If the doubter were brought into court under indictment for his offences
against common sense, against ordinary experience and belief, and the
jury of his peers sitting upon the case were composed, as of course it
would be likely to be, of faithful believers chosen at random from the
different walks of practical life, no better defence could possibly be
offered than a simple statement of the incongruities which the
consciousness of ordinary life is constantly addicted to. True, for some
reason lying deep in human nature, a defence that ends by convicting the
jury of error, is hardly likely to lead to the immediate discharge of
the prisoner; judges or jurymen are not in the habit of taking a rebuff
in that way; but in course of time the prisoner will be justified, and
his justification, however tardy, is all that now concerns us. To his
defence, therefore, and the discomfiture of his judges, but to the
latter without any malice, we turn at once.
And where shall we begin? Our predicament in this defence is something
like that of the small boy, bewildered over the task of "picking up" his
nursery. [p.030] "I can't do it," he says. "There are so many things; I
can't tell which to take first." Poor little fellow! If he halts now,
what will he do when the littered room--I had almost said the littered
playroom--of his later life confronts him? Contradictions under foot
everywhere are certainly not less confusing than blocks, horses, papers,
trains, marbles, picture-books, and the like--or unlike--scattered over
a nursery floor.
Here, for example, in practical life is the natural, physical world. How
real, brutally real, it is; its very law is fate; its forces are no
respecters of persons, inexorably ruling and compelling all alike,
giving life and taking it, full of the grimmest humour, raising hopes
only to cast them down. Is some one rash enough to suggest that things
physical are only so many ideas, real only as states of mind, of God's
mind possibly, in some way coming to consciousness in the senses of men?
The practical man knows a thing or two about that. He kicks a stone, or
strikes his fist loudly upon a table, and so ends the matter, laughing
the mad idealist away. And yet, prestissimo change! What do we hear him
saying now? This brutally real world of physical things and powers is
but a fleeting show; a thing only of space and time. What is really real
and abiding is the spiritual that is everywhere and always. Another
world there is, not to be spoken of in the same breath with this present
world, a world compared with which this is but a mist before the eyes.
In so many familiar ways this duplicity towards what is real is
manifest. People go to church to do such a wonderfully strange thing;
nothing more [p.031] nor less than to save their real souls from an
unreal world, or sometimes to hide a real worldliness under unreal rites
or symbols. "You may think me worldly, selfish, sensuous," says some
one, "and I can not deny that often I do seem so, but this life of mine
is ever only a yearning after the things that are spiritual, for which,
as you see, I pray so earnestly, and which have nothing at all to do
with one's worldly life." Yes, we do see, and particularly we see that
things spiritual are often an impertinence in worldly affairs. The "real
self" never does the things that are really done. Only this, just this
is where the duplicity lies. Again, from some one else, a practical man
presumably and an accuser of the doubter, we hear the following: "Only
the spiritual life is real; look to it that you fear, as I fear, deeply
and constantly the material world hanging like a sword over us all." Can
it be, as would certainly appear, that superstition is still among us,
that so readily we can give reality to unreality, that belief in ghosts
still holds our human minds? Once upon a time--at least once--the
Christian Church rose in bitter resentment because a certain man, by
merely questioning the separate reality of the physical world,
threatened to deprive the holy priesthood, with all its time-honoured
prerogatives, of its heaven-appointed labour. Yet what is to be said of
a church that prefers to think of an independent physical world, by
which man is bound and damned, in order to save for itself the task,
either hopeless or useless, of rescuing him? Labelling a man "rescued"
or "Christian" does not make another-world creature of him. In political
history, too, what [p.032] a paradox it is that kingship by divine right
has always been also kingship by physical might. The practices of an
avowed supernaturalism have always been strangely materialistic.
