Uniformity of Nature without evidence. The reluctance that is genuinely
felt by many minds to take up this position is probably due to a feeling
that if we may believe in one thing without evidence, then anyone may
believe in anything he likes. And it would not be quite fair to make the
rejoinder, What does that matter to you, as long as you are free to
believe what you think right? The tendency to dogmatise, and to be
intolerant of opinions not our own, is, indeed, strong enough in all of
us to make us stand somewhat in dismay of a line of argument which seems
to indicate not merely that other people have a right to differ from our
opinions, but may quite conceivably be right in so differing. Still,
this tendency does not wholly account for our reluctance. That
reluctance has, in part at least, a nobler origin than narrow-mindedness
and the ignorance which knows not that it is ignorance. It does matter
to us what our fellow-men believe. Still more does it matter how and why
they choose their beliefs.
The reluctance to admit that it is permissible to believe without
evidence even in a truth so undisputed as the Uniformity of Nature, is
also in part due to yet another cause. It is felt that to admit belief
without regard to evidence is to invite intellectual anarchy, and to
leave mankind the helpless prey of ignorance, error, and superstition.
Hence, in many candid souls, a lamentable feeling of distraction and
hopelessness: to abandon their old faith, even if it has no evidence, is
almost more than they can bear; to retain it, knowing that it has no
evidence, is to open the floodgates of a saturnalia of unreason by which
the foundations of civilisation would be swept away. Hence, too, the
zeal with which other minds call for the destruction of every belief,
but especially religious belief, not based on evidence, and with which
they denounce faith as the one unpardonable sin.
But the error into which both classes of mind fall is a simple one. It
consists in imagining that if we take one thing on faith, because there
is no evidence, therefore we may believe anything, even if the evidence
is conclusive against it--that if we once accept faith, we must for ever
abjure reason. The error has been clearly exposed by Professor Huxley,
who, after pointing out that reason--ratiocination--is based on faith,
says, "But it is surely plain that faith is not necessarily entitled to
dispense with ratiocination because ratiocination cannot dispense with
faith as a starting-point; and that because we are often obliged, by the
pressure of events, to act on very bad evidence, it does not follow
that it is proper to act on such evidence when the pressure is
absent."[35]
It seems, then, a piece of alarmist exaggeration to say that if we admit
one thing, _e.g._ the Uniformity of Nature, without evidence, we forfeit
the right ever again to ask for evidence for any other statement: on the
contrary, whenever evidence can be got, we must get it and abide by it.
But this only shows that no disastrous consequences will necessarily
ensue, if we frankly admit what in any case is the fact, viz. that there
is no evidence for the postulate on which all science is built. You will
not have committed high treason against the best interests of mankind by
acting, in this case, on the principle that a man may sometimes believe
a thing on evidence which, he is well aware, is insufficient, or on no
evidence at all. On the other hand, in another case, to act on the
principle might be, if not high treason, at least mischievous.
It seems, then, first, that there are some things which a man may
believe without evidence, and some which he may not; and, next, that he
may not believe things the consequences of which would be disastrous or
mischievous. But now what of the things not mischievous or disastrous?
On what principle are we to choose amongst them? Let us once more follow
our guide, the man of science, and ask him on what principle he elected
to believe that Nature was uniform, rather than that she was not. I
imagine it was once more on the ground of the consequences: grant that
Nature is uniform, and then all the marvellous discoveries, the
revelations of the past and prophecies of the future, which science has
made, become things that we can reasonably believe in. Refuse to
believe, withhold your faith, and then you have no reason to believe
anything whatever, thought and action alike are paralysed. It is between
these consequences that we have to choose. Our choice is an act of will;
and it is on our will that our beliefs and our actions depend.
In science, then, we are offered the alternatives: either believe
without evidence that Nature is uniform, or renounce all that science
has to give. We want to be scientific, so we choose the former. We
believe (in science) because we want to believe, not because we have any
evidence. To say that we may yield to the impulse to have faith, without
being unscientific, is to understate the case: we cannot be scientific
without faith.
