- 
 theless English history is a very obstinate argument 
 in behalf of the English temper. Frenchmen, though 
 
270 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 so neighbourly to England, have been conspicuously 
 more radical than the English in their doubts and 
 problems, and in consequence have been at once more 
 reckless and more vacillating in their solutions. The 
 English, always so practical, throughout their history 
 have held to their world as primarily real and con- 
 sistent, and have therefore neither lost themselves 
 whether in fear or in hope of some other sphere, nor 
 been only fickle servants of this. Consistently and con- 
 stantly they have sought only the ever more effective 
 use of what they had, of what they found about them. 
 Not revolution, then, but evolution has been the key- 
 note of their history. Their other world, in practice, 
 has meant other parts of this witness their colonial 
 activity as well as their missionary enterprises or only 
 other in the sense of deeper and fuller expression of 
 this witness the testimony of so many of their 
 historians. Macaulay, for a classic example, dwells at 
 some length and with much emphasis upon the English 
 people's genius for a progressive conservatism, remark- 
 ing that in religion and politics and social life they have 
 given up less of their past than any other people, and 
 yet at the same time have kept in the forefront of 
 modern progress. It may be contended that this was 
 truer in Macaulay's day than at the present time, but 
 there is enough truth in it now to give it point. 
 
 Instead of courting doubt as if it had worth in 
 itself, the English may be said on the whole to have 
 courted candour. Candour does not exclude doubt, 
 but it is never merely negative, and for this reason 
 it is peculiarly normal and wholesome, although of 
 course having its own dangers. To be candid, in the 
 
DOUBT AND BELIEF. 271 
 
 sense of the word here intended, is to accept what is, 
 which in lack of a better term we may call nature, 
 and to insist only on seeing this, and living up to it, 
 deeply and fully. The doubting French have appealed 
 to truth and righteousness or reality as only an innate 
 conviction, and so have easily missed the possible 
 realism of such conviction. Descartes made just such 
 an appeal, and though he did indeed gain, or rather 
 regain, a real world, the reality did not quite receive 
 even from him, as we have seen, its full due of close- 
 ness and intimacy with human life. Kousseau, later, 
 made the same appeal, finding his own personal will 
 intrinsically good, but his philosophy, though a 
 passionate, uncontrolled belief in reality, was taken, 
 not unnaturally, as a call to revolution. But the 
 simple, candid English, on their side of the Channel, 
 have appealed, not primarily to anything abstractly 
 within the self, not to a mere ideal or sentiment or 
 subjective belief, but to reality embodied and palpable 
 in a word, to nature, the great all-inclusive sphere 
 of candid experience. In France, again, nature has 
 failed ever to be a thoroughly practical thing, a 
 positive, directly interesting, wholly pertinent situa- 
 tion. It has been a cry, of course, sometimes of 
 alarm, sometimes of hope ; a great enthusiasm, too ; a 
 dream ; an ideal if not unideal substitute for the 
 present life; a sphere often, too often, quite opposed 
 to God and government and organized society; but 
 never, or almost never, a present responsibility to be 
 clearly recognized and calmly measured ; never, or 
 almost never, a part and parcel of the present life; 
 never, or almost never, something that lives in and 
 
272 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 through God and government and society. In England, 
 on the other hand, so differently, if Bacon and Locke 
 and Berkeley and even David Hume may be trusted ; 
 if Shakespeare and Coleridge and Wordsworth, or 
 Hobbes and Burke and Blackstone, or Charles Darwin 
 and Herbert Spencer are representative; in England 
 nature has ever been very real and very present ; not 
 outside of manifest English life, but actually in- 
 corporated in it. How else understand English deism; 
 the laissez faire economics ; the peculiar nature and 
 growth of the English constitution; the pragmatism 
 of English science; the sun-warmed atmosphere of 
 English literature; the nature-homage and bodily 
 vigour of English recreation ? How else account for 
 the English people's progressive conservatism ? 
 