So, in high places and in low, in the affairs of men now and in the
past, the physical and the spiritual have ever been in a most remarkable
relation; each real in and by itself, but with a most unusual courtesy
also unreal at the slightest motion from the other; each now supreme,
and now wholly subject; each now the whole life of man, and now the very
opposite, the antipodes of all that is human; and each self-existent and
independent, yet never without its real need of the other. Here surely
is contradiction, or vacillation, in experience that is, to say the
least, very confusing to him who reflects.[1]
But, to take up something else certainly not less confusing to the
ordinary mind, "practical," and unaccustomed to reflection, this is a
world of separate, individual things, of chairs, hands, atoms, eyes,
stars, men, stones, books, leaves, rivers, lives, mountains, relations,
notions, distances, days or years, and so on, [p.033] indefinitely and
above all indiscriminately; a world, moreover, into which in part God,
in part man, defying an equally powerful agent of chaos or dissipation,
has put at least for a time a certain kind of order, an order that might
be said to be good enough for all practical purposes. Yet with all its
indiscriminate manifoldness, and with the irregular, uncertain conflict
between chaos and order, it is nevertheless a single world, in short,
just one more individual thing, one more example, perhaps outdoing all
others, of the marvellous license with which human beings are wont to
speak and think of a "thing." Chairs, hands, mountains, men, stars, and
the whole universe, are all "things," and in this world of things, that
is itself another thing, or, should I rather say, _apart from_ this
world of things, that is another thing, there are two, at least two,
discordant powers taking turns at making order and disorder.
Confusion indeed! Nor have I exaggerated it. The loose association of
chairs, distances, and days; the easy assumption of two supreme agents
working against each other; the certain uncertainty about these agents
being in the world or out of it, of it or not of it; and the readiness
with which the whole universe, the all-inclusive thing, is treated as
only one more thing to be included: these habits of the ordinary mind
show a confusion that seems like insanity. Can we even face them safely
and soberly?
For special regard I select just one, perhaps the central one; the habit
of treating the universe, the unity of all things, as but one additional
thing, the whole, as if it were only another part, the complete [p.034]
and infinite as if distinct from or outside of what is finite or
incomplete; or again, in good old philosophical terms, the One as if it
were another and so in effect, but one of the Many. Now some there are,
and their number may be large, who never have thought of the
contradiction and consequent confusion in the notion of a single world
made up of many single things, yet itself another thing, or of the
Infinite as external to the Finite, or of the One as not in and of the
Many, but the contradiction is there, and can scarcely need more than
mention to be seen.
Even in theory, scientific or philosophical, the wholeness or unity of
the many things of the world has sometimes been taken for just one more
thing, as when Anaximander taught that it was "that thing which is no
one of the world's things," or for one of the many things supposed by it
to be unified, as when Thales so naïvely declared all things to be
water. Anaximander and Thales were only ancient Greeks, albeit very wise
and enlightened Greeks, living as early as 600 B.C., but in very recent
times they have had followers. Electricity has been taken as the one
force of all other forces. Our chemists, some of them, have been hunting
down the one element among the rest. Statesmen and churchmen have often
dreamt of one man as somehow in his single person expressing the unity
of all human life, and more than once they have even imagined him
present in the flesh. God, although the Being in whom we, as ourselves
persons, live and move and have our being, has Himself been another
person. Society and its supposed component individuals have made two
orders [p.035] of existence. Life and living creatures; history and its
many events; the solar system and its planets: nature and all her
various kingdoms: these have also been held apart, making amazing
dualisms. But, simply to repeat from above, taking the whole or the
unity of all things as itself an independent thing, as itself one more
thing, is a contradiction that needs only to be stated clearly to be
appreciated. Let me hope that I have stated it clearly.
Nor is this particular conflict in our ordinary ideas yet before us in
all its fatefulness, for--as if to defy the principle of consistency to
the very last degree of its forbearance--we are often, if not usually,
given not only to unifying our world of things in terms of just one more
thing, or of persons in terms of just one more person, but also to
thinking of this one more thing, or person as _sui generis_, as
altogether different in nature and substance. So do we mingle our
duplicity about reality with that about the unity of things. The many,
for example, are physical or of the substance of matter; the one is
ideal or of the substance of mind or spirit. The many persons are merely
human, the One is divine. Strange, indeed, that men should ever take one
more as the unity of all the rest, but if possible it is at least, at
first sight, stranger that this one more should be relegated to a sphere
wholly apart and peculiar. In the madness of such compounded
contradiction there may lurk real method, but of the contradiction and
of the compounding there can be no question.
Even the soul, a something, an entity, that each one of us has been in
the habit of claiming for himself [p.036] and of holding very sacred and
inviolate too, has been subjected to the same way of thinking.
