But, secondly, there is the scientist's ideal of specialism, which is at
once not less earnestly cherished and not less strikingly at constant
war with itself. What specialism for science means is known at least in
a general way to everybody, and that an objective science must be made
up of numberless independent inquiries needs only mention, since the
objective world, if really innocent of all personal or subjective
relations, is necessarily manifold and discrete, being made up of a
number of wholly separate details, and being approachable in every one
of its parts from a number of wholly separate standpoints. The objective
world apart from a subject is like a workshop without a workman--a
collection of unused and so unconnected tools and materials each one of
which may have an infinite number of uses; and the objective scientist
views it very much as a stranger, perhaps a savage--may I be forgiven
that mark--might view the lifeless shop, seeing now this thing, now
that, but never the living unity of all the things. So, to repeat, as
soon as the self or subject is removed and the world is turned
objective, all things and all views of things must fall [p.087] apart,
and science as the observation of such a world can be only "special."
Not so clear, however, or at least not so commonly appreciated, is the
peculiar fallacy and contradiction of specialism to which attention is
asked here. Once more is science to be seen as in a sense standing in
its own light, since it cannot be at once special and directly and
literally true and adequate.
To begin with, specialism makes vision, the mind's vision as well as the
sensuous vision, dim or distorted. It may even be said to induce a
species of blindness or, as virtually the same thing, to create in
consciousness curious fancies, strange perversions of reality, seen not
with the natural eye at all, but with the imagination, always so
ingenious and so original, and one might almost add so hypnotic, in its
power of suggestion over the senses. In ways and for reasons neither
unknown nor unappreciated by most men, specialism even closes one's eyes
and makes one dream. It makes the specialist among physicians see his
special ailment in every disorder, and every disorder in his special
ailment, and this so truly that merely to consult him may be to fall his
victim. True, he may never be, perhaps can never be, wholly wrong, and
his transgressions, conscious or unconscious, have often helped
discovery, but nevertheless his situation, not to say that of his
patient, is full of humour, and always among other troubles he is under
the error of partiality or one-sidedness. And in science generally the
specialist always does and always must dream. His dreams may be waking
dreams, but he is always transgressing his own proper bounds without
ever [p.088] clearly comprehending that he has transgressed. Nor, be it
admitted, can this necessity of dreaming be a wholly unmixed evil to
science. However unfavourably it may reflect on the final, literal
validity of any special science, it only shows nature, or reality,
preserving her unity against the attempted violence of specialism. It
shows that in spite of the specialist being all eyes for his own
peculiar object, the mind that is within him and that is above all
else--such, apparently, is the nature of mind--responsible not
exclusively to the special and sensuous, but to the all-inclusive and
essential, and is therefore bound to conserve for experience the
interests of an indivisible universe in every particular thing, leads
him, devotee that he is, patiently repeating his sacred syllable, into
most wonderful visions. For the sake of inclusiveness and reality his
mind projects his would-be special consciousness into regions of strange
subtlety and marvellous logical construction; as Oriental priest or
Occidental scientist he is a specialist, yet not without a mind, or a
real, ever-present world, which refuses to be special, and as he dreams
he comes to see, yet knows not that he sees, the whole universe. A
seeing blindness, then, is this specialism; a monomania too, but, of
course, conventional and respectable.
Mathematics and physics and chemistry and biology and psychology, not to
say also the social sciences, all depend upon the far-seeing mystical
visions of the mind, if not of the eye, upon the subtle, logical
constructions which their would-be scientific specialism, their desire
to know all things narrowly, forces upon them. Each one may be special,
but each as it [p.089] gains precision and as it becomes truly an
account of the facts, under the guidance of an exacting mind that at any
cost must present the whole to consciousness, conserves within itself
the common universe of them all by developing under what is called the
"scientific imagination" all sorts of indirections, disguises,
abstractions, logical constructions for the things and view-points of
the others. Each to be veracious has no choice but to be also voracious,
and when, for example, a physical scientist insists on seeing his world
only physically, while in reality it is of course, to say no more, a
world of chemical process also, and even of vital and mental character,
he is sooner or later constrained to admit to his thinking what above
were called abstractions or logical constructions, but what also pass
under the name of "working hypotheses." These are formally true to his
physical standpoint, but any outsider in order to explain why they are
hypotheses that _work_ must call them compensating or conserving
conceptions--in short, logical constructions that are, or that in part
involve, substitutes for the neglected points of view, being, as it
were, the secret agents of a universe refusing to be divided. To
characterize them in just one more way, a science's working hypotheses,
results as they are of science's blind but brilliant dreaming, many or
all of them, are doors in the panelling by which the other sciences are
quietly admitted to a room seemingly tightly closed to all comers. Every
science, and this the more as it becomes scientific, must entertain all
the others, however unwittingly. Tennyson's "flower in the crannied
wall," so often plucked, is nothing in [p.090] all-inclusiveness when
compared with a well-developed special science. No science, physical or
psychical, biological or social, ever does or ever can live to itself
alone. It may will to, but it does not and it cannot. All the others
live with it and for it--nay, they all live in it.