 The most radical doubt must eventually appeal 
 to nature and, what is more, must sooner or later 
 bring man to live with nature practically and 
 responsibly, intimately and sympathetically; but 
 candour, like the candour of the English, that 
 never doubts without at the same time believing, 
 lives ever with her. Perhaps the English people 
 need to have what they seem never to have had 
 though the Armada threatened something of the kind, 
 and the loss of the thirteen colonies, or even the Boer 
 war was, not without its value a great, overpowering 
 disaster, a deep all-searching despair ; yet, be this as it 
 may, their part in the struggle of a life that must 
 always doubt in order to grow is always instructive 
 and is often inspiring. 
 
DOUBT AND BELIEF. 273 
 
 V. 
 
 The sceptic has been referred to here as a member 
 of a wonderful triumvirate, and, leaving now the field 
 of historical illustration, we must return to that 
 characterization. The other members of the triumvir- 
 ate were the loyal defender of the formal law and the 
 great spiritual leader. All three were said to be 
 parties to the real life of the spirit, and the sceptic 
 seemed to have a co-ordinate part with the others 
 in this life. But was I not conceding too much ? 
 Certainly there are many who will wish to protest. 
 Yet I was only making the doubter and the believer 
 face each other squarely and honestly. Both are 
 parties to any reform. No leader or true reformer ever 
 can neglect or betray the contentions of either. In the 
 organizations of society professional conditions may 
 hold the two characters apart, but vitally they always 
 belong together. If truly we must believe in what 
 we doubt, how can there fail to be between them, not 
 indeed a shallow and sentimental sympathy, but a 
 deep, heroic sympathy that is always superior to the 
 differences of the disrupted life, of a professionally 
 organized society, without betraying them ? 
 
 At once opponents and companions this is the 
 truth about the doubter and the believer. Consider 
 how taken alone neither would be quite justified, 
 while together both are justified. Perfect approval 
 or, for that matter, perfect disapproval, can belong 
 to neither singly, not to you or me in our doubt- 
 ing, even though we fully confess, nor yet to him 
 who hides his doubts in an outward show that 
 
274 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 almost deceives him as well as others. Of course in all 
 matters as well as in this of intellectual honesty, the 
 conceit of individual righteousness or individual pos- 
 session is a very strong one, but it is "easier for a camel 
 to go through a needle's eye " than for a man who is 
 anything or has anything to himself alone, to enter into 
 any kingdom. Is not life everywhere a movement and 
 a struggle? And who is there, rich or poor, law-abid- 
 ing or lawless, righteous or unrighteous, faithful or 
 treacherous, believing or doubting, who can stand aloof, 
 or who needs to stand aloof, and say to himself: "I 
 personally, within my own nature, have no part in 
 the struggle ; for good or for ill, I am just what I am, 
 and with him that is against me I have and can have 
 no dealings " ? The doubter, then, and the believer may 
 have to look askance at each other ; the looking 
 askance may be quite appropriate to the conflict in 
 which each has and must feel his social role, but, at 
 most and worst, they are only jealous lovers. They 
 may be given, and profitably given, as much to quarrel- 
 ling as to gentleness, but they love still, and, to borrow 
 part of a line from a familiar college song, their 
 battling love affords just one more view of that which 
 " makes the world go 'round " instead of off at some 
 tangent. 
 
 Should some one awake to new views come to me 
 and ask which I would have him do, break away from 
 his traditions and all that they involve or hold to 
 them, I could only say, in the first place, that, which- 
 ever way he turned, he would have some, though only 
 some, justification, for he could not be either right or 
 wrong exclusively ; in the second place, that his de- 
 
DOUBT AND BELIEF. 275 
 
 cision not only must be made, and made strongly, one 
 way or the other, but must also be his, not mine ; 
 and in the third place, that no decision should ever 
 be an absolutely final settlement. Decisions are only 
 means to action, and as such they can settle nothing 
 finally. They are not even protocols of peace, often 
 being, on the contrary, merely signals for firing at 
 closer range. Sometimes I know they seem even like 
 real treaties, providing the terms of a permanent 
 harmony, and they appear to determine just where 
 the parties to them really stand. But, after all, they 
 do but bring the. conflict home, making it domestic 
 or personal instead of settling it. So once more to 
 my inquirer I may say only this : Choose ; fight ; fight 
 fair ; fight with yourself as well as with your enemy ; 
 with your belief, not merely with his dogma ; or with 
 your doubt, not merely with his dishonesty. So 
 fighting you and he will truly be at once opponents 
 and companions. 
 