Doubtless, since God has not been spared, we should hardly expect the
soul to escape. We view the soul so materialistically, even while we
insist that it is not material. We say, we think, that it is something
in the body; yet, of course, we are at our wit's end to tell just what
particular place it occupies there. Similarly, God is supposed to be
somewhere in the Universe, yet in no assignable place, and the chemist's
universal atom is somewhere also, though surely not in the same place,
and, wherever it be, waiting with its own, yet certainly a divine
patience that ought to be inspiring, for experimental discovery. But
with regard to the soul, although the life and unity of the body,
although one of the things in the body, the soul itself is not bodily at
all; it can enter the body and is important--who dares say how
important?--to the body, and it can, as at death, leave the body, but
though for a time in, it never is of the body. A strange standpoint
certainly, but men insist that it is quite as true as it is strange. It
seems very much like saying that when you build a house, in order to
ensure it real solidarity, to give it real permanence and integrity, you
should make a special point of putting your bricks or your lumber
together, not with clinging, well-set mortar, or strong pins and
straight-driven nails, but so much more sensibly, because so much
further from what would be like the material bricks or lumber, or like
the equally material mortar or nails, with those real and really compact
things, absolutely continuous or indivisible, or at least indestructible
[p.037] even when disintegrated, empty space and pure uneventful time.
With such space and time there would be union indeed I But, again,
strange as such a procedure in building a house would be, men insist or
at least I can readily imagine their insistence, that houses are built
in that way, and built successfully. The method may seem absurd, but
they insist that it is not madness. Are not abstract plans and such
seemingly unsubstantial things as mathematical formulæ, which are very
near to being made of empty space and time, the real strength and
integrity of all our great modern structures? And the soul, whatever be
said of its being an immaterial thing, is nevertheless, even for being
both immaterial and thing, the very sinew of the body.
Here may be method, then, and sanity, but there is always contradiction,
obstinate contradiction, compounded contradiction! The soul, unity of
the body, is only another thing or part in the body, and at the same
time, though in the body, it is after all not really of the body.
Possibly, perhaps necessarily, such patent contradiction, and, more than
all, such compounding of contradiction, like doubling a negative, make
for what is without contradiction, but this wholesome result is not
consciously intended, and in the face of all, whatever our hopes or our
beliefs, we must feel grave doubts and confess our doubting. Those who
do build better than they know, if enlightened, would not again build in
the same way. Two contradictions may be better than one, but even two
make us wonder.
Closely connected with the contradictions in our [p.038] customary ideas
of reality, and ideas of wholeness or unity, there is the way in which
we calmly take opposite sides in our notions about space and time, and
about that very fundamental factor of our experience--causation. These
are, all of them, so general and fundamental as possibly to seem too
abstruse even for mention in this place, since throughout these chapters
we are courting simplicity, but of space, and time, and causation, only
what is very simple needs to be said. Thus to the ordinary consciousness
how fatally things are separated from each other by conditions of space
and time. Then is not now. Here is not there. Space and time are only
physical and as brutal as all things physical, separating this from that
with a finality that knows no degree. Lovers, continents apart, despair
over the cruel distance. Time tears us ruthlessly from those dear to us.
What is to be, as well as what was, though in the next moment, is
absolutely beyond our grasp. Could anything be freer from dispute than
the reality and the separating brutally of space and time? Yet, almost
at a whisper, all distance and all duration become as nothing. Do not
the lovers write to each other, flatly and passionately denying that
they are far apart? Do we not constantly forestall the future and retain
the past? Indeed, when all is said, a thousand years are as one day, and
all the places of the earth are one. So real, and so vast, and so
physical to us but a moment ago, space and time have now passed into
mere phantoms of the imagination. We live, then, not only in a world
that is brutally spatial and temporal, but also, and at the same time,
[p.039] in a world that is not spatial and not temporal at all; and
living here--or there?--we have again to wonder and to doubt even in our
belief. To our own constant amazement we find that we make our life a
bridge over what would seem to be an absolutely impassable chasm.
