I referred in an earlier chapter to the great Frenchman who boldly
declared that his doubting was all that he could be certain about, but
that this, being so very real, being indeed universal, left him a belief
in himself, although only in his always doubting self. Descartes' belief
in himself has interest for us, for while his thinking followed lines
somewhat different from our own, he seems to have reached nearly, if not
quite, the same very personal conclusion, namely, the right of the
doubter to say: "I am."
Descartes was born in Touraine in 1596, and for the larger part of his
life he was at least nominally a resident in the Paris of Louis XIV,
Montaigne, and the earlier Jesuits. He was educated at a school of the
Jesuits in La Flêche, and in the course of his mature life he published
works of importance not merely in philosophy, but also in science and
mathematics. His _Meditations_ and _Search after Truth_ are easily first
among his contributions to philosophy. He died in 1650.
Yet not exactly with the Descartes of positive history, but with
Descartes as a doubter, as perhaps the most notable progenitor of the
modern confession [p.173] and the modern use of doubt, are we now
directly concerned; for without the license of this broader view we
might lose a large part of the advantage of the centuries that lie
between Descartes' time and our own. He had many disciples, and these
disciples uncovered much in the Cartesian philosophy that Descartes
himself failed to see, or saw only imperfectly. He was not without
faults, too, some moral and some intellectual, if the two are separate,
and these faults we shall not consider, though the conscientious
historian should never play to the sentimentalist by disregarding them.
But with our present task we can afford to forget the faults; just as we
cannot afford to lose the interpretations and corrections of the
disciples. With interests as vital and personal as ours, we seek
something more than matter of fact. Our interest is very near to that of
the historical novel, but needless to say, this book is an essay in
philosophy, not a novel. Past men and past times can be really useful to
us, only if, belonging as we do not to the seventeenth but to the
twentieth century, we really use them. What we ourselves are able to
find in any period or in any human career is always truer or realer,
possibly in a sense it is also better history, than what lay on the
surface at the time or than what was seen, however profoundly, even by
contemporaries. So much better did Descartes and all really great men
build than they knew or even willed.
Descartes came into European life at a crucial moment. The period of the
Renaissance, with its rediscovery of the old world and its stirring
vision of the new, had culminated in the Reformation, not [p.174] merely
in the religious reformation that set Protestant against Catholic, but
in the reformation that appeared in every department of man's life--in
art, literature, and science, in morals and in politics, as well as in
religion. Man asserted his independence of established authority in any
form. Man, not king, not pope, not even God, became the real centre of
the universe. Justification by his own faith was simply overflowing with
a meaning that knew no bounds in his experience.
But the birth of Descartes was fifty years after the death of Luther,
and by the time he had reached his intellectual majority, as might well
be expected, the Reformation had changed from a spiritual
enthusiasm--whether among those who were its great leaders or among
those who, not less devoutly, were bent on summarily checking its
progress--into a practical, thoroughly worldly situation. The two
opposing parties, without exaggeration, seem to have settled down to
real business, and not less in the thought of one than in that of the
other the end justified any means.
The society of Jesus was definitely organized and began its notable
career in 1640, and although its members, the Jesuits, have given to
history many wonderful examples of devotion and heroism, Jesuitry itself
is synonymous with the extreme materialism to which the Roman Church
resorted in its desperate defence against the Protestants. And on the
other side, men became not less sensuous and worldly, giving as good as
they got. They simply met, or opposed, like with like. Reading the
history of the time with [p.175] its controversies and jealousies and
intrigues and persecutions, one can only conclude that the honours were
about even. If Catholicism felt justified in her acts of sensuous
brutality, of almost hellish violence, which culminated in the massacre
of St. Bartholomew, Protestantism was made the specious, yet not less
welcome, excuse for worldliness, general materialism, and sensualism out
of the Church and in it. Any religious reform, or reform of any sort,
must always bring an unscrupulous lawlessness with it, and the great
Reformation was by no means an exception to this rule. Extreme
humanists, naturalists, atheists, sensationalists, social and physical
atomists, Machiavellists, sceptics and opportunists of all sorts,
swarmed in every capital of Europe, and especially in Paris.[1]
But the extravagant, more or less unconventional things of any time are
often the best signs of its inner life, since in them we see a few men
boldly, if not prudently, stepping over the bounds of custom, and
sometimes even of decency, and giving expression to what is actively
present, though often suppressed or concealed, in the lives of all. Thus
contemporary with Descartes, and from one side or another expressing the
materialism of his day, there were at least three very significant
movements, all of them endorsed by parties, of course under different
names, from both of the contending churches, or from their outside
echoes or reflections, and all of them at least in some degree when not
in great degree beyond the bounds of common conventional respectability.