 VI. 
 
 Is life, then, only a comedy ? Is it no better than 
 one of those well-conducted duels that save the honour 
 of all concerned but bring injury to no one ? Let me 
 say, in these last pages, that life appears to be three 
 things, to which I should like to call attention. It 
 truly and seriously is a comedy ; secondly, it is poetic ; 
 and lastly, it has all the gravity and earnestness of 
 duty. Its very tragedy comprises all of these. An old 
 teacher of mine, a much respected and somewhat old- 
 fashioned professor at one of our larger universities, 1 
 
 1 The late Professor Q. C. Everett, of Harvard University. 
 
276 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 once published a book entitled, Poetry, Comedy and 
 Duty. Exactly what his reasons were for associating 
 these apparently incongruous phases of life I do not 
 recall, but the man and his title have remained 
 pleasantly and significantly in my memory, and the 
 reasons which follow, in substance if not in form, can 
 not be very far from his. 
 
 Thus, as to the comedy of life, we need only to 
 reflect that where extremes always meet, where there is 
 always conflict, but conflict of such a nature that the 
 parties to it not only may change sides, but also in 
 a genuine sense are always on both sides, in such a 
 life politics cannot be alone in making strange bed- 
 fellows, but the opportunity for comic situations must 
 be unlimited. A life in which reality has no residence, 
 and truth no place where to lay its head, in which 
 fools may utter wisdom and the wise may speak folly, 
 in which reformers are easily confused with trans- 
 gressors and death itself is said to be life, is bound 
 to be richly and deeply humorous. Of such a life 
 there can be no understanding, into it there can be no 
 insight, without the keenest sense of humour. To say 
 no more, that doubter and believer are companions as 
 well as opponents, is cause for a deal of merriment 
 at least among the gods. 
 
 But life's comedy is also a poem, and no one save 
 a poet can truly comprehend it. Even a metaphysician 
 must be not merely a humorist, but also a poet; 
 perhaps he must be more the poet than any other. 
 Poetry is the portrayal of life through suggestion 
 of harmony, or poise, among its conflicting elements. 
 Nor can life be seen, or known, in any more direct 
 
DOUBT AND BELIEF. 277 
 
 way; only the balance of opposites, which always 
 makes the poem, can possibly present it to our ken. 
 Commonly men feel this when they insist that all 
 portrayal of life, or of reality in general, must be 
 dualistic. Dualism, be it the theologian's or the 
 moralist's or the metaphysician's, the statesman's 
 or the scientist's, never is and never can be anything 
 but so much poetry; richly and deeply significant 
 always, and always alive with what is real, but always 
 poetry, never prose. Can a reality, that is real only 
 if, to the forms of experience, it is always a tertium 
 quid, can such a reality ever be present to any other 
 than a poet's consciousness ? Eeality is not knowable \ 
 face to face ; it is beyond the reach of positive know- p^ 
 ledge; though dwelling in, and informing all know- J 
 ledge, it can never come to the surface of knowledge; 
 for so, to its own betrayal, it would take sides and get 
 a habitation and a name. True, by analogies one may 
 conceive it, as the religious man thinks of God's 
 personality, or as the philosopher thinks of the unity 
 of his world, or as the scientist thinks of nature's 
 law ; but the analogies are always so many tethers, and 
 are accordingly necessarily partial, whereas no whole 
 can ever be quite in kind with any of its parts. We 
 may conceive reality, then, by the use of analogy that 
 is, by projecting what we do know of one or another 
 side of life beyond its natural sphere; but such pro- 
 jection, at least for him who has both insight and 
 humour, who feels the limits of his knowledge and 
 the grandly transcendent way in which he has used 
 his knowledge for the crossing of some chasm, and the 
 solution of some conflict in his life, is poetry. For 
 