As for causation our temerity is not less surprising. Wet and dry moons,
unlucky Fridays, holy and unholy numbers, haunted houses, so-called
providences, free in the sense of indifferently, irresponsibly free
wills and fiat deities with their suddenly made worlds may not be
generally in vogue at the present time, at least among the better
educated, the enlightened and not infrequently conceited classes, but
even among the wise and the consciously informed they have their natural
offspring, and I am not so sure that many of them might not be found
almost intact, at least in the more retired parts of the consciousness
of my readers. To illustrate, for some if not for all of us, this is a
world of many free and independent causes, yet also it is the single
effect of one cause; it is again, our mood having changed, the single
effect of two absolutely unlike beings or natures, each of them an
all-powerful cause; it is a sphere here and now of causal, creative,
productive activity, but it was itself created once for all long ago, at
a date which the exegete hopes--in the equally distant future!--to
determine for us; it contains some things that are only causes and some
that are only effects, or some, or all, that are both causes and
effects; it has parts that are the accepted causes of other parts; it
has causes, those acting now and the one original cause, that are
temporally [p.040] antecedent to their effects; and, not to make the
list longer, it is variously a world of one last effect, of one first
and only cause, of an infinite series of causes and effects, and in
whole, or in part, it constantly shows something made out of nothing or
nothing resulting from something. A wondrous world most assuredly; and
yet at first statement this record of our various notions of causation
may not appear as a very serious arraignment of the consciousness which
it exposes. Moreover some people actually glory in such a wonder as it
presents. But, to be plain, though also monotonous, the uncaused cause
or the effect that is only a part of the whole, or the cause or the
effect that refuses to share in the other's nature, or finally the
causation that is now so individual and so manifold and so effective,
and that was once so single and so complete, is something that must give
any thinker pause. Can a moving body move an immobile body? Can some
things in the universe be mobile; others not? Can the moving body and
the moved body belong to different moments of time? Can motion lead to
rest or rest to motion? But our ordinary ideas of causation would allow,
or even require, an affirmative answer to every one of these questions.
Alas! Shall this labour proceed? Can we afford to continue it? The
defence of the doubter is getting almost too successful; it is becoming
too personal to be pleasant. The task of picking up the room of our
ordinary life grows harder, not easier, as it moves forward. Every thing
that we touch tells of a spirit of violence in our nature. Even the
small boy can not have been more lawless, for his toys were all [p.041]
battered perhaps, but not, like ours, all broken. Can we afford to go
on? Afford it or not, we simply can not help ourselves, for our
self-confidence is already shattered; our attention to the disorder is
already beyond our control; each one of us is the doubter we would
defend.
Here close at hand, where we have to see it, is another contradiction
common in all human experience. It inheres in our conceits about
knowledge. For us, on the one hand, the world we know not only really
is, the tree out yonder or the planet miles and miles away being really
and actually there, but also is just the world which our knowledge
reports to us. What we have knowledge of is in our belief a real thing
in and by itself, and we know it literally and directly, not
figuratively, not afar off through symbols; we know it as it is; we know
a real world, and we know it face to face. Yet, on the other hand, with
all this simple confidence in our knowledge, what are we also given to
saying, or assuming when we do not say it? Even in the moment of our
confidence we humble ourselves with the cry of our utter foolishness,
making our recognized foolishness only a counter-conceit. What but
perfect folly is our knowledge before God's knowledge! "Illusion! The
dream of a few hours or a few years!" is so often the best we can say of
the whole fabric, past and present, of human consciousness. Not now, but
only in the hereafter are we to see reality face to face; now we see
only very darkly, if at all.
Some one here protests strenuously, raising an objection that might very
properly have been raised [p.042] before. Thus, I am told that only
different people, or only the same people at different times, ever hold
two opposite views, whether about knowledge or any thing else; never one
and the same person at the same time holds them both; and so the present
arraignment can not be as serious as it is made to appear. Well, with
this objection I can agree in part, for there is at least a half-truth
in it, but by no means does it tell, either in general or in particular,
that is, with regard to the special case of the conceits about
knowledge, the whole story of double living or double thinking among
men. Indeed the easy way, in which men make the distinctions of society
or the distinctions of time bear the responsibility for what must always
in the end be the conflicts of their personal lives, is but another
illustration of the difficulties besetting their ordinary views of
things. Duplicity of view, like anything else in experience, must always
be more than a matter of different people or different times, for the
simple reason that, whether directly personal or not, it is present in
the environment of the individual person. So, even if those two
positions, confidence in worldly knowledge and religious trust and
humility, for the sake of argument be momentarily associated only with
different persons or social classes or times, our present point will
really be just exactly as pointed, for there is always a third person or
class or time into whose direct single experience the duplicity or
contradiction is bound to enter. Consider, for example, the case of a
child. For a part of the week he is perhaps at school; on Sunday at
church; and the life in which he thus takes part must [p.043] appear to
him, there being in all probability little or no reservation on either
side, to be hopelessly divided against itself. Now is knowledge power;
now hindrance and greatest danger. Now he is to learn all he can; now,
on the other hand, to forget what he may have learned. So is the
conflict about him made his personal conflict, and exactly as in his
case, so in all human experience the individual must share personally
whatever the environment affords.
