Our confession must, of course, be thorough-going, and can be made so
only through a complete statement of every possible reason that
experience affords for the attitude of doubt. To the end, therefore, of
such a statement we shall consider in this chapter certain general and
easily recognized facts about doubt itself, while in chapters that
follow we shall continue the confession by examining, first, our
customary or "common-sense" view of things, and then the view of
science, and having brought together in each case numerous
incongruities, or contradictions, which ordinarily are at best only
casually noticed or timorously overlooked, we shall find ourselves
facing in a peculiarly telling way, not only certain strong reasons for
doubt, but also some of the real issues that doubt raises. As no issue,
moreover, can be more central or crucial than the meaning of the
contradictions found to pervade our views of things, before completing
our confession we shall allow ourselves some reflections, that should
prove useful to us in the end, upon the possible worth of contradiction
in human experience; for even to casual thinking contradiction, although
good ground for scepticism, suggests some positive advantage and
opportunity; the advantage of breadth, [p.006] for example, of freedom
from special form, or the opportunity of personal spontaneity and
initiative as against the restraints of formal consistency, of class,
and of institution; and if these things, among others, can be associated
with our case for doubt, our reflections will certainly not have been in
vain. Then we shall close our confession by seeking the companionhip of
a great doubter of modern times, and by learning what we can from him of
doubt itself and of the doubter's natural world. And finally, as a
result of all our own efforts, supplemented by his help, we shall be
able to reap some of the fruits for life and thought that a confession
so fully made may fairly claim.
From start to finish, moreover, of this study of doubt we have to
remember that there can be no important difference between what is
possible and what is real. Thus anything whatsoever that can possibly be
doubted is really doubtful. Also, if anybody is amazed to hear mention
of facts about doubt, as if doubt should not somehow submit to its own
nostrum, let him merely reflect that, strangely enough, nothing is quite
so indubitable as doubt, nothing so convincing as the reasons for doubt.
Let me not be too subtle, but to doubt doubt is only to affirm it, and
somehow--whether for good or ill need not now be said--all the negative
things of life possess a peculiar certainty, and are all most easily
proved. A great Frenchman once put the case quite plainly when he said,
after canvassing very carefully the whole field of his consciousness,
that his doubts were the only things there, the only things he could be
quite certain about, and these were so very real that they left him
absolutely [p.007] nothing but belief in himself, in his all-doubting
and ever-doubting self, to rest upon. His was surely a sweeping
confession, and his residuum of belief may not at first sight seem very
promising or very substantial, but quickly, I think, we shall find
ourselves in agreement with him, at least as to the reality and the wide
scope of our doubting, and it is also a possibility well worth
foreseeing that we may even find his belief in the reality of an
ever-doubting and all-doubting self a rock for our own saving.
So, to turn now to those general and easily recognized 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 experience had ever been subject to
question, all the 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 formally 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 [p.008] 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 [p.009] regarded as a
contradiction of terms. How can one be sure and religious at the same
time? Moreover, positive people under any standard are notoriously as
fearful as they are dogmatic. Fear is often, if not always, the chief
motive of dogmatism, and fear is hardly the most natural companion of
genuine confidence. The part which the emotion of fear has had, both in
the personal life and in the doctrine of the dogmatic among men, would
make a most instructive study.
If, then, dogmatic people are slaves to their fears, while more
thoughtful people, as has not needed to be said, seem to get no reward
from their self-consciousness but the uncertain reward of their doubts,
then only such as live quietly, asserting nothing, depending on nothing,
and even assuming nothing, but simply taking what comes, are left to
represent genuine belief. Yet how many such are there? A few may seem to
approach the ideal, if ideal it be, but the class itself in realization
must be said to be a hypothetical one, and few, if any, of us could ever
really envy or strive to imitate its supposed manner of living; for, in
spite of all the dangers and all the doubts and fears, only the
constantly examined life can ever really lure us. Doubt, besides being a
general condition of life, seems to be also incident to what gives life
worth.
But, furthermore, not only are we all universal doubters; the case for
doubt in the world is, if possible, even stronger; for also--and this is
the second general fact: _Doubt is a phase, nay, a vital condition of
all consciousness_. To be a conscious creature is to be a doubting
creature.