278 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 him who is lacking in both insight and humour, who 
 sees just what he sees and no more, who insists on 
 making reality accord literally with his own formal 
 experience, it is only prose. Prose is simply formally 
 consistent experience, experience that is wholly bound 
 to some determined standpoint, and, being this, in 
 what it presents that is, in its subject-matter it is 
 always, not adequate and inclusive, but partial and 
 narrow and one-sided to reality. Prose, in short, 
 sacrifices wholeness, that is to say, depth and breadth 
 of view, to mere formal consistency. Poetry, at least 
 in its subject-matter, is above formal consistency and 
 above partiality. Through its very license poetry 
 bears the message of what is real and whole. Poetry 
 forever prefers reality to prosaic peace. 
 
 So life is a comedy, rich and deep, and it is a poem, 
 realistic and inclusive. It is, finally, a serious duty. 
 To many, stern and oracular in their moral sense, the 
 character of duty will seem not to fit at all well into 
 a life that is always humorous, and that is never real 
 and complete without being also poetic. But it does 
 fit. Duty, they hold, is quite too sober ever to be 
 mingled with humour or comedy, and quite too precise 
 and explicit, too plainly prescribed, and in its spirit, 
 when not in its letter, too legal ever to appeal to a 
 poet or to be in any way associated with what appeals 
 to him. But tell me, is the Puritan's notion of duty 
 an accurate one ? Is it the highest notion ? Is it even 
 profoundly moral ? Has duty no chance at all on any 
 other plan ? In a word, are humour and poetry truly 
 fatal to real duty ? Why, even such questions must 
 make the stern rigorists among us hope just a little, 
 
DOUBT AND BELIEF. 279 
 
 though also these good men may still fear, for the 
 relief that the questions seem to promise. Perhaps 
 they mingle their hope with fear, only because, as I 
 feel quite sure, they forget that comedy and poetry 
 always bring more than mere relief. The real comedy 
 and the true poetry of life are altogether too deep to 
 do only that. They do indeed bring relief from the 
 rigour and prosaic consistency of any specific pro- 
 gramme or uniform, and so to any man they are 
 always welcome, though he continue to suspect them 
 of being wrong; but they bring also a responsibility 
 that is fuller and larger and harder than the formal 
 precept or prescription. Should the rigorist ever love 
 his enemies ? Not if he would be consistent. Should 
 he ever find hope in what he fears ? Should he ever 
 laugh at his own manifest smallness ? Yet these are 
 real duties ; they are great, transcendent duties ; and, 
 richly humorous as they are, only a poetic conscious- 
 ness can ever appreciate them and truly feel their 
 living obligation. 
 
 For this, our life of comedy and poetry, which is 
 real only as it is both, no principle can come nearer to 
 the very foundation of duty than just the principle, 
 deeply true : Whatever is, is right. Men have laughed 
 and men have wept over this truth. Was ever more 
 perfect mingling of doubt and belief? Was ever 
 greater jest ? Or more tragic fact ? But truth it is ; 
 the truth of all duty ; and it is life's eternal comedy 
 the alpha and the omega, too, of life's own poem. 
 
INDEX 
 
 A 
 
 Abstraction, of science, 58, 107 ; 
 and duplicity, 61 
 
 Agnosticism, 75, 106 ; special 
 dangers of, 111, 117 ; dogmatic 
 and instrumental, 120 ; as call 
 for action, 125 ; as passion for 
 real life, 128 
 
 Analogy, among the sciences, 97 ; 
 of individual self to environ- 
 ment, 155 ; of universal to par- 
 ticular, 33, 220 
 
 Anaxagoras, 94 
 
 Anaximander, 34, 94, 147 
 
 Anti-vitalism, 147 
 
 Aristotle, 155, 156 
 
 Atomism, 97, 102 
 
 B 
 
 Babylonians, 106 
 
 Bacon, 176 
 
 Baldwin, 15 
 
 Belief, as unquestioning, 8, 194 ; 
 and doubt, 53, 105, 107, 130, 
 133, 192, 248 
 
 Biology, 88, 90, 104, 110 
 
 Boehme, 177 
 
 Body, and soul, 227, 237; im- 
 mortality of, 141, 234 
 
 Bradley, 153 n. 
 