The individual and the environing society are the closest of blood
relations, though we often allow ourselves, all too easily as has been
said, to lose sight of the fact; they live under the same roof, and rely
for sustenance on the same fare; and while to some the contradictions of
life may be overlooked as personally impertinent and unimportant, being
referred wholly to the environment, they are plainly the unavoidable
heritage and the personal responsibility of every individual that counts
himself a member of the human race. The objection, then, that was raised
does not remove contradiction as a cause of doubt, but merely emphasizes
what in a subsequent chapter must occupy us, the social aspect of
experience.[2] Thus, not only does experience, in ways now coming to our
view, teem with contradictions, and is contradiction a cause of doubt,
but also experience so conditioned is social as well as individual, a
matter of personal relations between man and man as well as a matter of
the single person's inner responsibility. Society in its manifold
classes, in its conflicts and in its history, may help us to see the
whole of experience, the unity [p.044] of experience on all sides and in
all parts, but it never does, and it never can, relieve the individual,
or deprive the individual, of any side or part of what makes up an
experience-whole. Grown men and women may be more definitely set in
their lives and their ideas to certain specific things than children,
but in no one, young or old, can such specialism ever be wholly
exclusive of any of the other things.
To return to our immediate interest, if men are given to being doubters
in their views about reality, spiritual and material; about unity or
wholeness; about space and time, on the one hand fatally vast and
independently real, and on the other formal and illusory; about
causality, so actual and positive now, and yet so complete yesterday, or
ever and ever so long ago; and about knowledge, so perfectly wise and so
thoroughly vain and foolish; if, I say, men are double in all these
different ways, in their moral judgments they seem, if possible, even
more confused, and the confusion, the division against themselves, is
the more serious for being with regard to what so directly concerns
personal life and human fellowship.
To begin with, as will indeed readily appear, the offences of our moral
judgments, which often, if not always, are largely influenced by
religious or rather theological conceptions, are only a peculiar
expression of the two-faced attitude towards causation, human persons or
wills being the causes specially involved. In general the causes of the
universe are of three sorts, those of natural force, those of
supernatural agency, and those of human agency, and although toward them
all essentially the same attitude is [p.045] assumed, it is worth our
while to consider particularly the causation that is commonly adjudged
to belong to the human will and the moral ideas that spring from it.
For the purposes of the moral consciousness we translate the two
conflicting powers of our world, or the spiritual reality and the
material, into two agents of good and evil respectively, each having a
power of doing whatever, true to its peculiar character, it may will to
do, and then, as if in accord with this way of thinking, we find two
distinct selves, a good self and an evil self, within each one of us,
and we also divide the body social into two exclusive classes, the class
of those who are identified with the righteous life and the class of
those given to the unrighteous life, the sheep and the goats, the elect
and the damned. But, to say nothing of the fact that these three ideas
of the two powers, the two selves and the two classes, cannot be made
really to accord with each other, although they possess an outward
agreement, is it not clear that any attempt to take the good and the
evil as two mutually exclusive things, be they spirits or selves or
classes, is to destroy at once the real substance of virtue and the real
value of the consciousness of evil? In practical life this means, what
everybody knows so well, that an isolated, unduly holy righteousness, a
sort of touch-me-not goodness, is bound to be empty, to be only
ritualistic and aristocratic or pharisaical, and in any one of these
respects it appears decidedly unrighteous; while an isolated
unrighteousness, besides having at least the moral worth of a protest
against its counterpart, is in itself exactly like the original [p.046]
sinfulness of the theologian; being unavoidable, it is wholly without
any warranted opprobrium. Indeed, it all but comes to this, that
righteousness as a fixed thing, fixed to a part of the universe or to a
part of the individual self or to a part of society, is really in just
so far evil, and the direct opposite of such righteousness is
proportionately good. Good and evil, then, may not mix well, but certain
it is that contradiction results from the common attempt of men to
regard either as untainted or untempered by the other.