Yet in actual practice, what are these working hypotheses that work
because they are compensating conceptions or doors in the panelling? No
veracity without unrestrained voracity is interesting as a formula, but
how verify it? Verification, or illustration, is now imperative.
Illustration, however, is very difficult for a reason which the
scientists now on trial must allow me to mention. The scientists know
too much about the sciences, or at least of them, while I know too
little. Still, as too much knowledge is often the source of obscurity,
and so only a form of ignorance, my situation is not altogether
hopeless. Thus, while it is true that the scientists are likely to
insist, even in the face of a mind bound to preserve the unity of an
indivisible universe in all the varied studies and conclusions of
science, that physics is only physics and chemistry only chemistry and
biology only biology and psychology only psychology, and while also all
illustrations must come from the field of their special studies, and may
therefore only set them more firmly in the wilful blindness of their
specialism, still the principle of a conserving mind, or an eternally
conserved truth or an indivisible reality, is a disturbing influence
which they cannot evade. Then, too, I am forgetting and allowing them to
forget a very important fact in scientific work to-day. In these [p.091]
times the running together or merging of different sciences, as if
through something of the nature of a chemical reaction, is a very
familiar phenomenon. It is as familiar, although not so loudly heralded,
as that of the railroads and industrial companies; and it has been
taking place with such persistence and confidence as actually to suggest
a natural affinity, each of the sciences involved having the rich
experience of discovering itself already in the others. This fact, then,
must make illustration less difficult, since, in a way that must appeal
to the scientist as no merely theoretical considerations can, it proves
or goes very far toward proving what is to be illustrated. Moreover,
specific illustration is hardly necessary in the sphere of the different
physical sciences, or again, in that of the social or the psychological
sciences, for within each one of these groups the affinity but just now
referred to has been very clearly exemplified, as in the interesting
case of physics, chemistry, and mathematics, which nowadays are one
science, not three, and which can be held apart only on methodological
grounds, not metaphysically. Illustration, accordingly, appears, after
all, to be needed only for the specialism that separates the physical
and the psychical sciences.
Physiological psychology and physically experimental psychology, both of
them suggestive of nothing less incongruous than seething ice, are sure
to come to mind at once; but also there is a mathematical psychology,
comparable with a developmental mechanics and biometrics in biology, and
hardly a single field of science, however apparently distant and alien
in nature and interest, has not contributed something [p.092] to
psychology or to epistemology, the general science of knowledge. But now
it is likely to be objected by some one that just because sciences,
whether in clearly related or in widely separated fields, are useful to
each other, just because they can serve, as they do, in the rôle of
methods of each other, they are not necessarily in any real and natural
affinity. May not their association be purely one of utility, involving
no surrender of special individuality and requiring in any case only
temporary relationship? The question is absurd. Any means that really
serves an end must have something in common with the end it serves; and,
again, an end that really sanctions a means, whatever the means be, must
itself be, at least potentially, which is after all to say essentially,
in and of the means employed. Different sciences, then, even physics and
psychology, or natural science and theology, cannot be even temporarily
methods of each other without partaking in some way, under some disguise
or other, through some peculiarity in their conceptions or in the
relations of their conceptions, of each other's subject-matter.
