An original sin, or an essential defect, must somehow be for some good
purpose. At least, if a general faith in the ultimate propriety of all
things has any ground to stand on, such must be the case. The sin or the
defect cannot be unmixed; its very originality, its essentiality, must
line it, though it be the blackest of clouds, with some silver. Theology
has sometimes forgotten this, but an honest doubter cannot afford such a
lapse.
Yet before examining the possible worth of the original defects of
experience, or, as some might regard the present enterprise, before
attempting to give the devil himself a "character," we must recall the
various steps of our general undertaking as it has progressed so far. We
have been, in the first place, occupied with a thorough-going confession
of doubt, with the greatest possible candour hunting down all the
reasons for the attitude of doubt which experience affords, and so far,
in the second place, we have found doubt justified, whether for good or
for ill, because of its potential when not actual universality among
men, of its character as a condition of all conscious life, of [p.132]
its importance to real active life and deep experience, of its intimacy
even with habit, and of its natural sense of dependence and consequent
impulse to companionship with nature, man and God, but more than
all--and this was the special interest of the last two chapters--because
of the paradoxical and self-contradictory nature of all human
experience. As regards the last point, our ordinary consciousness, the
often-boasted consciousness of common sense, was found to harbour a
widespread, very persistent duplicity towards such vital things as
reality, wholeness or unity, space and time, the causal relation,
knowledge, moral freedom and natural law; and science, to which many
when dislodged from their ordinary standpoint have been accustomed to
retreat with greatest confidence and hope, was examined with similar
results. Science was found in its rise to involve abstraction of
interest and disruption of life, and in its avowed point of view to
be--suppose I say at this point--impossible but contradictory. So, in a
word, as a clinching argument for doubt, as an argument that at least on
the surface has less of hope in it than any of the others, we are face
to face with the bare, hard fact that in the very nature of human
experience, besides the relativity and instability and subjectivity,
there dwells a spirit of positive violence. Contradiction is just one
phase of the error to which all men are said to be addicted. As a
background for the inconsistent theologian, the fickle woman, the
shifting politician and other equally double-faced monsters, we see
both-sidedness, individually and to a certain extent socially, to be a
basal habit of human nature, [p.133] and if the doctrine of original sin
is tenable at all, in just this fact it would appear to have its
strongest support. _Humanum est errare_ may be translated: Man is most
human when hopelessly divided against himself.
But just here our confession of doubt has reached a critical stage;
since in experience apparently at its very worst, as if in a medley of
discords we have caught a promise of real harmony, and so something from
which to get genuine hope. In the very habit of duplicity or
contradiction we have again and again had suggestion of an agent of
validity, a power for adequacy in experience, which would hold even a
phenomenal, relative, partial experience to a real world. In short,
really the strongest reason for doubt is possibly a ground of belief;
or, as was said in substance at the close of the foregoing chapter, the
very experience of which we are already confirmed doubters is, after
all, just the experience which we seem to see our way to believing in.
Since the time of the great Leibnitz, and probably since the time
self-conscious man drew his first breath, all genuine optimism has
caught its most assuring vision of what was good, not in something quite
apart from what was evil, but in and through evil itself, as if what is
evil must be ever building better than it seems or than it knows. Very
much as mathematics has viewed the negative quantity as an integral part
of the whole system of quantities, so in the person of
Leibnitz--statesman, historian, scientist, mathematician, and
philosopher--and I imagine in the person also of you or me, though we
may not claim the same [p.134] authority, the human mind has been wise
and deep enough to see evil, representing all the negative things of
life as an organic part of the best possible world, even of the world
created by an infinite God. At least since Leibnitz's time, I say,
optimism has generally justified itself, not by denial of evil in the
world, but in and through evil. Not long ago a young man who was perhaps
more profound and reflective in his habits of mind than wise in his
manner of statement, said to me that the most spiritual truth as yet
disclosed to him was the identity of God with the devil. A shocking
declaration, of course; yet, to say the least, not very far from the
very spiritual idea, welcome to most, if not to all, that the conviction
of sin is the beginning of salvation, or that the consciousness of
ignorance is the very ground of wisdom. And here, similarly, belief
within doubt, not belief apart from doubt, or validity and reality only
in a contradictory experience, not aloof from a contradictory
experience, is the sum and substance of what our confession has
certainly been leading towards.