These [p.176] movements in one church or in the other, or in neither, as
the case might be, were, first, a scoffing scepticism; second, a
dogmatic mysticism; and third, a most visionary gnosticism.
1. Vanini (1585-1619) in Italy, Montaigne (1533-1592) in France, and
Bacon (1560-1620) in England, among many others that might be named,
were more or less extravagantly, not mere doubters, but satirical, often
derisive, scoffing doubters of everything in human life. Conceit of
knowledge, whenever asserted, in church or state, in everyday
consciousness or in science, was declared idolatry and held up to
constant ridicule. Could man's wisdom at its best be anything more than
a blinding folly?
2. And religion, the religion of a few, as if in acknowledged sympathy
with these sceptics, surrendered everything but God--God being more a
longing than an actual fact; a spirit than a positive thing or person.
Even within the Catholic Church the Oratory of Jesus, a society
energetically opposed for good and sufficient reasons by the Jesuits,
was organized in the interests of a purified, truly spiritual
Christianity; and among those who had broken with the Catholics appeared
new sects of many names, such as the "Friends of God," "Collegiants,"
and the "Brotherhood of the Christian Life," but with one ideal, the
direct untrammelled worship of God. "God is," they proclaimed in so many
words; "and God, just God, is all. Church and creeds and rites and
priests are hindrances, not helps, to true religion." This attitude,
commentary as of course it was on the conditions of the day, had almost
more satire in it and more doubt than any of the words [p.177] of the
most active scoffers; it was so unconscious; so quietly and so piously
it picked up the crumbs that the scoffers left. Indeed, the sceptics and
their devout, pure-minded contemporaries, Pierre Charron (1541-1603) and
Jakob Boehme (1595-1624), both advocates of religious purity against
theology and sensuous ritual, must be said not to have engaged in
separate activities, but to have shared the labour of a single activity.
Scepticism and such mysticism are but two sides of the same shield.
3. But with the scoffing scepticism and its complementary counterpart,
the dogmatic mysticism of religion, there was associated also a most
visionary gnosticism. Thus the science of mathematics was heralded as a
key to all the secrets of the universe. A few simple applications of
mathematics to physical phenomena had been successfully made by the
scientists--for example, by Galilei--and ere long certain men in the
world of the intellectual life went wild over the possibilities of
mathematics. Obliged, as soon they were, to abandon every other field of
knowledge--theology, politics, material science, tradition, and
convention--they needed but little encouragement to give themselves
heart and soul to this last resort. Their enthusiasm for mathematics
doubtless had a deeper source than this simple account of its rise would
suggest, for an intellectual atmosphere in which just such a purely
logical, abstract science would develop was the natural product of
medievalism; but Galilei's successes may be said to have precipitated
the movement, and in any case for many mathematics became, both in its
principles and in its method, an intellectual [p.178] cure-all, and in
consequence not only were remarkable advances made in the science
itself, but men went to the extreme of applying the methods and the
formulæ of mathematics in every conceivable direction. Religion,
morality, and politics, as well as natural science, were all subjected
to mathematical treatment. Among the surviving monuments to this
activity the _Ethics_, so called, of Benedict Spinoza (1632-77) is
certainly the most noteworthy; a work of five books on God, mind,
emotions, bondage, and freedom--each with its special quota of axioms,
propositions, corollaries, scholia, and the like, and the procedure of
the whole amazingly consistent with that of Euclid. Excuse, also, a
personal reminiscence. I can myself recall how in the enthusiasm of a
first course in geometry I formulated a Euclidean proof of the
proposition: Knowledge is power. I, too, had my axioms, my special
demonstrations, my corollaries, and my final Q.E.D.'s. But any
present-day resort to mathematics or its methods is only a shadow, or an
echo, of the movement of the seventeenth century. At that time it was a
movement of last resort and all the passion of a deceived intellect, of
a mind given over to the most far-reaching doubts, and a disappointed
faith, once more acquiring hope, was present in it. The truths and
methods of mathematics--what but veracity incarnate, the very mind of
God made manifest to mankind!
Nor, furthermore, does it take much reflection to appreciate that
mathematics was after all a very appropriate form for credible knowledge
to take in a time of scepticism and of religion turning to purism.