In logic, whether inductive or deductive, the case is the same. We must
either believe without evidence in the axioms on which reason is based,
or forego reason altogether. We want to be reasonable, so we choose to
accept the axioms. But our choice is not the least evidence or proof
that they are true. We believe they are true, because we wish to
believe that they are true. There is no reason except there first be
faith.
With morality the case is not otherwise. We believe in the principles of
morality, not because we can prove them, or bring evidence to show that
a man ought to do what is right, but because we wish to believe, and
because we have faith in the right. There is no morality except first
there be faith.
We are nothing, know nothing, can do nothing without faith. And it is
not in the dead past, which is what we mean by "evidence," but in the
living future that faith has its well-springs. It is because we wish to
do right henceforth that we put our faith in right-doing. It is not the
ghosts of our misdeeds, rising from the charnel-house of the past in
evidence against us, that give us good hope of the future--it is faith,
not built on evidence, on a past that cannot be altered, but on hope, on
the future, on what shall be as we will it.
The future is uncertain. But that is no reason why you should be. There
is no evidence that we shall succeed, that logic can be trusted, or that
science is true. But fortunately it is possible to be certain without
evidence. In commenting on the text "Faith is the assurance of things
hoped for, the proving of things unseen," Professor Huxley says, "I
fancy we shall not be far from the mark if we take the writer to have
had in his mind the profound psychological truth, that men constantly
feel certain about things for which they strongly hope, but have no
evidence, in the legal or logical sense of the word; and he calls this
feeling 'faith.'"[36] It is a profound psychological truth, and by the
aid of the theory of evolution we may understand why it is so
deep-seated in the mental and moral constitution of man. Primitive man
can have had no extensive "evidence" of any kind to go upon in
regulating the conduct of his daily life; and in all probability
exercised but little power of criticism in judging the value of what
evidence he had. At the same time, if he was to survive at all in the
struggle for existence, he had to act and to act promptly. Fortunately
for him it was possible to feel certain about things for which there was
no evidence, _i.e._ to have faith. And he survived in consequence--in
virtue of the law of the survival of the faithful, a law whose operation
is possibly not confined to this world.
On the theory of evolution, again, man's wants must have aided him in
the struggle for existence; and no evolutionist will doubt that the
desire to be rational and to do that which is right has assisted man in
his upward struggle. The victory has remained with those who have been
contented to feel certain about things for which they had no evidence,
and to act on faith. It is those who hesitate to do right until
sacrifice of self is proved to be reasonable, who lose their chance,
and consequently have been and are being, though slowly, weeded out.
Those who have yielded to their inner impulse to believe, without
evidence, have evidently been the better fitted to their environment,
and the more in harmony with the ruling principle of the cosmos and its
evolution.
Thus far in this chapter there has been no explicit mention of religious
faith. We began with the fact that faith is indispensable to science as
its starting-point. We do not wish to end with the suggestion that
scientific faith can or ought to be stretched so as to make religious
faith its logical or necessary consequence. On the contrary, the man who
by a great act of faith accepts the Uniformity of Nature without
evidence, and then resolves never to accept another statement without
evidence, is quite safe: no one can make him believe in religion as long
as he holds to his resolve--or in morality either. There is no
evidence--and therefore he cannot believe--that a man ought to do what
is right. If he does ever depart from his resolve as regards morality,
it will be because in his heart--with its reasons which his reason knows
not of--he wants to do right, not because there is any evidence.