Nothing, it is indeed true, so blasts a man's assurance as to have his
ideas and arguments on a certain matter, or on matters in general,
exposed as defective, and worst of all as positively inconsistent, and
with his discomfiture human nature must always entertain the warmest
kind of sympathy. In fact, upon just this sympathy I have been depending
in the development of the argument of this book. But human nature,
however sympathetic, is really superior to any momentary discomfiture,
and most if not all men sooner or later come to value highly [p.135]
even their once discomfiting inconsistencies. "I am glad," we seem to
hear a fellow-being say, "that after all, in spite of myself, I did
recognize the other side. You abused me and called me double; yet so
doing you were double too. I see now that my duplicity saved me, not,
however, for your view or for another's, but for the both-sided and
true, which we both shared and served"; and exactly such a reflection on
the inconsistencies of experiences, in their less or in their more
fundamental manifestations, is the burden of the present chapter. Again,
to one who complained that with every breath he took he had to
contradict himself, respiration being as necessary to his breathing as
inspiration, just as in walking falling is as necessary as rising, we
might properly and satisfactorily reply: "You are really alive, sir,"
and just this answer is also quite pertinent to any who might be
disposed in their doubting to despair over the essential duplicity of
human experience. Is not experience more than any one idea or any one
ideal? Being really alive, is it not infinitely more than this or that
thing, than this or that place or time, than this or that power or will,
than this or that point of view? And, if more, what so surely as
universal duplicity and self-opposition can ensure at once its vitality
and its integrity?
I am not forgetting or wishing my readers to forget that there are other
defects in experience besides this of self-opposition, besides
experience's habit of never failing to induce its own conflicts; but no
defect seems to me so central or so conclusive as this, and none is at
the same time so clear in its testimony to the intimacy of doubt and
belief. [p.136] Subjectivity, relativity, phenomenality, artificiality,
partiality, and instability--certainly an imposing and appalling list,
though logically I must suspect it of being at least a
cross-division--are all noteworthy defects; but supposing the list exact
and complete, we must recognize that all these either beget
contradiction or are begotten by it. Contradiction is just the life or
the heart of the interesting family to which they belong, and so in
applying our thinker's stethoscope to that heart we shall have
determined the hold upon life of the whole race.
Now, there are five things, some of them already foreseen, that seem
worth saying here of the essential habit of self-contradiction, and they
seem worth saying because so effectively and so comprehensively they
warrant the conclusion that even upon our strongest reason for doubt we
may rest a genuine case for belief.
Thus, for the first of the five, contradiction incites and even in
itself implies movement; it requires, or positively it is, action. As a
mode of thinking, as a logical form, it is the way, perhaps the only
possible way, in which the mind can, so to speak, make a cross-section
or take a picture of activity or give the semblance of fixity, the
formal appearance of static nature, to what is dynamic. The photographer
trying for a portrait of reality might ask it only to look pleasant, but
the logician, for whom reality was essentially dynamic, would demand
manifest opposition, for in no other way could his art, limited to
conditions of rest,[1] [p.137] be equal to its subject. Where experience
is contradictory, then, there is movement, whether for that which is
known or for him that has the knowledge. In your character or mine, so
like a lover's unselfish selfishness in its apparent inconsistencies, in
our double views about reality or unity or law, in a
subjective-objective science, in an agnostic philosophy, in all these
the contradictions are only the marks of essential unrest, of necessary
movement, that make the picture possible. For a world of opposites there
can be no peace. The very things opposed are themselves fluent and
unstable, and that third something, the _tertium quid_, a picture of
which the opposition tries to be or to which the things opposed
necessarily point, belongs, as Alice in Wonderland seems to have
discovered, to yesterday or to-morrow, never to to-day.
But, secondly, contradiction, at least as here understood, is an
expression, or in experience a means to the expression, as well as to
the maintenance, of real unity. In general this is because real unity
cannot take sides, and so can never reside in anything that is, but must
rather be served by the co-operation of all things and in particular by
their mutually corrective or balancing differences. This no doubt will
appear to some readers as just one more example of a philosopher's
impossible subtleties, as a mountain with its top in so rare an
atmosphere that the common man would not dare to climb it if he could.