[p.010] In so many ways psychology is teaching us to-day with renewed
emphasis that we are conscious of nothing as it is, and that more or
less clearly we all know our shortcoming in this regard; or again, with
still more directness and emphasis, that for us there is no such thing
as a state of consciousness which does not indicate tension, or unstable
equilibrium, that is to say uncertainty, in our activity. Nor have we
need of the testimony of science to these facts, since common personal
experience is well aware of them. In small things and in great
consciousness transforms or refracts. In small things and in great
consciousness marks a moment of poise between an impulse to do
something, and more or less distinctly recognized conditions or
relations that would put restraint upon the doing of it. Even the law of
relativity, a psychological law only in its definite formulation, in its
idea a simple fact of everyday experience, true for all conscious states
from the crudest perceptions of the organs of sense to the most highly
developed ideas of critical reflection, by binding as it does all the
details of actual or possible experience into a whole, every part of
which acts upon the other parts, points very directly to this fact of
poise and instability, besides indicating also that knowledge never can
be literally or objectively exact, and that at least with some clearness
every knower must know it cannot. How can there ever be even a single
stable or a single finally accurate element in the consciousness of a
creature whose experience, in the first place, can comprise only
related, interdependent parts, and whose nature, in the second place, is
an essentially mobile and active [p.011] one? Moreover, as just one
other way of suggesting the inexactness and uncertainty of consciousness
and the balancing, tentative nature of all conscious life, we always
think, and think properly, of conscious creatures as having will, as
doing what they do purposely or from design. The new psychology,
however, to which we naturally turn, and which again has only formulated
what we can recognize from everyday experience, declares that the
purpose in conscious activity is not a developed, but an always
developing one. Purposive action is action that never finally knows, but
is ever finding out its real intent, purpose being identical with the
progressively discovered meaning of action. A volitionally, purposively
active being is always a seeker as well as a doer. Indeed, any doing
would itself be empty, or idle, if it were not a seeking, and so if it
were not subject to conditions of some uncertainty. In so many ways,
then, through the necessary inexactness of consciousness, through the
unstable equilibrium of all conscious activity, through the law and fact
of relativity, and through the tentative and provisional nature which
must always belong to purpose, we see how doubt must be a phase or
condition of all consciousness.
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 [p.012] moved and the head turned, but in spite of the
impulses 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
Professor 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 _onomatopoetic_. 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, oreate, 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 [p.013] 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
recognizing 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 seeming 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 everything 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 founding
colleges or theological seminaries, or finally, for [p.014] what we so
indefinitely call living. An activity such as throughout its length and
breadth ours is, conscious activity that must for ever heed the call:
"Not the letter, but the spirit," an activity that never is, therefore,
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 abstraction or
separation from actual conditions. Conservative 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 [p.015] 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 Revolution; 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 _baby_ 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 something 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:[1] "Habit expresses the tendency of the organism [p.016] to secure
and retain its vital stimulations," and such an account, placing the
interest of habit in so general and so changeable a thing as "vital
stimulations," is designed to make habit fundamentally, not merely a
tendency to repetition or imitation, but instead a demand for constant
adaptation or differentiation. In the doctrines of inheritance, also,
always moving necessarily in close sympathy with those of habit, a
similar departure has been made. Both habit and inheritance are in fact
seen to belong to life in a world of change, or variation, and they have
assumed what I will style a protective colouring accordingly. The habit
of always being adapted is at least as radical as it is conservative.
With this reform in the account of habit we have not only analogous
reforms, as was said, in the account of inheritance, but also in the
scientific view of character, custom, law, creed, and the institution
generally. Moreover, if in scientific theory we find these new views, in
practical life there are at least signs of the same standpoint. What may
be called a new conservatism--the most truly conservative thing being
taken to be the most thoroughly pertinent or adaptive thing--has for
many years been getting possession of us, and is now quite manifest. Our
political constitutions are amendable constitutions; our religious rites
and doctrines are recognized as only symbols; our theories are only
standpoints.