In most men the impulse to believe expends but does not exhaust itself
in reason and morality. There is also the religious belief that all that
happens to us is due to a Will not our own, in which we can trust and
to which we can give our lives. For this belief there is no more
evidence than there is for science: if a man will receive it, he must
believe in it as he believes in science, that is, without evidence. If a
man will receive it, he may, on the same condition as he believes in
morality or science, viz. that he wants it. Any other condition is of
his own making and is an act of his own will: if he says that he fain
would believe, but cannot without evidence, that is a condition of his
own making, imposed upon him by his own will--what science and morality
both require cannot be immoral or unscientific, and they each require
belief without evidence in order that they may exist at all. What logic
postulates can hardly be illogical. It can be no necessary law of reason
to check the impulse which gives to reason its initial impetus. We
believe that science is true for no other reason than that we wish it to
be true; and for every man, with regard to religion, the question is,
does he wish it to be true? if it lay with him to decide, would he have
it true? if he would, then it does lie with him to decide: let him be
assured it is true. If he would not, let him ask his own heart, Why? Why
does he wish there were no God?
FOOTNOTES:
[30] HUXLEY, _Science and Hebrew Tradition_, p. 233.
[31] HUXLEY, _Science and Christian Tradition_, p. 245.
[32] HUXLEY, _Science and Hebrew Tradition_, p. 65.
[33] HUXLEY, _Science and Christian Tradition_, p. 54.
[34] HUXLEY, _Method and Results_, p. 40.
[35] _Science and Christian Tradition_, p. 243.
[36] _Science and Christian Tradition_, p. 244.
X.
THE CHESS-BOARD
We began, at the beginning of this book, by accepting evolution as a
fact, and by asking the question: Granted that it is a fact, what
follows? What does it mean for me? What light does it throw on the
meaning of life?
The answers that we may give to these questions together constitute a
philosophy of evolution, which is carefully to be distinguished from
evolution as a scientific theory. As a scientific theory evolution is an
account, as exact as science can make it, of what actually did happen in
the past, of the precise process by which things have come to be what
they are. When this knowledge has been gained, we may ask the question,
What value has this knowledge for the practical purposes of life? And
the answer will be a contribution to philosophy, but it will not be one
of the things described by science as having happened in the past, will
not be part of the knowledge from which it is itself inferred, nor, if
it is a false inference, will it have any right to masquerade as science
and say that we must accept it as true or else deny the truth of
science. Indeed, we found that two answers to the question, two
philosophies of evolution, the Optimistic and the Pessimistic, have been
formulated, which being contradictory cannot both be true, though both
may be false.
The Optimistic theory, that evolution is progress, only established its
conclusion, that the process of evolution is necessarily from good to
better, by means of arguments which denied the distinction between good
and bad, and implied that our moral convictions were illusions.
The Pessimistic theory, on the other hand, assumed the reality of our
moral ideals, but was forced by its adoption of the theory of Necessity
to conclude that it is an illusion to imagine those ideals can be
finally realised.
Both philosophies in theory profess to make no assumptions, to take
nothing on faith, and to base themselves on nothing but what we actually
know to be facts. In practice each of them does unconsciously base
itself on faith and does tacitly make certain assumptions. But as the
assumptions made are not precisely the same in both cases, they reach
two very different conclusions--Optimism and Pessimism. Again, if each
philosophy treats as illusions certain facts--the freedom of the will
and the reality of moral distinctions--which the common sense and common
consciousness of mankind hold to be real, it is because each philosophy
arbitrarily rejects certain of the assumptions which common sense
makes, certain articles of the common faith of mankind. Consequently,
when we find that each philosophy is inconsistent with itself, and ends
by implying that what it assumed to be real is in fact an illusion, we
are led to suspect that its assumptions may not have been adequate or
well-considered, its faith not great enough to remove mountains or
explain the world.