Yet, suppose together we rise to the heights of this seeming
impossibility by a little unprejudiced study of the conditions,
remembering that the summits of very wonderful mountains, plainly
impossible of ascent, have often been reached [p.138] from the other
side, and that difficulties of breathing are often due to a needless
exhaustion. To take a first step, then, contradiction is only
difference, or contrast, at its limit. Naturally there is some
opposition, some mutual resistance, in all difference, in that, for
example, between one man and another, or one thing and another, between
religion and art, red and green, or warm and hot, and often the
difference or the opposition seems very slight; but contradiction, so
called, is only this difference abstracted and unrestrained--it is
difference at its worst or best, difference as only opposition, or, once
more, difference where any possible unity of the things opposed has lost
all material ground or all chance of actual, visible form, and has
become, accordingly, at most merely an empty, abstract principle.
Contradiction, then, is difference so wide that unity seems wholly
betrayed rather than served or maintained. A real unity, however,
requires for its realization just the freedom from material form or
ground which such extreme difference would force upon it. It therefore
gains instead of losing reality by passing into the world of the
materially and visibly empty and abstract, or, say, by leaving behind
any hope of a finite residence and entering the sphere of the infinite,
to which difference, or at least contradiction, so cordially invites--or
expels--it. And, this being true, we can see how unity is served or
maintained, as was said, by the contradictions of experience.
Commonly men have an idea that differences mean, or point to, unity, but
they are more likely to suppose that the unity is by mere contrast or
antithesis than [p.139] clearly to recognize that it is a most intimate
fact of the differences themselves. They will even see in a number of
things only so many varying aspects of some one thing, and will go so
far as to look upon the aspects as actually enriching and deepening the
unity, but they still fail fully to appreciate how the real unity is
immanent and immediate in the differences. Again, in all their thinking
they contrast, and may consciously observe that they contrast, only
objects or people that really have something in common, comparing, on
the other hand, only such as in some way are manifestly different, and
in their practical affairs they compete only with those who with them
are parties to one and the same life, a fundamental sympathy, indeed,
being a necessary condition of their rivalry, and actually and actively
hate only the beings whom because of a common humanity they might love;
but here, too, their appreciation lags behind the fact.
In life generally, moreover, in small things and in large, extremes do
have the habit of meeting. A man's virtues are so near to his vices. The
widest variations in things are only relatively at variance. Even what
is cold is somewhat warm. Nothing is absolutely anything. In history a
single ideal, rising to influence, has always divided men into two
opposing camps. Witness the fact of bipartisanship, not in politics
alone, but in all of life's interests. Democrats and Republicans,
Radicals and Conservatives alike have loved their country and honoured
their country's flag and, regardless of party, their country's heroes or
patriots. Epicureans and Stoics--in recent times or long ago--have found
the same life worth living. The [p.140] Roman Law and the Roman Holiday,
working together, like the right and the left hand, different yet in
sympathy, made the great empire. Two men, furthermore, in active, open
conflict are in truth at serious difference with each other; but, as
they might even say, if their conflict were in the form of a debate,
where words instead of fists or pistols were the weapons, in the bare,
unapplied principle involved, or say in the abstract, in the final
success of whichever is the "best man," they do and they must agree.
Simply throughout this life of ours there has been and there can be no
idealism without conflict and no conflict, whatever the issue or the
manner, without common weapons, which means, too, without some common
relationship and some common interest. As for the idealism, too, what is
it but a demand for real unity? And the common weapons, or for quite
general purposes, the common forms in which a conflict or an opposition
is expressed, as if the hiding-place of unity, perhaps a sleeping unity,
only indicate in the very differences a basis, a potential of agreement,
even an earnest of an underlying and sometimes awakening accord. So,
truly, in life at large extremes do meet. But commonly men recognize at
most only that they meet, without realizing that their difference is
intrinsic to a real unity.
Where unity is real, then, there must be infinite difference, and
infinite difference is just what the contradictions of experience impose
upon experience and make it responsible to. Infinite difference gives to
everything an opposite and to all things unity; to every man a rival and
to human society, as a whole, solidarity. Against the material it sets
the spiritual; against [p.141] the particular, the general; against the
subjective, the objective; against the living, the dead; against the
lawful, the lawless; against the caused, the uncaused; and to all these,
the spiritual and the material, the subjective and the objective, the
living and the dead, the lawful and the lawless, the caused and the
uncaused, it gives place in a perfect unity; not, of course, in any
material unity, since such unity could not be perfect, but nevertheless
in a real unity.