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. [p.017] Change must make doubt. Sociologically,
institutionalism 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_. Accordingly, 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
sympathy and makes it equally an inner motive. Forsooth, 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 [p.018] creatures
of habit, but we have, and we cherish, no habit stronger or more
essential than the habit at once of adaptation and variation.[2]
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. Real
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 consequences of the things to be done
always capable of being accurately foretold, there would be no real
[p.019] living, there would be nothing really to do. In such case life
in general, or in any of its different expressions, religion, or
politics, or art, or science, or industry, or morals, if one may suppose
for a moment that any of these differences could ever develop, would
consist in a purely passive condition, a mere fixed status; it would be
a wholly static thing falsely called life; its movement, if movement
there were, could be only the rest or routine of strictly mechanical
motion.
To a real life, then, doubt, as an evidence of challenge and resistance,
is absolutely necessary, and appreciation of just this necessity is
certainly an important part of our present confession, and the
confession is important, because it is sure somewhat to brighten what
heretofore may have seemed a dark horizon. Confession often changes
night to dawn, and here the association of doubt with real living, with
a world in which there is always something to do, awakens emotions that
such words as relativity, and instability, and change, and even game,
have discouraged, or even wholly suppressed. Leasing, perhaps better
than any one else, has given expression to these emotions, and has at
the same time reflected what in his day had certainly begun to be, and
what in our own time very widely and very deeply is, the ideal spirit.
Thus, as he wrote:--
"Not the truth that any one may have or may think he has, but the honest
effort which has been exerted to compass it, makes what is really worthy
in human life. For not in having, but in seeking truth, are those powers
developed, in which alone man's ever-increasing [p.020] perfection
consists. Possession makes us inert, lazy, proud. If God held in his
right hand the perfect truth, and in his left the ever-restless struggle
after truth, and bade me choose, although I were bound to be ever and
always in the wrong, I should humbly select the left, saying: 'Father,
give; surely the pure truth is for Thee alone.'"
This is a splendid utterance, and it has touched a responsive chord in
human nature the civilized world over, not so much, however, for the
humility of the choice as for the zeal in a life of seeking and
striving, or for the idea that knowledge is itself a dynamic thing, a
living, moving function, not a passive possession. The knower is made
also a doubter, and the doubter appears as having, in a sense,
forgotten, without for a moment betraying, the constant doubting within
him. If I may so speak, he has, even while he lacks; such is the
condition of his seeking; such is the way in which doubting is necessary
to real living. Doubt saves from the possession that makes "inert, lazy,
proud," yet does not take away. Doubt makes experience always deep, even
putting consciousness in touch with reality, and it makes life for ever
living.
Still others may be quoted in the same vein. Socrates made life,
particularly mental life, if this may be supposed distinct, essentially
active or dynamic when he identified true wisdom with self-conscious
ignorance, with a power in one of always finding oneself in error, and
in modern times Hegel has done the same thing as effectually, though
perhaps not in general so intelligibly, by finding a principle of
negativity or contradiction the very mainspring of all [p.021]
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 company of nature,
the company of his fellows, the company 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 movement. Nothing so much as
such relations gives [p.022] vitality. This special phase, however, of
the place of doubt in real life is a very interesting one, and it
suggests, besides, so much that is of positive value as almost to
transform what so far has been in large part a sceptic's confession into
a sceptic's boast.