[p.179] Trustworthy knowledge of actual things--that is to say, real
concrete knowledge--being held impossible, there was nothing left but
knowledge of the strictly formal relations of things. Formal principles,
just like those of mathematics, are altogether innocent of the confusion
in actual things and persons, in particular events and current issues;
and accordingly in the seventeenth century, just by reason of this
innocence, they were peculiarly timely. Doubt seemed quite unable to
touch them; controversy was turned to agreement before them; and even a
truth-loving God, so to speak, could appeal to them in support of his
right to rule the minds and the lives of men. You and I might question
the reality of the things we count or the justice of the ratio between
our wealth and the wealth of certain others in the world, but we could
not easily question that two and two are four, or in matters of wealth
that one thousand and two thousand dollars are in the same ratio as two
million and four million. Such knowledge as this may not settle any
actual quarrels that we have, for example, over the number of acres we
own or the taxes we pay or the prices charged by our butchers or
grocers; but what of that? The quarrels are idle any way, and our
mathematical wisdom, being exact from the start and self-evident, is a
basis of perfect agreement between man and man and men and God.
In short, mathematics is exact and universally credible just because it
is so empty and so logically formal, being always "in the abstract," in
that ideal, wholly blessed region, where there is no disputing, where
all men readily admit anything that can be [p.180] suggested; and its
being exact for this cause made it the only credible knowledge for
Descartes' time, a time at once of scepticism and mysticism. With
Vanini, then, and Charron, who were separately engaged, as was remarked,
in a single activity, we may associate the mathematicians of the day,
among whom none were more distinguished than Descartes himself and the
members of the Cartesian school. To Descartes we are largely indebted
for the Analytic Geometry, and Pascal did important work in the Theory
of Equations.
In rough outline we now have the times of Descartes before us, and with
deepened meaning I may say again that Descartes came into European life
at a crucial moment. Materialism was rife, not merely theoretically
among a few scientists and philosophers, nor practically in some
isolated class of dissipated human beings, but really and more or less
openly everywhere in the whole life and feeling of society. Even the
devout played into the hands of the worldly by their very purism. And an
accompanying doubt, cropping out significantly, now in positive
irreverence, now in mysticism, now in intellectual formalism, appears to
have thoroughly possessed the minds of men.
There was, too, in Descartes' day a growing sensitiveness to the
paradoxes of man's experience which have occupied so much of our
attention. Nothing was what it seemed. One writer boldly declared--not
much later--that France, nay, the whole world, could not be happy until
all should turn atheists. The boast of Louis XIV, "I am the State,"
whether literally made or not, was hardly less startling. The sensualism
of [p.181] the Catholic Church or the Pharisaism of the Protestant was
flagrantly paradoxical, and was keenly felt to be so on all sides. Men
turned doubters perforce, and in the fact that with their scepticism
rose also a movement at once of individualism and cosmopolitanism, we
cannot fail to see how the course of history illustrates the conclusions
of a previous chapter. The time was one in which through its humanism,
or its cosmopolitan individualism, civilization was to reap the harvest
from the medieval organization of society.
Descartes, in spite of, or perhaps because of, his training at a school
of the Jesuits, seems to have caught the spirit, the real meaning of his
time, getting behind the mere letter of their instruction and of their
point of view. Only mathematics gave him any satisfaction, and he left
the La Flêche school in the first place conscious that he had learned
little or nothing, in the second place curious about the possibility of
men ever knowing anything, and in the third place evidently through the
influence of mathematics strongly prejudiced in favour of introspection,
or of thought conducted independently of things, as the only possible
way to certainty. This education, then, and its outcome, true as it was
to the life of the day, fitted Descartes for his life work, which was
nothing more or less than the erection of a system of philosophy on the
basis of a thorough-going confession of doubt.
Descartes entered upon his great task by taking his day at its word. St.
Paul, addressing the Athenians, reminding them of one of their own
temples, and quoting their own poet Aratus, was not more tactful.
[p.182] Thus, as if speaking directly to the sceptics about him,
Descartes doubted everything, because he found, not only in his own
consciousness, become too reflective for implicit belief, but also in
the wide experience of his race, that everything was dubitable. He
doubted church and state, science and society; and he went even farther
than this. Also he boldly doubted mathematics, so long his own support
and the reliance of many others in his time. He did not know surely that
there might not be an evil spirit in the universe, a spirit of
deception, which even in mathematics was obscuring the mind's vision,
making it see things not as they are, but as they are not. Deception was
real enough and obvious enough in life at large to make such a suspicion
as this at least plausible. Moreover, the notion of an agent of evil in
the world had been a commonplace for centuries. It was just a part of
that medieval training. So although nothing could be said with certainty
either way, the plausible mischance had to be faced; mathematics went
the way of all doubtful knowledge, and man was left with literally
nothing but his doubt, his universal doubt. "_Dubito_," said Descartes;
"to doubt is my inmost nature"; and speaking so he at once marked the
first step in his reasoning, so important then and now, and in the
simplicity and directness of real genius reported a great, deep fact of
his own experience and of that of his time.