In view of this fact of mutual participation of nature and idea among
the sciences that use each other, I have myself conceived, and in
another place have given expression to, what appropriately may be called
a physical psychology or epistemology.'[1] This new hybrid science is
especially concerned with nothing more nor less than those substitutes,
disguises, or [p.093] indirections, really present in all the physical
sciences, for the peculiar nature, for the peculiar sort of unity,
intensive instead of extensive or qualitative instead of quantitative,
or say also even vital and spiritual instead of physical, which is
always associated with mind. In conservation of matter, energy, what you
will, in plenitude, in motion as only relative and so as always under a
principle of uniformity and constancy or even immobility, in motion too
as inclining to vibration, which suggests poise or tension, or to
rotation, in which we see rest as well as motion, and finally, not to
extend what might be a long list, in the infinity of space and time or
of quantity, the physical sciences have hidden entrances for the silent,
usually unnoticed admission of what is psychical. But I may seem to be
jumping too far, to be presuming too much. Then put the case in this
way--not quite so direct, but to the same goal. All of these
conceptions, so necessary to a "working" physical science, need very
little examination to be seen to be treacherous to the physical
standpoint and its peculiar categories. One might as well try to make
water unsupported assume definiteness of form as to conceive the
conservation of energy or plenitude or the relativity of motion in the
character of what is physical, or at least of what is properly and
conventionally physical. Being treacherous, then, to the physical
science that has conceived them, they are, as was said, doors for what
is not physical; hidden doors, perhaps, but certainly doors to be opened
at will; and by them mind is bound to enter the physical world and its
sciences. To those familiar with the history of philosophy, the
speculation [p.094] of the early Greek thinkers, notably Anaximander,
Parmenides, and Anaxagoras, will afford illustration of the physical
view running, in spite of itself, into treacherous conceptions, and
eventually reaching the discovery of their treachery and with it the
idea of mind or _Nous_.[2]
So for science is the material world, what properly it is often said to
be, a sort of dark mirror of man's inner life, of his psychical nature.
Physical science as consciousness of the outer material world is not,
and has itself shown that it cannot be, merely and exclusively physical.
By virtue of its working hypotheses, which are as secret doorways, it is
psychical also. Though darkly and indirectly it is our human
self-consciousness. Perhaps it is our self-consciousness rendered
impersonal or the self seen through the mirror of not-self or through
the disguise of what a photographer would call a "negative"; and, if it
may be so described, we are reminded of Burns:--
O wad some power the giftie gie us,
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
And foolish notion.
Only the bonnie Robert himself was too much of a specialist in poetry to
see that natural science was the very thing he prayed for.
And just as there is thus a physical psychology, so [p.095] in like
manner there is a psychological or epistemological physics, which in its
turn is concerned with the indirections, or doors in the panelling,
present in all the psychical sciences, for those very physical things
quantity and matter. The devil will have his due; even an optimistic
theology has to recognize him. And psychology has a sensuous self, the
self of the purely sensuous consciousness, which has always involved it
in a curious psychical atomism, a projection, in a word, of the physical
on the plane of the psychical. Sensationalism, too, as a psychological
theory in the history of thought has always been associated with
materialism.
With regard, then, to the separation even of the psychical and the
physical sciences, which obviously has at its base the distinction
between mind and matter, we observe that our principle of affinity and
mutual participation still holds. By a sort of projection or
reproduction mind and matter both appear, the one openly, the other in
disguise, in each kind of science. However unawares, the physical
entertains mind; the psychical matter; and specialism, so far as
standing for anything more than scientific method, has to withdraw from
its last stronghold. The very dreaming of the scientific imagination is
its undoing.