For our first step, therefore, in the ascent of that "impossible
subtlety," contradiction is only difference at its greatest limit; for
the second, difference in general, whether partial or extreme, marks an
underlying, or more precisely an indwelling unity; and for the last
step, real unity is served, not betrayed by difference. Moreover, the
wider the difference, the nearer it be to positive contradiction or
opposition, the more conclusive and effective is the service. Remember,
real unity can never take sides; in the world of things it must be
always both-sided. It cannot be here or there, now and then--be the then
in the past or in the future, this or that. In the words, used of truth,
perhaps an appropriate refrain for this book, it can have neither
visible form nor body, neither habitation nor name; like the Son of Man,
it cannot have where to lay its head. The particular opposition of life
and death affords a peculiarly serviceable illustration, for it is, of
course, at the bottom of many of the most searching paradoxes of our
human experience. Real life cannot be confined to any single organic
form or to any single group of organic forms. In fact, it cannot be
bound even to the organic as commonly distinguished from the [p.142]
inorganic world. So for the biologist, very much as for the theologian,
whenever life takes a residence, death must ensue sooner or later. Life
and death, then, as opposites, become the medium of real life. But not
only have we here a helpful illustration, also we have a suggestion that
should prevent an easy misunderstanding. In general, as so plainly in
this special case, the opposition, so necessary to reality in
experience, to a real life or to any real unity, can itself be complete
and effective, not through any single instance of extreme difference,
not through the opposition of just two distinct things, but only through
an accumulation or summation of all possible instances, so to speak,
from difference at zero to difference at infinity. In fact, a real
opposition or rather a truly infinite difference, could be only in such
a sum. Not the single climax of death, but the constant dying, to which
it is only a climax, is what makes real the opposition of life and death
and makes this the medium, as was said, of the real life. Death must
constantly condition all the movements and processes of life: it must
have all possible degrees. And, in like manner, extreme difference at
large, just to be real itself and to make for real unity, must be in and
through all possible degrees of difference. In other words, the perfect
opposition, or contradiction, upon which reality depends, like the
perfect death, is rather a continuum than the wide gap, or chasm, which
so many have thought it; it is a graduate difference, not a single
cataclysmic difference. Difference in gradation or degree, I have
sometimes heard it said, is not real difference; but this statement,
though by no means without warrant or meaning, is [p.143] misleading.
Surely a cataclysmic difference, a "difference in kind," can be only one
finite case of difference; the negative, or opposition, in it can be
only relative; whereas, when in degree, difference becomes necessarily
infinite. Accordingly, as we must not forget, from this point on through
the remainder of this book, the contradiction of which we have been
thinking and which we have found infecting experience at every turn, is
not, what at first and even second thought it may have seemed, just an
opposition of two things; between its lines, as it were, it is inclusive
of, or maintained by, all the manifold and various things in life and
consciousness; it is the completed, short-circuited sum of an infinite
series. An infinitely many-sided world is the only world that can claim
real unity, and a world of such real unity is the world to which the
habit of contradiction, which we have observed, relates our human
experience.
So far, then, in estimating the possible value of this central and
essential defect of experience, we have found that it implies action and
that it makes for, or testifies to, real unity. Now, thirdly, perhaps
only to enlarge upon what has just been said, contradiction is an
absolutely effective correction of narrowness or partiality or
relativity or one-sidedness in life or consciousness, and so it makes
experience not abstract, but realistic. This is in truth only another
view of the worth of contradiction to integrity and vitality, to unity
and reality, but it would emphasize, what is very interesting at least
to the metaphysician, and cannot fail to be of some interest to the
moralist and the theologian, that where there is real unity there
[p.144] is also true reality. Only the One is. The One and Being are the
same. There can be but one substance, as also but one God. So men have
said in effect throughout the ages, and where they have conceded reality
or substantial character to manifoldness, the concession has simply
concealed a reassertion, but with fuller and deeper meaning, of the
intimacy of unity with reality. What makes for real unity or wholeness,
then, must impart realistic character, giving actual contact and
intimacy with just that of which, so to speak, the world is made. Now
individual things or ideas always show life suffering in some measure
under tangential digressions from the circle of its real wholeness, and
only opposition can save them or can preserve the reality to which they
both belong and contribute. Has not Emerson, among many others, declared
with a cogency and a depth of meaning which quite defy the
superficiality and levity attractive to a few, that mere consistency is
narrow and confining? Any particular view-point or idea or ideal, any
particular thing or activity, simply needs an opposite to balance the
abstraction or digression which being particular must always involve.
