The Will to Doubt Part 4

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 discredited by the separation than it. To be distorted and discoloured is to be so only with regard to something 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 s.p.a.ce and time, for example, in which scientists observe things are widely different from the s.p.a.ce and time of will and action. In ordinary life a difference is felt between the world we know and the world we live, but the extreme professional att.i.tude of science greatly widens the differences. For science s.p.a.ce and time are quant.i.tative, divisible, formal, mathematically correct, and independent of what is in them, their reality or qualitative [p.109] value to active life being hidden or at least only very indirectly presented--I suggest, in the constant opposition of their finiteness and infinity--while for will and action they are qualitative, indivisible, inseparable from what is in them. Who ever did anything in a composite, divisible s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sive 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 differences 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:[3] "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, interferes with the volitional point of view of real life, [p.110] 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 contradiction, 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 una.s.sailable.

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 s.p.a.ce 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 att.i.tudes of the merely looking consciousness or the peculiar gla.s.ses 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 gla.s.ses. In like manner the typically, professionally correct looking consciousness, the observing, scientific mind, is never without those enabling att.i.tudes. Do you ask if they are then only subjective att.i.tudes? [p.111] 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." Remember that an att.i.tude that harbours opposition is always tip-toeing to overcome the bounds of its own natural vision. Such an att.i.tude cannot be unmixedly subjective.

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 att.i.tudes, 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 [p.112] reality. I should myself a.s.sert, in partial if not in complete opposition to Professor Munsterberg, 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 existence, sometimes presumptuously styled "practical life," but such a result seems not to trouble either Professor Munsterberg or the conventional scientist whose cause the vigorous professor has espoused. In other regions, fortunately, a formal disparity is not accepted as arguing to a natural divorce, but is even considered, let it be said, a reason for a.s.sociation; and as for the disparity 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 a.s.surances of a.s.sistance 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 [p.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 cla.s.s.

But, as is needless to say, I am not writing a novel. So, romance aside, unquestionably the forms and doctrines 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 transformations; 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_ [p.114]

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 b.u.t.ter, 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 professional science possible, and is also what makes possible and properly controls the application of science to practical life.

It may now be a.s.serted that the facts are not in accord with the view to which I have just given expression, that sometimes, and very of ten 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 subst.i.tutes 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 individualism, of lawless democracy, and of abstract communism and Christian Socialism; in religion G.o.d [p.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 psychological 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 subst.i.tution, and in cases of education, politics, religion, and literature, the subst.i.tution is equally a makeshift which the conditions of conflict impose upon life. An individualistic programme will not work, nor will a purely socialistic programme work.

Mere induction will not educate. No visible G.o.d 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, abstractly perfect thing. Life is dynamic, not static.

Accordingly it must move forward by its mistakes, or by storm and stress of the incongruous and misapplied, 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 [p.116] many a man has flattered 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 compet.i.tion 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 [p.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 applications 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 att.i.tudes taken individually. 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 harbouring what above was called, in so many words, an [p.118] 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 scientific 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 business, 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, numerically, 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 [p.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 pract.i.tioner, is always necessarily with himself, and in this sense never in more than one place, so that in character 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 pa.s.sion 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 independence 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. Compet.i.tion with life and will may often bring science low, degrading its methods and impairing its professional success, but protection involves at least equal risks. Professor Munsterberg--but may he forgive me my Homeric epithets--is a too zealous epistemologic protectionist.

The difficulty as to the agnosticism of science may be presented in another way. Dismissing all thought [p.120] 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 cla.s.sifies 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 scientist 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 consciousness, yet never of his looking and thinking consciousness; it is knowable, and formally knowable, yet not to him, not through any of the forms of knowledge, the enabling att.i.tudes, 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 [p.121]