But universal doubt is a _real_ experience, being real just because
universal. Nothing ever is real that is not universal. What is always
and everywhere is just the mark of something that really is substantial.
A real [p.183] experience, however, real because universal, be it of
doubt or of anything else, means a real self, so that in the always
doubting self Descartes found reality, or a real self; and this always
doubting self he further characterized as a thinking self. In other
words, the real thinker was for him the universal doubter, and,
contrariwise, the universal doubter was real, a real thinker, a real
self. Before Descartes' time, to speak generally, men had identified
reality with fixed condition or possession, with specific knowledge or
established power or definite prerogative, divine or human, and truth
was an object of faith rather than thought, say an unchanging programme
for life rather than a pure principle--there is such a wide difference
between a principle and a programme! But Descartes, as we have seen,
identified reality with loss or privation, with such an empty-handed
thing as doubt; he recognized no self but the thinker, and no thinker
but the doubter. We always feel the pathos of those who, suffering
constant privation, find and often declare that life is very real, and
yet the sense of reality that comes in this way--namely, in the way of a
privation that denies reality all residence in positive experience--is
especially strong, and the pathos we feel is certainly not all.
Something else hard to name appeals to us, too, and changes the pathos
into a nobler because a more positive feeling--good will, perhaps, or
honour--since the persistent holding to reality commands a deep respect.
Yet, putting this more positive feeling apart, only the pathos of
Descartes' real self, real because a thinker and thinker because a
universal doubter, can occupy us now. Enough if we see that [p.184] the
reality was as indubitable as the universal doubt, the self always being
real up to the reality of its experience, and that the pathos is not
more for him than for the sceptics and mystics and mathematicians of his
time. But, again, in the Latin words, burdened, as so often the Latin
has been, with the experience of all Christendom: _Dubito, cogito; ergo
sum_. I doubt, I think; I as doubter and thinker am.
That "I am" seems a sort of epitome of the humanism, not to say of the
pathos of the humanism of the time. Man had lost everything but his own
self, his lacking, longing, always seeking self. Montaigne put the
situation plainly when he said in so many words, that portrayal of self
was the beginning and the end alike of physics, the science of outer
reality, and metaphysics the science of all reality. Man had been left
with his mere self, robbed of beliefs and traditions, and abandoned by
everything but his doubts and the empty companionship which these
afforded, but to that, an unshaped thing with an undefined activity,
real only for what it did not have, he clung tenaciously and often
enthusiastically. And Descartes spoke for him: _Knowing that I have
nothing, I am_.
But in this self that was real only because always lacking, always
doubting, Descartes found a priceless treasure. Every one is familiar
with the principle of Christian theology, that the conviction of sin is
a real promise because the actual beginning of salvation, and every one
has some appreciation of this principle. It is a principle, too, that no
priest ever made or could ever unmake, belonging as it does to the very
nature of conscious creatures. In like manner, [p.185] then, Descartes
recognized in the consciousness of doubt, or say of intellectual error,
the real promise, because the actual beginning or even the very presence
of veracity in knowledge. The doubter, conscious of error as he must be,
was never without and never by any possibility could be without a sense
for truth, an idea of veracity. Doubting all things he must yet believe
in truth. Plato said centuries before that mere opinion, however false,
was nevertheless always in love with true knowledge, and this Platonic
love Descartes found in the doubter's conviction of error. In Plato's
spirit Descartes insisted that doubt was a constant yearning for truth,
a persistent faith in it. Doubt was informed with truth, with the idea
of truth, very much as one has the "idea" of a thing that one cannot
master. Man might be a doubter of all things, then, but in spite of his
doubt he must believe in the reality of things, not exactly in the
individual reality of each and every thing, but in reality in and among
all things. For him, doubting and self-conscious, there must dwell in
the world a realizing nature or power, an agent of perfect veracity,
checking any experience from being altogether deceptive. And, for the
present, to narrow our attention to a single phase of the doubter's
natural idea of veracity, as Descartes reasoned about it, truth and
everything that goes with truth, perfection and absoluteness in all its
phases, could not be solely human if to doubt was human. They must, in
consequence, be divine. So God, a spirit of truth and righteousness, was
real, as real as the real self of always doubting but ever truth-loving
man. _Dubito, cogito; ergo sum: etiam_ [p.186] _Deus est. I doubt, I
think; as thinker and doubter I am: and what is more, God, veracity
incarnate, is also_.