For other evidence against the integrity and adequacy of specialism,
showing how mind defies specialism and conserves its indivisible
universe, there are the following simple but certainly interesting
facts. All the different sciences, however special and however
apparently alien in subject matter, are wont to use the same general
methods--as, for example, the laboratory or experimental method or the
historical [p.096] method, the fatal consequences of which to the cause
of pure specialism may easily be inferred. History is famous for
overcoming differences. The common interest in mathematics must also be
mentioned, for mathematics, through its latest developments in danger of
turning into a pure logic, is quite independent of all those material
differences that separate the different sciences. It is formal and
universal, not special; so that the special science that would also be
mathematical appears somehow to be at least in aim as universal as it is
special. Perhaps mathematics more than anything else has fed the
voracity which we have seen veracity to exact. Has it not been the chief
agent in the virtual annihilation of the barriers between physics and
chemistry? This particular mingling of the special sciences has been
mentioned here already, but mathematics is threatening the party-walls
of all the other sciences also. Further, what are we to infer from the
idea that all sciences seek law? Certainly law is not special as science
has seemed to be. Somehow law is not many, but one. Many laws can only
be different phases or cases of one law. The very essence of law is to
be one and single and all-embracing. To put the case theologically,
could any one suppose that God made the laws of chemistry and sociology
and psychology as so many separate and independent enactments? On such a
supposition he had been a strange God indeed, lacking the very thing,
unity of being and character, which men have come to associate with
divinity, and what theology demands of God, science, even against its
own specialism, must demand of its object. Again, [p.097] the way in
which by implication, when not openly, one science is given to handing
over its hardest problems to another is very instructive as well as
amusing. Not many years ago I was present at a joint meeting, a
good-natured and doubtless honestly ambitious conference of biologists,
physiologists, and psychologists, and the addresses then made have often
reminded me of one of Thomas Nast's famous cartoons: A closed ring of
political grafters, none other than the notorious Tweed and his
followers, each pointing to his neighbour and putting on him the
responsibility of a very embarrassing situation. "Find the rogue" was
the artist's inscription; but with apologies for the association, we can
easily change it to "Find the special science." And, lastly, in this
list of the simple evidences against an adequate specialism there are
the conspicuous analogies other than those of common method or common
interest in law, which are always easily traced among the sciences, even
the sciences in the opposite camps of matter and mind, of any particular
time. Atomism in physics is contemporary with atomism in psychology and
with individualism in political philosophy; a monarchical politics with
an anthropomorphic, creationalistic theology and an also monarchical
physically centred astronomy, whether heliocentric or geocentric; and a
Newtonian astronomy, which really makes a law or force instead of an
individual body the centre and control of the solar system, with
democracy or constitutionalism, and with inductive instead of deductive
logic and naturalistic instead of dogmatic theology; so that at no time,
whatever the scientist's special interest, whatever his [p.098] special
syllable, can he fail to have at least a formal sympathy with others.
Such analogies among the sciences, so often recognized and so
absorbingly interesting to the students of the history of thought, if
not exactly doors in the panelling, may be said to make the panelled
partitions at least translucent if not unsubstantial and transparent.
But the most important fact in illustration of our case against
specialism is yet to be considered, and unfortunately it takes us where
to some the waters may seem dangerously deep. Not only for reasons
already given and emphasized is the special science a misnomer, a
contradiction in terms, except in so far as specialism be taken merely
as an incident, not without its humour, of scientific method, but also
for the same reasons (and chiefly because the truth and reality of the
universe are bound to be conserved) every special science must sooner or
later develop its doctrines either into direct paradoxes or into tenets
that oppose and contradict each other. Thus, as has been shown,
specialism in science is itself a paradox, and, as now asserted, every
special science assuming precise form and real validity becomes a home
of paradoxical or contradictory doctrines. Indeed, these doctrines just
through their opposition appear be the most effective agents of that
compensation for neglected points of view, or conservation of all points
of view, which we are insisting is for ever forced upon the scientific
specialist. In the cases of physical epistemology and epistemological
physics we have already seen doctrines working to this end. In those
cases the real treachery to the avowed [p.099] standpoints lay in
virtual when not open contradiction. And, for the general principles, is
it not quite clear that nothing so surely as contradiction in any given
point of view, or in the specific doctrines developed under it, can
serve the interests of any other points of view? I have heard it said,
but by whom originally I do not know, that a paradox or contradiction
was only the mind on tiptoe struggling to look over a very high wall.