The conception of a "positive" philosophy--that is, a philosophy which
confines itself to positive facts, and which is "agnostic" in the sense
that it does not profess to know what it knows it does not know--is
borrowed from science. It is an attempt to carry the methods of science
into the domain of philosophy, to substitute science for philosophy. The
attempt is made under the impression that science does not profess to
know what it knows it does not know, _i.e._ makes no assumptions and
takes nothing on faith. That impression, however, is, as we have argued
in the last chapter but one, a false impression: the Uniformity of
Nature is a pure--and rational--assumption. If, therefore, a philosophy
confined itself strictly within the bounds of science, it would not be
strictly positive or agnostic: it would still make some assumptions,
even if only those made by science, and would still, even if it confined
itself to the positive facts of science, be taking something on faith. A
sound philosophy is one, not that makes no assumptions, but which seeks
to find out what assumptions are made by any department of knowledge or
practice--science, art, evolution, morality, religion--and how far those
assumptions will carry us. The bane of philosophy is not making
assumptions--all thought does--but is thinking you have made none.
Common sense assumes that the testimony of consciousness, so far as it
can be verified by consciousness, can be trusted as evidence of the
reality of that which is presented to it. Positive or agnostic
philosophies, whether of the optimistic or the pessimistic type, on the
principle of making no assumptions, reject this one, either on the
ground that the Real is Unknowable (which is itself an assumption as
incapable of proof or disproof as the assumption that the Real is
Knowable) or on the ground that we only know our states of
consciousness, and cannot know whether there is or is not any reality
beyond them (which again is simply an assumption that consciousness as
evidence of a reality beyond itself is not to be trusted).
Now, granted that common sense makes an assumption here, as it assuredly
does, it is one such as can only be rejected by making a
counter-assumption: to refuse to trust consciousness as evidence of a
reality beyond itself is to make the assumption that it is not
trustworthy--which may or may not be true, but is just as much an
assumption as the supposition of its trustworthiness is. The positive
and agnostic philosophies, therefore, do not succeed in avoiding
assumptions in this matter: they only tacitly add another to that which
they have already unconsciously made by assuming that Nature is uniform.
If, now, they adhered to these assumptions, we might proceed to ask what
conclusions they deduced from them. We should not, indeed, expect their
conclusions to be the same as those reached by persons starting from the
opposite hypothesis, viz. that consciousness is trustworthy. And we
should not agree that they were superior to those reached by the common
sense and drawn from the common faith of mankind. We should only admit
that they were different, because drawn from different premises. The
argument that the teaching of a philosophy which makes no assumptions
must be superior to one that does, is an argument which, whatever its
value, we should have to set aside in this case, on the ground that the
agnostic philosophies are not so ignorant as they modestly profess to
be: they do know something--they know that Nature is uniform, and that
consciousness as evidence of reality is not to be trusted--or they
assume they know.
But the positive philosophies do not adhere to their assumptions. Few
philosophers do. The optimistic evolutionist takes back his remark
about the untrustworthiness of consciousness, so far as material things
are concerned: matter and motion at any rate are real, and consciousness
is good evidence, as good as can be got, of their reality. The
pessimistic evolutionist also repents him, as far as our moral
convictions are concerned: they are fundamentally real; our
consciousness of the moral ideal is our best evidence for it.
On the other hand, both the optimistic and the pessimistic evolutionist
adhere with perfect consistency to their rejection of the evidence given
by consciousness to the freedom of the will. But here, too, the
assumption of common sense cannot be rejected without a
counter-assumption: if it is a pure assumption to say that things could
have happened otherwise than they did, it is equally mere assumption to
say they could not.
Finally, there is one other assumption made by the common faith of
mankind and rejected by positive philosophies. It is that the world,
_i.e._ everything of which man's consciousness is aware and to the
reality of which his consciousness is evidence, is the expression of
self-determining will, human and superhuman, manifesting itself
directly to his consciousness. This assumption, too, has its
counter-assumption--that there is no self-determining will, human or
superhuman--and to reject the one assumption is to accept the other.