 Burns, 94 
 
 C 
 
 Candour, of the English, 270 
 Carlyle, 126 
 
 Catholicism, 175 
 
 Causation, 39, 82, 83, 109, 205 
 
 Change, and habit, 15 ; as motive, 
 17 ; of purpose, 11 
 
 Charron, 177, 180 
 
 Chemistry, 34, 36, 88, 90, 91, 110 
 
 Christ, 51, 246, 263 
 
 Christianity, and immortality, 
 290 ; preparation for, 266 ; 
 different views of history of, 
 266 
 
 Christian Science, 2, 32 n. 
 
 Class, the social, 62, 126, 162 ; 
 relation of, to doubt and belief, 
 171 
 
 Comedy, 275 
 
 Companionship, with nature, 21, 
 71 ; with man, 24 ; with God, 26 
 
 Contradiction, in ordinary views, 
 30 ; in idea of reality, 30 ; of 
 unity, 33 ; of space and time, 
 38 ; of causation, 39 ; of know- 
 ledge, 41 ; of morality, 44 ; of 
 law, 49 ; as of value in ex- 
 perience, 4, 37, 131 ; and dual- 
 ism, 101 ; as corrective of nar- 
 rowness, 100, 116, 143 ; as 
 meaning action, 136 ; as realiz- 
 ing unity, 137 ; as securing 
 reality and practicality, 145 ; 
 as requiring society, 147 ; as 
 not to be cultivated for its own 
 sake, 151 ; as related to person 
 and class, 170 
 
 281 
 
282 
 
 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 Conventionalism, 66, 260 
 Creationalism, 82, 202 
 Crusades, 267 
 
 Death, 141, 151, 239 
 
 Deduction, 97 
 
 Democritus, 65 
 
 Development, special, transfer- 
 able, 165 
 
 Descartes, 6, 172, 196, 251, 254 
 
 Dichotomy, 101 
 
 Dogmatism, and fear, 9 ; and 
 belief, 194 
 
 Doubt, as widespread, 1, 7 ; 
 actual, if possible, 6 ; as essen- 
 tial to consciousness, 9 ; and 
 habit, 14 ; as making life real, 
 18 ; and feeling of dependence, 
 21 ; as seeking company, 21, 
 255 ; as mediator between old 
 and new, 25 ; and atheism, 27 ; 
 and belief, 55, 105, 130, 133, 
 192, 248, 273 ; as investment 
 for gain, 259 ; and candour, 270 
 
 Dualism, 64, 101, 147, 209 
 
 Duplicity, of science, 61 ; of life, 
 118 
 
 Duty, 47, 278 
 
 E 
 
 Education, and interest, 18 n. 
 
 Emerson, 144 
 
 Energism, 147 
 
 England, peculiar scepticism in, 
 269 
 
 Environment, as source of con- 
 duct, 46 ; social environment 
 and personal individual, 169, 
 231 
 
 Epicureanism, 116, 265 
 
 Epistemology, 92 
 
 Evil, and good, 45, 133, 150, 276 
 
 Evolution, 78, 202, 246 
 Experience, unity of, 160 
 Experimentalism, 68 
 
 Fatalism, 49 
 
 Fear, and dogmatism, 9 
 
 France, peculiar scepticism in, 
 
 271 
 Freedom, of will, 47 ; of thought, 
 
 211, 227 
 
 G 
 
 Galilei, 177 
 
 Genius, 168, 196, 263 
 
 God, Descartes' proof of, 181 ; 
 
 fallacy in D.'s proof of, 189 ; 
 
 D.'s idea of, 186, 190 ; sceptic's 
 
 idea of, 26, 187, 190, 203; 
 
 death of, 237 ; birth of, 269 
 
 H 
 
 Habit, and doubt, 14 
 
 Hebrews, 25, 264 
 
 Hedonism, 64, 147, 265 
 
 Hegel, 20, 147 
 
 Heraclitus, 147, 152 
 
 Hering, 147 
 
 Hero-worship, 243 
 
 History, standpoint of, 79; of 
 
 Christianity, different views of, 
 
 266 
 Hope, even in doubt, 13, 19, 37, 
 
 48, 53, 105 
 Horace, 21 
 Hypotheses, working, 89, 93, 258 
 
 I 
 
 Idealism, 65, 147 
 Illusions, 2, 23 n., 254 
 Immortality, 141, 234 
 Impostor, the, 253 
 Individualism, 72, 116 
 
INDEX. 
 