Particularity, specific individuality, is certainly a necessary
condition of real worth in life, but with an equal necessity there could
be no life, no conservation and wholeness of life if the particular,
individual things stood unchallenged in the world, and no realistic
experience, if experience were not thus paradoxical and divided against
itself. Life, therefore, gets not only movement and unity from the
contradictions that lie at the very heart of experience, but in getting
unity it gets also contact [p.145] with reality, and the three together
may be summed up in the one word poise. Montaigne marvelled at the
hopeless folly of mankind as compared with the wisdom of God, but man's
folly is divided against itself and so imbued with God's wisdom; and
with countless others he saw the ideas of man to be only subjective and
unsubstantial and irresponsible, but man's ideas, though fanciful and
illusory, though subjective and imaginative, work against each other for
what is real and substantial. Man's ideas co-operate for their own
correction and so for communion or intimacy with a character that is not
less substantial or responsible than that of God himself.
And so, fourthly, the contradictions of experience make experience
supremely practical. They make it practical just because they make
realistic, or substantial, an experience which without them would be
abstract and only relative and "phenomenal." Possibly this is the
hardest thing of all to apprehend, or at least to express
satisfactorily. Yet the fact, to which I keep returning, that only the
both-sided in everyday matters or in science or in any form of positive
experience can accord with reality and its wholeness, is assuredly quite
to the point. In practical life there always are, and emphatically there
always must be, two sides, to every thing, to every question. In
practical life, too, or at any rate in all effective activity, there
always is, and emphatically there always must be, something very like to
leadership; but any truly practical leadership, any leadership that is
all along the lines of life, be it of things, ideas, persons, or social
classes or parties, can never be confined to a [p.146] single individual
representative, but must be instead a leadership of many. No thoroughly
practical leadership, I say, can ever be on one side or the other, but
instead of being one-sided it must be both-sided, or rather, infinitely
many-sided; it must be between or among all the different and opposed
individuals; it must lie, perhaps in a sense sleep, in rivalry and
competition. There can be no visible leader, whose leadership is wholly
practical, whether of things or realities--for the metaphysician--or of
ideas or categories--for the logician--or of persons or classes--for the
statesman or the moralist or the theologian. Metaphysical reality, the
truly practical and realistic knowledge, the political supremacy which
is complete and inclusive, or the wholly moral life or the divine life
must forever be secured, not through a single manifestation presiding
over the others, but through the divided labour of them all. Yes, real
leadership, like real unity in general, is a divided labour; it is a
labour that effects successful co-operation through its very differences
and conflicts: for reality, a labour perhaps of different "elements" or
"entities"; for knowledge, of different ideas and standpoints; for
morals, of different standards; for politics, of different parties and
platforms; for divinity, of different Gods; and for life at large, a
labour of infinite differences, which means also a labour of opposites,
that at once develop and correct each other to the glory of that which
is real and practical.
It would be peculiarly interesting to examine further this principle of
a practical, truly realistic experience ensured to human life through
the inner [p.147] conflicts of experience. The history of morals and
ethics, for example, notably of the perennial conflict between hedonism
and idealism, could not but cast a good deal of light upon it; and the
history of political struggles, or the history of the great
controversies in science--such as that between vitalism and
anti-vitalism or that between atomism and energism; or in philosophy,
between dualism and monism; or in theology, between naturalism and
supernaturalism, would also be most illuminating; while, also perhaps
appealing only to the few, in the logic of the negative, as it has
developed from the earliest times, or in psychological theory--for
example, in the dispute of the advocates of the innervation theory and
the afferent theory, or in Hering's theory of vision, or, again, in the
life and movement of any one of the time-worn paradoxes of popular or
scientific or philosophical ideas, one might expect to find suggestive
illustration. In philosophy, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Zeno, Socrates,
Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel have all found negation, or contradiction,
necessary to any adequate account of reality. Explorations, however, in
their teachings or along any of the paths that were suggested, would
lead us too far astray.