decidedly an excellent example of professional blindness, being a sort of _reductio ad absurdum_, of the scientific point of view, for plainly it treats the unknowable as a matter, first, of knowledge--the scientist'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 professionalism 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 declaring 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 agnosticism is also teleological, but not in any sense of a fixed and static telos. Telic character or purposiveness 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 [p.122] 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 hypothesis 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 always 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. Recognition of this other mediation, accordingly, is all-important to any final appraisal of the meaning of agnosticism, to an appraisal 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 narrowness of its various professional abstractions, and is not the att.i.tude 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 [p.123] by implication points to an unknown. It is equally true, however, that the conditions of positive experience are such that there is no fixity to this unknown; 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, eternally remote yet-to-be-known, for its being always, or its being infinitely distant, simply makes it something besides positive knowledge actual or possible. It must mean something which, though not knowledge, 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 unknowability, 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 knowledge possible can hardly be fully and directly an object [p.124] 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 impossibility. 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 compa.s.s [p.125] pa.s.s more than they may visibly present. The knowing 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 professional realization. And the knower, as he knows, in and through his knowledge must always be compa.s.sing 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 existence. With just this meaning, then, a meaning larger and deeper than that usual to positivism, the att.i.tude of the agnostic is instrumental and teleological. Agnosticism 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 "unknowable," 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 establishing 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 [p.126] cla.s.ses of those who look and those who do, the unknowable 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 n.o.blest."

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 sentimentally ideal, but also the inevitable, the inner and actually real motive, the natural outcome of the scientific standpoint in each one of its three att.i.tudes. Such a showing might follow historical and sociological 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 cla.s.sified.

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 [p.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 movement the a.s.serted 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 utilitarianism, is followed by the rise of Napoleon. So does objectivism pa.s.s 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 a.s.sociates in science. The dividing part.i.tions may still stand, but only as unsubstantial forms wholly transparent and ineffective, so that the undivided universe is really present to consciousness. The undivided universe, however, as present to consciousness, is a call for will, since it cannot be fully realized in any formal consciousness. The natural decline of an a.s.serted 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 [p.128] 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 G.o.d, but in G.o.d. Thirdly, whether because of the freedom from technique 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. Psychologically 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 pa.s.sion for reality to which agnosticism must always testify ensures in good time the a.s.sertion of the volitional as distinct from the merely scientific point of view. Whatever this may mean psychologically, historically and sociologically 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 [p.129]

and religion, too, the same wish and will to use the results of science shows itself, as in the social settlements, in scientific charity, in the "inst.i.tutional" 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 knowledge, 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 consciousness 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,[4] 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 experience.

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 consequent division against itself. Its most cherished ideals, as shown in its att.i.tudes and methods, are chimerical, or impossible. In general and in particular it has a [p.130] paradoxical standpoint, being not less given to contradictions 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 att.i.tude 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 incongruities 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 everyday life. Yet, that we may more fully comprehend 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.

[1] See an article: "Epistemology and Physical Science--A Fatal Parallelism," in the _Philosophical Review_, Vol. VII, No. 4, July, 1896.

[2] See articles: "Pluralism: Empedocles and Democritus," 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.

[3] See Munsterberg's _Psychology and Life_, p. 267. Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1899.

[4] For an interesting account, mainly psychological in standpoint, of will as involving such a poise, see Munsterberg's _Grundzuge der Psychologie_, Vol. I, chap. xv., Leipzig, 1900.

[p.131]

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 thorough-going confession of doubt, with the greatest possible candour hunting down all the reasons for the att.i.tude 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 [p.132]

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 companionship with nature, man and G.o.d, but more than all--and this was the special interest of the last two chapters--because of the paradoxical and self-contradictory 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, s.p.a.ce 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 confidence 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. Contradiction 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, [p.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 a.s.suring 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 quant.i.ty as an integral part of the whole system of quant.i.ties, so in the person of Leibnitz--statesman, historian, scientist, mathematician, and philosopher--and I imagine in the person also of you or me, though we may not claim the same [p.134] 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 G.o.d. 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 ident.i.ty of G.o.d 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 a.s.surance 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 [p.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 inconsistencies 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 himself, 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. [p.136] Subjectivity, relativity, phenomenality, artificiality, partiality, 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 saying 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 semblance 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] [p.137] be equal to its subject. Where experience is contradictory, 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 themselves 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 understood, 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 [p.138] 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 unrestrained--it is difference at its worst or best, difference 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.