The point is just this. The special science, because special or partial
and because at the same time courting scientific character or validity,
that is, conformity with reality, must be relative, formal, abstract,
artificial, unreal, but also for exactly the same reason it must
contrive to admit to its conceptions other view-points than its own. Its
own peculiar view-point is relative, but that it may attain actual
validity it is bound to overcome its relativity by admitting, secretly
perhaps yet not less truly, other points of view; and paradox or
contradiction is the natural door for such admissions, the original
view-point being tenacious to the last. Physics says: "I will be physics
through thick and thin; I will be physics though the heavens fall and
though dreadful paradoxes arise"; and in like manner psychology cries
aloud: "I will be psychology though I suffer from a splitting dualism
for my pains." Have you, gentle reader, never held and held and held to
some particular notion about things, modifying the details perhaps
little by little, but always imagining yourself strictly loyal to the
old, old view, and then suddenly discovered your consciousness alive
with contradictions? If you have, you know, possibly [p.100] too well,
the natural history of every special science, and also you can
sympathize deeply with the hen and her cherished chicks that proved ugly
ducklings. The special science, I repeat, must be hospitable, however
grudgingly, to strangers, though at the expense of becoming thoroughly
divided against itself. Such hospitality is an obligation--call it
logical if you will, or moral or metaphysical, for the name matters not
if it only suggests coercion--which is not less binding upon the
scientific spirit than upon the spirit of racial unity, always urgently
present in you and me. You and I may be so special or exclusive as to
drive strangers from our doors, but an impulse to call them back and
give them entertainment always follows--an impulse that is only the
necessary reaction of the expulsion. Humanity is indivisible in spite of
our asserted exclusiveness, and nature is indivisible, too, in spite of
specialism. Partiality of any sort, along any line, in any field, can
never long persist without, though often darkly and indirectly, though
by the way of bold, unrecognized, or unconfessed paradox, receiving from
outside all that it would exclude. I am not merely repeating. At first,
we saw only that the scientific imagination brought to the special
science as its working hypotheses certain conserving or compensating
conceptions; then, that these conceptions involved treachery to the
science that harboured them; but now we are face to face with the fact
that their complete, their most effective form is the paradox.
Would that I had the ability to write with the penetration and the
clearness of statement that the [p.101] subject should certainly elicit,
upon the strange equanimity with which mankind, in science or in
practical life, receives and faces a direct negative or an open
contradiction. Perhaps the habit of easy division into positive and
negative, the ready resort to dichotomy, explains the mystery; perhaps
the fact that negation or opposition is and can only be in kind, that
there never is or can be any real change or need of change in a mere
negation, is at least an important factor in the case; perhaps, again,
the very hopelessness of the dualism, which a flat, unequivocal negation
plainly involves, is also to the point; but, beyond all peradventure, we
do accept the direct negative with a patience, even an indifference,
that may greatly assist our natural conservatism, whether of thought or
life, but that on being recognized certainly does arouse our wonder.
Good and its opposite evil, true and false, real and unreal, unity and
plurality, life and death, the indivisible and the divisible, rest and
motion, plenum and vacuum, immaterial and material, actuality and
illusion, lawfulness and lawlessness: these and so many other opposites
are the common stock-in-trade of our living and thinking, and we accept
and use them with a complacency that cannot easily be exaggerated. Yet
the negative in each and every one of them holds the future of the
universe in the palm of its hand. And the special scientist before his
inevitable paradoxes is as conservative and as complacent as the rest of
us.
But it is one thing to say, or even to reason out cogently and
satisfactorily in every way, that the [p.102] special science, if both
persistently special and honestly scientific, must be sooner or later
inwardly contradictory and treacherous to itself, and it is quite
another thing to show the contradiction in actual cases. The actual
cases, however, are more easily found than many are likely to suppose,
and at mention they may even seem like forgotten memories, like things
which at some time we have noticed but become callous towards. Thus the
atom is through and through a self-contradiction, being itself only a
part of a divided reality, yet at the same time itself real only because
indivisible; and a science harbouring such an atom can hardly be said to
be unmixedly physical. The vibration, too, already referred to here as
motion in poise or at rest; infinity as one more quantity that is
significant because not quantitative; the sensation, a component element
of consciousness that cannot possibly be composite; the plenal physical
medium, which can be physical only if displaceable by other material
things, and so plenal only if not physical, and which has served besides
as an immobile yet infinitely elastic basis of motion or its
transmission; and, to give just one more instance, in moral and
political science the person, a self-existent, actively free being or
entity whose every deed as well as whose every thought is responsible to
something, being adaptive and therefore social, social with other
persons and with nature, and whose every virtue implies dependence and
an existence shared with something else: these are all also
self-contradictions. And in view of them who must not see how the
special sciences are always more than special, ever correcting [p.103]
in ways that may be unappreciated by themselves their partiality of
view, ever responsible to the totality of things even while they would
observe things only under selected view-points. Such contradictions,
once more, show mind loyal to what students of logic are familiar with
as the "universe of discourse." Even in science you cannot discourse
about anything without at least implicitly discoursing about everything,
although in order to do so you must speak in such paradoxes as the atom,
the person, the biologist's "vital unit," the vibration, the plenum, and
the like indefinitely.