Fifthly, then, not only do the contradictions make experience realistic
and so practical, but also they make it essentially social. A life or an
experience that is contradictory has (1) movement, (2) unity or
integrity, (3) reality and poise, and (4) practicality; and then it has
besides, as if the medium through which these four things are sustained,
(5) social character, society being only the visible expression, the
[p.148] outer realization, of the both-sidedness, of the infinitely
differential unity or the divided labour, which an active, yet
thoroughly self-controlled, truly realistic, practical experience
requires. In a former chapter, it will be readily recalled, an impulse
to social life was found to be intimately connected with the attitude of
doubt, and here clearly we are confronted with only another view of the
same fact, since contradiction has become our most cogent reason for
doubt and is now seen to require the social relations. An individual
whose experience is ever divided against itself is, _ipso facto_, a
social character, his social environment, whether in its narrowest or
broadest manifestation, adding nothing to his nature or to the struggles
of that nature, but only making the division against himself constantly
and manifestly real. The social environment, as it were, just proves the
man, his struggle and all, to himself. Some have agreed that the
individual consciousness contained nothing on which to ground a positive
case for society, for direct positive social interest; but so long as
man's experience is necessarily paradoxical or contradictory, so long as
man is divided against himself, or as the labour of life and reality is
a divided labour, the case for society and for personal interest in
society is clear and conclusive. A basis for society lies in the very
nature of experience. Society is not something added to individuality
from without.
Let us here beware of easy sentiment. Let not our thinking conjure false
sweetness and light. Experience is truly and essentially social; the
individual was not meant to dwell alone; but herein is no immediate
[p.149] cure-all, no promise of an unperturbed brotherly love, of a life
for one and all of simple peace and blissful quietude. On such a plan
society would hardly suit the individual with whom, and with whose
natural experience, we have become acquainted. To speak with the
extravagance of a counter-sentimentalism, the individual of our present
acquaintance is forever spoiling for a fight. In the life of the society
to which he belongs; in the life where he watches for his incoming ship,
there must always be hate and evil in all their forms, lawlessness and
destruction, illusion and error; but--and just here sentiment, the
sentiment of a really searching optimism, called once before a
sacrificial and heroic optimism, may find some assurance--never an
unmixed hate, never a wholly idle destruction, never an unmeaning error.
Can anything, indeed, that has another thing against it--that has, in
short, an opposite--ever be itself unmixed? The good or the evil in
society, being always opposed, is always also shared. So few people
recognize, or appreciate, what a great mixer opposition is. Death is the
passing only of inadequate or unworthy life. Hate witnesses only a false
love; sin, a pharisaical righteousness. Destruction marks an imperfect
construction. And in all its forms, evil is not so much something in and
by itself as an exposure and reproach of what is supposed to be
unmixedly good. Public crime, for example, is not so local as it
appears; it is only a generally, widely private vice made locally
manifest, and the respectable and law-abiding, who adjudge it evil, are
bound to feel as if adjudging and condemning themselves. In a word, the
individual's natural society [p.149] is never without evil, but in all
its forms the evil has somewhat of good in it; and although social life,
not less than individual life, must be one of conflict and discord,
nevertheless, because the various factors or factions, however opposed,
can never be unmixed, because the members of society must all be good
and bad, right and wrong--I almost said living and dead
together--instead of being hopeless for having evil in it, the life of
society is so much the more worth living. Shallow sentimentalism may not
so esteem it, but we need give little thought to shallow sentimentalism.
So our use of the word "society" is not sentimental. Society means
conflict. It is just the natural sphere of life and reality as for ever
a divided labour, as for ever divided and laborious--divided even
between the powers for supposed good and for adjudged evil, and through
the conflicts, in which the division is expressed, what is true and good
and vital is being forever kept real. Or, to repeat, society is the
natural medium through which movement, unity or integrity, poise and
reality, and practicality are secured and realized in human experience;
it is that which makes the individual's division against himself
manifestly real and positively and progressively effective for a life,
yes, for his life, at once of vitality and perfect wholeness.