Still, not upon this real difficulty in our moral judgments would I now
lay greatest stress, although it is real enough and important. In yet
another way our moral consciousness is at war with itself. In estimating
the worth of human conduct, so far as this is determined by its
initiation, we are in an almost hopeless tangle. We are more than likely
to think of other people as influenced by their environment in what they
do, of ourselves as quite original and responsible, as independent of
any such influences; or, more fully and more exactly, we are given to
referring our own bad deeds to environment, our good deeds to ourselves,
while for others we are prompted to do just the reverse, referring their
good deeds to environment, their bad deeds to themselves. Such is human
nature--not, to be sure, at its best, but common human nature; and even
when we escape the foregoing personally invidious distinctions, we
still--and this is the main point--treat self and environment as two
naturally conflicting, altogether independent sources of conduct. Two
different and independent sources of anything, [p.047] however, can only
make for conflict and contradiction. If only our courts of law could
judge responsibility either wholly from the determinations of
environment or wholly from those of personal will, or again, if only the
will and the environment could be seen as not so radically opposed, what
a simplification would ensue, and how much freer and more certain
justice would be. To venture on a variation of an aphorism, where
there's another way there is always a loophole; where there's
environment there is always a shifted responsibility; where there's a
"free will" there is always a will taken for some unperformed or
imperfectly performed deed.
So the double origin of conduct offers a very serious difficulty, which,
when it is understood, is not unlike that of the two powers or selves or
classes, but even more is to be said in exposure of our moral judgments.
Thus we have the confident conceit of freedom, of our own freedom in
good or our neighbour's freedom in evil, or in general of man's freedom
to act without regard to the determinations from environment, but we
have also a strange though possibly a fortunate way of qualifying the
very freedom that we claim. We claim freedom only to avow, almost in the
same breath, duties and responsibilities. We have the freedom, but only
the duties make it worth anything. A startling paradox this, so familiar
to us all: "I am free to do all that I ought to do," or, "I am free to
carry out certain necessities of my true life." A startling paradox;
and, above all, a strange way of escaping the necessities of
environment, unless, forsooth, it really opens the door, or supplies a
secret door, by which the [p.048] necessities of environment and the
necessities of one's true life can come together? If freedom demands
law, why should it hold aloof from the natural law, the law of
environment so definitely present? Possibly, then, as once before
suggested, one contradiction in experience may be the corrective of
another, the paradox of freedom and duty only correcting the
contradiction of two sources of conduct, personal will and environment.
In the case, for example, of the disposition to distinguish between
one's own acts and another's, with respect to their initiation by will
or by environment, to mingle duty and necessity with one's own supposed
freedom is equivalent in effect to denying one's neighbour's freedom
because of the restraints of his environment. But such considerations,
however promising for future reflection upon the conflicts in our moral
consciousness, are not of immediate interest. Our doubts may once more
find hope in the reflection that the faults of experience may balance
themselves, but we have no occasion to abandon our doubting as idle or
meaningless. Contradictions that balance each other, errors that are
mutually corrective, are still contradictions, are still errors.
So, to reduce our moral judgments, confusion and all, to small compass,
we are free, others are not; they are free, we are not; and our freedom
is bound by duty, by duty to the moral law, while their freedom, unless
a hopeless lawlessness, is bound by the environment and its law. Again,
good and evil are each unmixed, and moral acts serve two masters--that
is to say, spring from two sources. We may, therefore, [p.049] still
believe in morality--yet how can this be? And freedom--yet how is
freedom possible?
But finally, as last to be examined, there is the idea of law, just now
brought to attention. This idea is a focus for a good many conflicting
views. Witness the familiar argument from the knowledge of law in nature
to fatalism, an argument as absurd as it is widespread, for the bare
fact that we know the laws of nature really emancipates us from the
blind fate to which the argument points. Can knowledge ever mean
anything but freedom? Certainly no law can ever be known unless the
sphere of its operation accords with the nature of those who have the
knowledge. Simply to know is to share in and be at one with whatsoever
is known, and the clearer and more cogent or rational the knowledge, the
truer and realer is this participation or union. The law we know, then,
must have all the meaning and the natural authority of a law of our own
enactment, and so must actually have the sanction of our will. Will, I
say, cannot help sanctioning knowledge, for knowledge is always true to,
because conditioned by, the natural action of the knower. But no such
message of freedom, or say of human opportunity in natural necessity, is
commonly received by men at large from the evidences of law in nature.
Superstitiously they see only fate. Clear knowledge and blind fate!