Thus, in the first place, doubt seeks the company of nature. "Return to
nature!" has time and again in human history been the cry of the human
heart. Has civilization lost its hold, seeming unreal, artificial,
formal? Has morality become hollow? Has a lover suffered the shattering
of his dearest hopes? Has a creed lost its credibility? Have you and I
wearied of our study or our labour, whatever it be, and come to wonder
if it, or anything, is worth while after all? Have friends, ideals, and
God Himself deserted us? We turn, and all people turn to nature. Exactly
so the homesick traveller takes himself homeward, or the prodigal arises
and goes to his father. And your experience and mine, and the poetry of
all literatures, which tells so deeply the experiences of all men of all
times, are a constant witness to the comfort, and forgiveness, and
renewed confidence in self that nature imparts. Nature is our infancy,
in which all things are possible; she is our untrammelled will; she is
infinitely hopeful for us and infinitely kind; her necessity is so wide
and so open that its very law, so different from any human law, is our
greatest opportunity. True, our resort to nature is sometimes, perhaps
in greater or less degree always, by the way of moral dissipation, or
political anarchy, or intellectual suicide, or religious profanity; but
even these dark ways to the home and the great mother-heart of [p.023]
us all have never been hopelessly misleading. If history and literature
and personal experience can be trusted, even they have led to a kind
nature. Have you never failed in anything and become reckless, and then
profited from the very knowledge of yourself which the recklessness
uncovered? Personally and socially recklessness, return to nature that
it is, is always a helpful assistant to nature's great teacher,
experience. Great is the pathos, but also, as it is understood, great is
the inspiration of Rousseau's passionate outcry that his will was
perfectly good. He was incapable of a single wholesome relation in life,
yet, so he said, no man was better than he! Rousseau, philosopher of
revolution, spoke for nature. Out of her great love, nature always takes
the will for the deed--and perhaps she alone should have the privilege
of doing that; for she knows that the deed, however violent, however
bad, is sure to leave at least the will good.
But intellectually, as well as morally or politically, or as well as in
any of the departments of the practical, emotional life, when trouble
comes we turn to nature. Nature has a mind as well as a heart, and when
state, and church, and social tradition have lost their validity and
infallibility, their various formulæ 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 [p.024]
shall more fully appreciate, even to the extreme position of
agnosticism. He doubts all things human that always he may be learning
of nature.
So the companionship of nature for the comfort and pardon which she is
sure to give, and for the deeper knowledge which she is certain to
impart, is a passion of the doubter. True, no passion is free from
dangers; yet this passion, at least this passion, has somewhat of hope
in it.
But, secondly, the companionship of one's fellows is not less strongly
desired. Huddling together in time of distress is by no means peculiar
to the animal world; in human life it has more than once made distress
seem richly worth while. "We have each other" in word or thought has
been the comforting reflection of many a family, or many a community,
when the money has gone, or when in other ways, possibly through a great
fire, or a great earthquake, or the ravages of a disease, afflictions
have come, and "Now we know how others have suffered" has been not less
common. Indeed, it is my own conviction that these two reflections
always rise together. The distress or affliction of doubt, however, is
certainly no exception to the rule. Doubt often separates an individual
from the customary corporate life with which he has long identified
himself, throwing him out of his church, or his party, or his society,
or even his immediate family, but the doubter at once feels his
loneliness, and gets a yearning, never realized before, for social
relations. Benedict Spinoza may have been better than most of us, but he
was not in any other way different, and though maligned and insulted, as
earlier in history [p.025] another of his race had been, for his doubts
and heresies, and though exposed to the dangers of the assassin's knife,
and finally, when other measures failed, with special cruelties
excommunicated by his synagogue, he loved his people, and all men
besides, as few have loved them. Doubt makes one dependent; isolation
gives a sense of loss; and, if ever a solution of the doubt comes, in
the life and consciousness which it enjoins the lost companions, whether
they will or not, are included with oneself. In many ways this is an
important fact; yet it must suffice that we see the affinity of the
doubter for society. Man ever confidently seeks what man has lost.
Dependent man and doubting man must have society.
That doubt, furthermore, not only creates a motive to social life, even
to the restoration of lost companions, but also by weakening the
barriers which have divided some class, a sect perhaps, or a party, or a
nation, or a race, from some other class, puts social life on a broader
and deeper basis, is also an important fact, and full of significance
beyond our immediate interest. Thus, to suggest indeed how those two
reflections mentioned in the preceding paragraph are inseparable,
besides his wish to retain or recover his wonted companions, the doubter
would also associate them and himself with new companions, I venture to
say, as if in a figure, with Gentiles as well as with Jews, and this
gives to doubt, or to those who experience it and adequately use it, a
most significant rôle in the evolution of society, the rôle of mediation
between old friends and new, between the past and the future, the narrow
life and the broader [p.026] and deeper life, what is conservative and
what is progressive; but at least for the present it is again enough if
we see that doubt, not only by its personal losses gives the motive, but
also by its removal of barriers gives the larger possibility of society.