But now that the five things are said, now that the contradictions of
experience have been seen to serve experience by giving it movement,
unity, poise, practical reality and social character, somebody is sure
to remark facetiously that on the evidence contradiction is something we
should all cultivate assiduously, and [p.151] that henceforth to face
both ways, the butt of so much opprobrium, should be one of man's
greatest ideals; in brief, that the inconsistent creatures in politics,
morals, and theology are the coming examples for mankind. Verily the
devil has been given his promised "character." But, alas! in the spirit
of such startling humour one would have to conclude also that because
crime has beyond all question been a means of social development, being
all-important to the awakening of the social consciousness and
conscience, all men should at once take thought and find it their duty
to turn criminals; or, again, that because death has a fundamental part
in the order of nature and is, moreover, of greatest spiritual worth and
significance, we should all morbidly seek it, being successfully
righteous only by being suicides. True, we do need to recognize the
positive function of crime in the progress of civilization, or in the
history of law, and also to be aware of crime as a possibility in our
own lives, and we need to be ready to die and to feel besides that dying
we are far from losing all that is worth having, but to court crime or
to seek death would certainly be to deprive either of the very worth
which has made it significant. And in much the same way we may very
profitably recognize contradiction or controversy, whether personal or
social, as a necessary condition of all valid experience, but not on
that account are we to cultivate what is contradictory, to be always
blindly spoiling for a contradiction. Like crime or death, if directly
courted, contradiction would lose its peculiar effectiveness. The
both-sidedness or the all-sidedness, which at once develops and
conserves human life, is only [p.152] that which is maintained with a
tenacious, even with a would-be consistent loyalty to each and every
side.
So, although grossly misused if directly courted, this defect of
experience has its place, even its ideal value, in experience, and what
on the surface seemed an almost if not quite hopeless reason for doubt,
has truly become all but transfigured, seeming now a source of real
assurance. With Heraclitus of old, only perhaps seeing even more than he
saw, we can glory in a world of strife. Doubting all things, we can yet
believe that all things work together for what is real, for what is
good.
But let me now put the result, so far secured, of our confession of
doubt in a new way. For a life in which every thing has an opposite,
every idea a counter-idea, truth very plainly, as has indeed been
frequently said, cannot be a specific consciousness nor reality a fixed
thing. Truth is not a creed, but a spirit. Reality is not a thing, but a
life. And for being a spirit truth is only the more realistic? For being
a life, reality is only the more substantial. Perfection, too, even the
Perfect One, with whom we associate the true and the real, is no
particular separate being in a certain established exclusive status, at
once infinitely and passively excellent, but a power ever dwelling in
the strife that makes for movement and poise. For being such a power,
too, he is only more surely perfect, only more certainly infinite and
excellent.
Such terms as spirit, life, and power are confessedly somewhat dangerous
terms to use. Especially the first is liable to misunderstanding. Yet,
whatever [p.153] common usage may be, when I say that truth is not a
creed but a spirit, that reality is not a thing but a power, the
reference is directly to that agent or principle of validity which has
been found to hold our experience, naturally so faulty, to contact and
intimacy with the real world. A spirit of truth, a principle of validity
there is, to which the very faults of experience give witness, and in
view of this we who doubt, who doubt the particular things, the creeds
and the objects generally, the definite forms and ideas, the habits and
standpoints of our everyday life or our scientific theory, may yet
believe; we may believe in the real spirit, or power, which makes all
things parties to the divided labour of a real life.[2]
[1] This limitation is shown, for example, in the logical principle of
identity.
[2] The worth assigned in this chapter to the contradictions of
experience involves a standpoint which apparently is at variance with
that of Mr. F.H. Bradley, whose book, _Appearance and Reality_, has
occupied such an important place in the philosophical study and
controversy of the last ten years. Of course, here is not the place for
final criticism of Mr. Bradley, since the present examination of doubt
is no such scrutiny of experience as his; it is far short of what would
make a complete philosophical argument. Nevertheless, a word or two
expressing the nature of the difference between his view and the view
advocated here can hardly be impertinent. Thus, if I read him rightly,
Mr. Bradley has argued from the paradoxes of experience to the complete,
hopeless phenomenality of experience, while in this study of doubt the
argument has been from the paradoxes of experience to a thoroughly
realistic experience. Again, Mr. Bradley's Absolute is able to include
the phenomenal, the relative and contradictory, only because this is so
unsubstantial as to offer no resistance, while here there has not even
been any question of inclusion. _All experience_, our position has been,
_is informed with reality; its very contradictions hold an otherwise
phenomenal, relative, changing experience close down to a real world_;
and this position, I repeat, is at variance with what Mr. Bradley has
_seemed_ to say. See, however, a short article, "Relativity and
Reality," in the _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific
Methods_, Vol. I, No. 24, November, 1904.
[p.154]