Nor are we commonly satisfied with only so much superstition. We go
still further and make the case as bad as possible by treating the law
we know as if in its spirit, if not in its letter, it were final. In
other words, we view nature, with some of whose ways we [p.050] have
become conversant, not merely as a source of blind fate, or external
necessity, for our lives, but also as essentially and ultimately a
sphere of strictly mechanical routine. Yet here again we are surely
reasoning beyond our premises--the very essence of superstition--for the
routine we know can never answer substantially, or even formally, to
nature as she really is. Our positive knowledge, our knowledge that
arrives at specific formulæ, even though these formulæ reach the noble
dignity of mathematics, is bound to be in terms of some particular
experience, personal or national or racial; it is relative and special;
it is partial knowledge; and he is superstitious, and does, indeed,
argue beyond his premises, who takes the whole, whose law he does not
know, to be literally analogous to the part, whose law he thinks he
knows, but can in fact know only partially. No whole ever is one of its
parts, or merely analogous to one of its parts; _a_ law never is _the_
law, or even in its lawfulness literally analogous thereto; and
mechanicalism, whether as a popular or a philosophical "ism," has no
justification save just this false analogy.
And the prevalent confusion in the notions of law or lawfulness is of
course reflected in the corresponding notions of lawlessness. Here, as
with other negative terms, men forget that negatives necessarily are
quite relative to their positives. All specific, definitely manifest,
known and positive lawlessness simply must have some place in _the_ law
of things; it can no more be an absolute lawlessness than any human
routine can be supposed final; and, on the other hand, there can be no
positive law whose breaking has not some [p.051] sanction; there can be
no lawfulness which does not warrant some lawlessness. This truth,
perhaps as nothing else could, must show the error in the notion of
mechanical routine as affording an adequate description of the ultimate
nature of things. Where the whole always gives point to the negation of
any of its parts, where _the_ law always sanctions some breaking of any
law, to think of the whole in terms of its parts may be human, but it is
of the human which is prone to err. Those who would still insist upon
seeing only routine in law, and upon judging lawlessness as only
relative to such seeing, might do well, rising above their ordinary
views, to remember with some real appreciation that once upon a time the
law-breakers and the reformer were very closely associated; they were
associated in life, and at the end they were crucified together.
Whatever may be one's theology, there is a deal of food for thought in
those deaths on Calvary and in the several lives which they closed.
Lawlessness suggests the supernatural. So many have promptly concluded
that just as with the knowledge of law in nature human freedom must be
resigned, blind fate taking its place, so anything or anybody at all
supernatural, Satan--for example--as well as God, must once for all
withdraw. If law reigns, God can will whatever he wills only because the
law is so; the law is not so because he wills it; and this in common
opinion only makes him decrepit, without real initiative, dead. Yet,
once more, what superstition! The knowledge of law has never robbed man
of his freedom, nor even slain his God; or this at least: the loss of
freedom or the death of God, for [p.052] which any law that man has had
knowledge of has been responsible, has always been only the forerunner
of a larger and fuller freedom and of his God's resurrection and
glorification. This or that law may rob and may kill, but this or that
law, let me reiterate, never is _the_ law, and why common opinion has to
judge all things in heaven and earth, as if it were, is hard to
comprehend. Neither nature nor God, if these two need to be thought of
as two, is law-bound; each rather, with a meaning which I must hope now
to have made clear, is law-free. The law in which nature is free is as
infinite, as transcendent of any particular human experience as the
ever-developing freedom of man or as the will of God. And God, or the
Supernatural, is not confined to the narrow sphere of what man knows, as
man knows it; this stands only for what man calls nature. God is the
all-inclusive sphere or source of the absolute law, for which knowledge
can be only a constant striving, or which is itself even a party to the
constant striving. Somehow _the_ law must be a living thing, not a
routine: the supernatural must be not nature as she is known, but
nature's fullest and deepest life.
Very emphatically what has just been said about nature or God being
law-free, or about _the_ law being infinite, or not analogous in form or
substance, in spirit or letter, to any thing in positive knowledge, is
no argument for the Jonah story or even for the miracle of the wine at
Cana's wedding feast; and yet time and again people who apparently
should have done enough thinking to know better, to the great
satisfaction of thousands have used the infinity of [p.053] nature's or
God's lawfulness, which is to say the only partial and tentative
character of all human knowledge of law, as a clinching proof of all the
miracles in the Bible. Can they not see that like what is lawless in
general, the miraculous must be in the premises only relative to the
experience of the time? Even chance is not less so. The spiritual
meaning of those miracles may persist, for the miraculous we must always
have with us; but if even our relative, imperfect knowledge stands for
anything, if it be even a tentative knowledge, a working standpoint, the
literal truth of most, or even all of them, disappeared long ago.