And, in addition to the company of nature and the company of man, doubt,
springing as it does from man's sense of insufficiency, seeks also the
company of God; yet not of the God of any theology. As here conceived,
God is that which lies at the back of nature, and at the back of man in
the sense of being in character broader and deeper than either of these,
and quite superior to any difference between them; he is the single,
all-inclusive, wholly indeterminate reality upon which the doubter
depends, and must depend; he is as nameless and unspeakable as he is
indeterminate and all-inclusive, and he is real and perfect only as so
nameless. To theology, God is determinate; to doubt, imperfect if
determinate. At times, perhaps only half in earnest, or at least not
clearly knowing if he is in earnest or if he wishes others to think him
so, the doubter speaks of nature as his God, of the hills, or the
fields, or the sea, or the sky, or the busy street as his church, or the
great book of the universe as his Bible. At times, with the deepest
emotion and with open avowal, nature and God are fully one to him, and
the poetry, or the science, or the philosophy, to which his doubting
leads him, is veritably a religious revelation. But always his doubting,
as he knows it, as he is honest with it, is an appeal, not merely to
nature as physically a powerful agent in the life he is pursuing, nor to
others like himself who, by sharing, [p.027] may lighten his distress
and enhance his final victory, but also to a full, inclusive experience;
to a life, perhaps like his own, yet indeterminately deeper than any he
has known; to a mind and a heart, such as he knows must be present in
that which surrounds him and moves within him, in knowledge more
enlightened and in emotion more inspired, than his doubting mind and
faltering heart have ever been; and such a life or such a mind or heart,
whatever name it be called by, is God. Can mind appeal to anything but
mind, or heart to anything but heart? And doubt--can it be doubt without
the appeal?
The doubter who refuses or hesitates to speak the name of God may thus
be a protestant, but plainly he is no atheist. A mere name, in any case,
is quite as likely to obscure as to illumine the reality; the
chiaroscuro effect must ever belong to it. Doubt is no road to atheism.
As a way to theism it may be beset with hardship, and its goal may be
quite beyond the horizon; but the doubter is not by nature an atheist;
quite the contrary. As no other, feeling dependent, he is a seeker, and
even a confident seeker after what is perfect. He truly and confidently
seeketh, for he seeketh after what hath neither visible form nor body,
what is without habitation or name, what, like the Son of Man, hath not
where to lay its head. He seeketh, what his very seeking itself is, not
a God, but the life of the God.
* * * * *
The general facts about doubt are now before us, and although much needs
yet to be said in explanation, and a further fact is reserved for a
[p.028] concluding chapter, still not so darkly as it began this first
chapter in our confession of doubt has come, perhaps somewhat abruptly,
to an end. We have next, entering more fully and critically into the
conditions of our human experience, to scrutinize closely our ordinary
habits of mind, those common-sense views of things that on the whole
prevail among men. In these ideas, impulsive, unreasoning, above all
often flatly contradictory, we shall find some of the strongest reasons
for our doubting nature.
[1] _Mental Development of the Child and the Race. Methods and
Processes_. By James M. Baldwin. Macmillan, 1895.
[2] Let me add, that if certain people, struggling in the present maze
of educational theory, and objecting, with a zest and a combativeness
that fairly belie their contentions, to the use of interest as the
primal educational motive, if these people would only recognize change
as always a part of interest, their greatest trouble would be removed.
They refuse to have education easy or pleasant; interest, they insist,
must make it so; and doubtless the advocates of interest are in part to
blame for this view; but change, which to my mind is involved in all
interest, includes resistance and struggle; change is ever a challenge
to effort; and, such being the case, an education led by interest is not
necessarily easy or idly pleasant. The real meaning of the interest
theory, at least as I have to understand it, is simply (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 over expected to do, or ever did any thing
without these? The interest theory, then, would not eliminate hardship
or discipline, but, to my understanding, by making education serve
actual life, would substitute a natural for an artificial and externally
imposed hardship. Not hardship, but real achievement makes the educated
man.
[p.029]