To say that you do not know whether a man's word may be trusted or
not is literally agnosticism, and may be the only rational attitude
to assume, _e.g._ if the man is an absolute stranger, as most
witnesses in court are to the judge who tries the case. But on the
ground of your ignorance to refuse to pay any attention to his
evidence when given is to abandon your agnosticism--if a judge
directs the jury to disregard the evidence of the witness, the
presumption is that he assumes it to be false. So, too, if we
disregard the evidence of consciousness on this or any other point,
we do not thereby succeed in avoiding assumptions, we only assume
that consciousness is not trustworthy.[37]
The idea that in philosophy it is possible permanently to maintain an
agnostic attitude with regard to the trustworthiness of consciousness is
the outcome of a conscientious attempt to apply scientific methods to
the solution of philosophic problems. Science does not find it necessary
to assume either that there is or that there is not a God: on either
assumption it is certain that bodies tend towards each other at the
rates specified in the gravitation-formula. Philosophy must be made
scientific. Therefore philosophy must carefully avoid making either
assumption. Why, the very reason why science has progressed and
philosophy never moves is that science builds only on demonstrated fact,
philosophy only on undemonstrable assumptions. Proof, and therefore
truth, is impossible if you start from assumptions which never can be
proved to be either true or untrue.
The truth is that it is possible to maintain the agnostic attitude, and
to avoid making assumptions, just so long as we do not need to form an
opinion or take action on the matter which the assumption affects.
If my interests, practical or speculative, are not affected by a certain
trial now proceeding in the law courts, I can avoid making any
assumption as to the trustworthiness or untrustworthiness of a witness's
evidence. I do not know whether he is trustworthy or not, and I can
refuse to make any assumption whatever on the subject--there is no
reason why I should. But the moment circumstances call on me to form an
opinion, I find myself beginning to make one assumption or the other, or
perhaps at first one and then the other, though I am just as ignorant
whether he really is trustworthy or not as I was when I refused to make
any assumptions; I know no more about his previous career or his
antecedent credibility than I did before he entered the box.
So, too, the truth is not that science makes no assumptions, but that
she makes no assumptions except those which are necessary for her
purposes. The man of science assumes--and it is pure assumption--that he
can trust the evidence of his consciousness as to the reality of the
chemicals he experiments on, the plants he classifies, or the stars he
observes. He assumes that they are real. He also assumes without proof
that what has produced a certain effect once will produce it again in
the same circumstances, that if a thing has occurred the conditions
essential to its occurrence must also have occurred--in fine, that
Nature is uniform. But so long as he is engaged exclusively in
scientific work, in finding out what actually does happen or has
happened in Nature, he need make no assumptions as to whether a certain
witness is trustworthy or not, or whether there is a God or not: he can
maintain a perfectly agnostic attitude on both questions. He can say, if
he chooses, "God or no God, two and two make four"; or, to put it more
precisely, whether the evidence which consciousness gives in spiritual
experience to the reality of a God can or cannot be trusted, I do trust
the evidence which consciousness gives in sense-experience to the
reality of material things; whether the assumption that every event is
the expression of self-determining will is true or not, at any rate I
believe in the assumption that Nature is uniform.
And if man had nothing to do but investigate the actual course of
Nature, and had nothing else to form an opinion about except whether
this phenomenon is followed by that, it would be possible permanently to
avoid making any assumptions save those required by science. But man has
(let us suppose) to know, not only what does happen, but what ought to
happen, and to decide what shall happen. The ordinary man, in making
those forecasts of the future which he must make for the ordinary
business of daily life, assumes, quite unconsciously, that Nature is
uniform and that material things are real. In deciding what he ought to
do and what he will do, he assumes, without knowing that he is making
any assumptions at all, that his moral ideals are real, that his will is
free to choose this course or that, and that the God with whom he
communes in his heart is real.
Let us now take the question raised by agnosticism as to these
assumptions, which constitute a large part of the common faith of
mankind. The question is not whether these assumptions are right: the
agnostic declines to discuss that question; he does not know whether
they are right or wrong, he has no means of deciding, they are too high
for him. The question is whether the agnostic himself succeeds in
making, as well as endeavouring to make, no assumptions on these points.
We have already argued he fails: he succeeds, not in making no
assumptions, but only in making the counter-assumptions to those assumed
by common sense.