 283 
 
 Individuality, 155, 165, 224 
 Induction, 72, 97 
 Industrialism, 222 
 Infinity, 52, 102, 142 
 Institutions and institutionalism, 
 
 16, 59, 260 
 Interest theory, in education, 
 
 18 n. 
 
 J 
 
 Jesuits, 172 
 Jesus, 51, 246, 263 
 Jews, 25, 264 
 
 Jurisprudence, standpoint of, 13, 
 47 
 
 K 
 
 Kant, 110, 147 
 
 Knowledge, contradictory views 
 of, 41 ; of law, and freedom, 
 51, 212 ; and the unknowable, 
 106 
 
 Labour, division of, in special 
 relation of person and class, 
 163; division of, in experience, 
 232 
 
 Law, standpoint of, 13 ; courts 
 of, 47 ; contradiction in idea 
 of, 49 ; and nature, 51, 218 
 
 Lawlessness, 51, 141, 261 
 
 Leadership, 168, 196, 263 
 
 Leibnitz, 133, 154, 210 
 
 Lessing, 19 
 
 Louis XIV, 172 
 
 Luther, 174 
 
 M 
 
 Macaulay, 270 
 
 Machiavelli, 66, 261, 263 
 
 Malebranche, 198 
 
 Materialism, 65, 147, 175 
 
 Mathematics, 88, 91, 96, 133, 177, 
 215 
 
 Mechanic, the, as social type, 
 228 ; peculiar death of, 238 
 
 Mechanicalism, 82, 218 
 
 Method, Socratic, 71 ; historical, 
 95 ; experimental, 84, 95 ; 
 mathematical, 96 
 
 Miracles, 53, 246 
 
 Monism, 147 
 
 Montaigne, 172, 176, 184 
 
 Miinsterberg, 109 n., 112, 119 
 
 Mysticism, 176 
 
 Nast, 97 
 
 N 
 
 Nativism, 196 
 
 Nature, return to, 22 ; relation 
 of science to, 23, 56, 74 ; and 
 God, 26, 203, 271 ; sympathy 
 of, 23, 203 ; and law, 51, 220 ; 
 as mechanical, 217 ; English 
 and French views of, 271 ; 
 knowledge of law of, and free- 
 dom, 49, 212 
 
 Necessity, in conduct, 47 ; super- 
 stition of, 49, 212 
 
 Negativity, 2, 20, 37, 83, 85, 94, 
 101, 125, 133, 147 
 
 Newton, 97 
 
 
 
 Oratory of Jesus, 176 
 
 Paradoxes, in ordinary conscious- 
 ness, 30 ; in science, 75, 98 ; 
 in religion, 103 
 
 Parallelism, 204 
 
 Paris, 172, 192, 251 
 
 Parmenides, 94 
 
 Pascal, 180 
 
 Person, nature of, 155, 165 ; re- 
 lation to reality, 170, 184 ; re- 
 lation to doubt and belief, 171 ; 
 part in society, 169, 231 
 
284 
 
 THE WILL TO DOUBT. 
 