Miracles, like laws, come and go; only the miraculous, like _the_ law,
goes on forever.
And this leads to something else, to something also very common, perhaps
the reverse of the foregoing. With what an unaccountable delight many of
us have accepted naturalistic explanations, for example, of the sun
standing still, or of the retreat of the waters of the Red Sea, or of
the Immaculate Conception, or of any of the many other marvels in either
the Old or the New Testament, and have thought that so our old beliefs
are to be preserved. I have myself heard honest and earnest men, even
members of an academic community, appeal to parthenogenesis as a fact in
nature which would at least make the miracle of Christ's birth
scientifically plausible as well as spiritually significant; but such an
appeal, besides being, in my opinion, positively irreverent, is as blind
religiously as it is ignorant scientifically. Cannot such men
appreciate, and cannot all others who do as they do also appreciate the
fact that naturalistic explanation of [p.054] any miracle, if really a
genuine explanation, may prove the fact, but must in just so far
destroy, I do not say the miraculous, which is indestructible, but the
particular miracle?
The lawful miracle, then--lawful, of course, so soon as explained--is
one more contradiction in our prevalent notions about law. That it
exemplifies, too, a habit of mind which is exercised by us in many
directions besides that of interpretation of the arbitrary things of the
Bible can hardly need be said. In life generally the arbitrary is
peculiarly fond of going to law, sometimes to what is called nature's
law, as when revolutionists of all sorts--strikers and radical
reformers--raise the cry of "natural rights," laying down the law as to
what men are by nature, and sometimes to "human" law, as when the
conservatives in government or business with their vested rights, be
these coal mines, oil fields, or political privileges, appeal for
"justice" to the courts or to the military.
But, to say no more, with the lawful miracle, with law the strange
support of what is arbitrary, with this as a very good example of the
duplicity which in general we are all of us wont to allow in our
practical life, the present exposure of our ordinary consciousness must
come to an end. With regard to the real substance of things, or to their
unity, or to the nature of space and time and causation, with regard to
the worth of knowledge, with regard to our human conduct, to its freedom
and responsibility, or finally with regard to the place of law in nature
and in the life of man, our ordinary consciousness is manifestly
inconsistent and vacillating--nay, is grossly contradictory; and we are
[p.055] led at least to suspect that the disorder which we have found is
inherent and essential, having the nature of an original human defect.
Such a defect, however, is cause for doubt; so that man, above all
"practical" man, having inconsistency or duplicity as almost, if not
quite, an uncontrollable habit with him, should be himself a prince of
sceptics.
And yet, although we have indeed found man spending at least his waking
hours in a room that seems disorder incarnate, and although before the
court of practical life the doubter seems thus to have been thoroughly
justified, while his too hasty judges are in turn condemned,
nevertheless the case for doubt is not of such a character as to leave
absolutely no hope for belief. Now and again in the evidence, as it has
been disclosed, have we not felt the presence of something, not yet
given its due weight, that would make man more than a mere doubter and
unbeliever? Have we not been led to suspect that somehow, without loss
of their reality and validity, the most cogent reasons for doubt, even
the contradictions in our views of things, might turn into bases of
belief, that an experience essentially paradoxical may not be as
hopeless as at first sight it may appear, that in all the madness there
is at least a chance of some method? The view of science, however, must
be examined before our attention can be turned definitely upon such a
possibility. Enough if in our present doubting we are still left with a
little hope.
[1] In the rise of Christian Science, against which I have no special
grudge, although I have already taken exceptions to its claims, there is
a special case, special because affecting a single, relatively small
class, of the popular hospitality to contradiction. Thus, the Christian
Scientists would reduce all reality to mind, but at the same time they
busily deny reality to a large group of mind facts, namely and notably,
the ideas of disease. Recently, it is true, according to the newspapers,
their healers have been told to "decline to doctor infectious or
contagious diseases," yet not because such diseases have any reality,
but because the illusion of them is so real as to make the "Christian"
treatment of them both imprudent and impractical. Philosophies and
religions of illusion are certainly weird, uncanny things!
[2] Chapter VII.
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