Nor is the scientist the only dreamer of paradoxes among men. Ordinary
practical life, as we have seen, teems with paradoxes. But, for purposes
of illustration, not to say also of giving greater breadth and depth to
the view, a reference to the situation in the religious consciousness
will have peculiar value here. A religion that supplements reverence for
a personal God, working miracles and caring for the elect, who even
nowadays are more or less elect, with belief in a devil, even nowadays
more or less personal, is clearly a blood relation to science, and it is
besides by no means so unnatural or irrational as is often declared,
particularly by the scientists. Its two errors, just because opposed,
conserve what is real, and no science can claim more than that. Indeed,
a science, notably a special science, like a theology, might well be
described as a system of mutually corrective errors, of abstractions
that, because abstract, distort the reality of things, but that also
because being at difference with each other and eventually [p.104]
falling into contradictory and so counteracting pairs are at least
parties to what is real and true. By hook or crook, by the hook of
abstraction or the crook of contradiction, every science gets in touch
with the universe as a whole, and so even with its errors is a "working"
science. The errors of many a religion, by their working together, have
not failed to save men.
So we may return to the assertion that in its specialism, as well as in
its demand for objective knowledge, science is self-contradictory, and
with this conclusion established the exposure of science already offers
a very strong case for the doubter. Yet it does this only to the extent
and in the sense that contradiction warrants doubt. After all is said,
have we been only exposing science? Has attack been our only procedure?
Do we not find, as we reflect, that in our exposure there has also been
something very near to defence? Or, once more, through the science to
which we have taken exception have we not seen a science in which we
could believe? In the examination of science's objectivism we saw that
technique buried science, but--though we did not say this in so many
words--that there might be a resurrection. If fruitful in inventions
serviceable to life, science was justified in spite of its cultivated
objectivism, and the objectivity itself, besides an aid to accuracy, has
further significance as possibly an earnest of wider social
relationship, of broader and deeper life. The question of fact, too, if
appreciated and so made subordinate to the question of meaning, was even
allowed, and science, although at once formally conservative [p.105] and
materially negative and destructive, seemed after all to be the promise,
so to speak, of a new dawn for the very things denied. And now in what
has been said of the specialism of science, the same turning of the edge
of attack is all but manifest. Every special science is narrow and
relative--it is in the form of an unreal dream; but reality somehow
gives form to the dream, for there are always the compensating
conceptions. The contradictions by which the compensation has been
effected are, then, interpretable not more as causes of doubting science
than as reasons for confidence in it. Thus, to be tedious again, the
special science is relative and formal; it is a peculiar system of
ingenious abstractions that in so far are also errors; but its formal
character includes also contradiction; its errors are so related as to
correct and balance each other; so that, even in the face of our
necessary scepticism about it, science has been evident to us, as also
was the consciousness of ordinary life, as somehow always building
better than it knows or than its methods or ideals and doctrines viewed
only from without would lead one to expect. Moving in it we have
certainly felt the presence of, something, not yet called by name, which
is very like a principle or power of validity, preserving the reality of
things even in and through the relativity and contradiction under which
the things are seen. While the letter of our knowledge, even of our
scientific knowledge, must ever have an indeterminate future; while rest
or stability, ultimate reality or consistency is quite impossible to it,
still its inner, active spirit seems a source of faith that is
inviolable, that cannot be shaken. Different [p.106] quantities, such as
four and two, and sixteen and eight, do not make the same sum, much less
are they the same digits; but they are in the same ratio, and similarly
the truth of science would seem to lie in the ratio, the working
together, of the errors of science. Outwardly and materially changing
with time and with people, assuming ever new forms and comprising always
new doctrines, science nevertheless, as an active force, as a positive
resultant, is at least now conceivably always the same and applicable to
the same life. Even the Babylonians of an ancient day successfully
predicted eclipses, the very errors of their astronomy working together
for truth, exactly as the heresies of pagan religion seem to have
balanced each other to the preservation and the development of the life
which we of the present day and the Christian civilization are pleased
to call our own.
Accordingly the science we have to doubt is also manifest to us as at
least a possible object of faith. The very causes of our doubt before
our very eyes have turned, or are in process of turning, into possible
bases of belief, and our confession of doubt as it proceeds is proving
ever more worth making. We are trying to be such honest doubters. We are
indeed such penitent believers.