 Pharisees, 262 
 
 Physics, 87, 90 ; epistemological, 
 
 94 
 
 Pillsbury, 212 n. 
 Plato, 65, 155, 156 
 Poetry, 276 
 
 Positivism, 73, 106, 122 
 Practice, and theory, 113 
 Principle, and programme, 183, 
 
 191, 194 
 Programme, and principle, 183, 
 
 191, 194 
 Protagoras, 264 
 Protestants and Protestantism, 
 
 174, 268 
 Psychology, 10, 87, 91, 210, 
 
 212 n. ; physical, 92 
 Purpose, 11, 83, 84 
 
 Q 
 Question of fact, in science, 83 
 
 R 
 
 Radicalism, 66 
 
 Realism, of doubter, 193 ; of be- 
 liever, 193 ; in contradiction, 
 143 
 
 Reality, double views of, 30 
 Reformation, 173, 266, 267 
 Relative, the, 10, 136, 199, 200 
 Relativity, law of, 10, 136 
 Religion, and scepticism, 27, 184, 
 189, 268 ; as paradoxical, 103 
 Renaissance, 173, 266, 267 
 Rome, 267 
 Rousseau, 23, 271 
 
 S 
 
 Scepticism, 176, 265, 269 
 Science, as a return to nature, 23 ; 
 like ordinary consciousness, 57 ; 
 as confessing to limitations, 
 56 ; defined, 58 ; as abstract, 
 58 ; as a " looking before leap- 
 
 ing," 58 ; and duplicity, 61, 
 129 ; method of, and environ- 
 ment, 71 ; specialism of, 71, 
 84 ; as inductive, 72 ; objectiv- 
 ism of, 75 ; technique of, 76 ; 
 and real life, 80, 125, 128 ; as 
 conservative, 81 ; and question 
 of fact, 83 ; as negative and 
 destructive, 83 ; specialism of, 
 71, 86; "mergers" in, 91; 
 physical, as self-consciousness, 
 94 ; as paradoxical, 75, 98 ; 
 agnosticism of, 106 ; aloofness 
 of, in ideas of space and time 
 and causation, 108, 109 ; ap- 
 plication of, 114 ; scepticism 
 of, 23, 258 
 
 Sin, original, 131 
 
 Skill, special, as transferable, 165 
 
 Smith, Adam, 257 
 
 Socialism, 116 
 
 Society, as sought by sceptic, 21 ; 
 as related to individual, 42, 
 165, 171, 231 ; and science, 23, 
 60 ; division of experience in, 
 60 ; as real to lower organisms, 
 84 ; as medium of conflict, 147 
 
 Society of Jesus, 174 
 
 Sociology, 88 
 
 Socrates, 20, 70, 147, 263 
 
 Soldier, the, 228, 238 
 
 Sophists, 66, 262 
 
 Soul, contradiction in idea of, 35 ; 
 and body, 227, 237 ; immor- 
 tality of, 141, 234 
 
 Space, 37, 38, 108 
 
 Specialism, blindness of, 87 ; in 
 social organization, 71 ; of 
 science, 71, 86 ; dreams of, 87 ; 
 artificiality of, 87, 97 ; contra- 
 dictions due to, 63, 98 ; pass- 
 ing of, 128 
 
INDEX. 
 
 285 
 
 Spinoza, 24, 147, 179, 198 
 Spirit, reality, or truth, as a, 152 ; 
 
 of veracity, 105, 133, 170, 214 
 Stoicism, 116, 265 
 Supernaturalism, 32, 52, 147 
 Superstition, 49, 218 
 
 Technique, 76, 119 ; special, as 
 
 transferable, 165 
 Tennyson, 89 
 Thales, 34 
 Theology, 26, 131 
 Time, 37, 38, 108 
 Training, special, as transferable, 
 
 165 
 Truth, spirit of, 105, 133, 170, 
 
 214 
 
 U 
 Unity, contradiction in idea of, 
 
 31 ; as expressed through con- 
 
 tradiction, 137 ; of experience, 
 
 160 
 Universality, of doubt, 1, 7 ; of 
 
 human characters in general, 
 
 161 
 Utilitarianism, 66, 261, 263 
 
 Validity, spirit of, 105, 133, 153, 
 
 214 
 
 Vanini, 176, 180 
 Vitalism, 147 
 
 W 
 
 Will, nature of, 11 ; freedom of, 
 47 ; to believe, 193 ; in relation 
 to agnosticism, 121, 125 
 
 Zeno, 109, 147 
 
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