And here begins or began a great controversy, nor can the issues of it
be said to have been wholly settled even to-day. What did Descartes
understand when in this way he proved to himself the existence of God?
Was only the God he seemed to have lost once more restored to him, and
restored intact? Did he merely justify, and so return to its old place
of authority, the traditional theology of his day? Was his doubt, as
some would view it, not his own genuine experience, but simply the
conceit and pretence of method? These questions need an answer, for
their answer affects not only Descartes' regained religion, but also his
regained real world in general. So many have been disposed almost to
laugh outright at the simple-minded Descartes for his doubting
everything from matter and mind to God, only in the end to get
everything back. They have seen him as one chasing the verities out by
one door only to welcome them with outstretched arms as they run in at
another that had been left open for their return; and this view of him
has been strengthened by the fact that conservatives in religion the
world over have made Descartes their victim by appealing to his proof,
borrowing for themselves his philosopher's robes, as if these could be
easily assumed and as easily put off. But as to the justice of such a
view there is little if any good evidence. Matter-of-fact history is not
our first concern here, as was said; yet, whatever may or may not have
been uppermost in Descartes' mind, the doubt of his day was both general
and very [p.187] genuine, and the final worth and validity of his
thinking lies wholly in that, not in his or any one's mere logical
gymnastic or verbal strategy. Moreover, for reasons which hardly need to
be given, the strong probability is that, notwithstanding his well-known
lack of courage in openly living up to or even thinking up to all the
consequences of his reasoning, he did feel in his philosophy not a mere
recovery of what had seemed lost, nor a cunning apology for the old, but
the birth of a new point of view; and, if this possibility should be
verified, among other things the conservatives, who have been borrowing
so much support, have been little if any better than parasites. Still,
even the probabilities in the case are relatively insignificant to us,
since the people of the time and of later times, and we ourselves from
the scepticism and mysticism of the seventeenth century, have learned to
think of God with a fulness of meaning never attained before, as--what
shall I say?--not a definite truth, but the living spirit of truth; not
a passive perfection, but a perfect activity; and not even a divine
person, in the sense of one more separate being of consciousness and
will to inhabit the universe, but the moving and conserving power of all
personality--the very active principle of reality present in the
vicissitudes and conflicts of our existence. And, such being the outcome
of history, we have to take it as really the meaning of the great
Frenchman's formulæ. We put aside the controversy, then, with the simple
reflection that results in history or anywhere else are at least very
hard indeed to conceive if they are anything more or less than realized
motives [p.188] perhaps the realized motives of a man or men building
somewhat beyond their clearest knowledge. Whatever has come about must
always be what more or less clearly men have been feeling after.
The God whom Descartes really proves to his time, and still more
positively to us, must surely be the God not of a satisfied
unquestioning believer, but of the universal doubter who loves truth and
whose doubting and loving make him the always curious thinker; a God
without visibly or even quasi-visibly fixed or specific character of any
sort, since with his nature set to such a character, tethered like a
beast to a stake or like the sun bound to an orbit, he would not be and
could not be divine enough--which is to say, veracious or perfect
enough--for a universal doubter's curiosity; a God, then, who has the
divine character of true infinity, who is, too, a spirit in fact as well
as in word. Infinity certainly cannot belong to a being that is apart;
such a being would at once belie his nature; and "spirits," divine or
human, must not be supposed to be, like Elijah, the merely translated
beings of this visible and tangible world, for they can belong only to
the invisible and the intangible, which is in this world and of it, in
its knowledge, in its love and strife, in its changes of all kinds, in
its work and in its suffering. Yes, a truly living God, living here and
now, is the God of Descartes' proof; the God of just that world of
movement and conflict, of poise and reality, to which the differences
and above all the contradictions of experience, as examined by us in
preceding chapters, have already borne witness. Let us recall how we
were able to say that the very conflicts of human [p.189] experience
were the wisdom of God. And if this all amounts to saying, as apparently
it does, that only Descartes' universal doubter, who loves truth too
much ever to claim its final possession, can believe in a real God, then
we have reached something that will surely repay the most careful
reflection.
Some have criticized Descartes for what they regard as a fallacy in his
reasoning. He jumped, they claim, without any real warrant, from the
idea of a thing as his premise to the actual existence of the thing as
his conclusion, from the idea of veracity, so necessary in the
consciousness of the doubter, to the substantial existence of a
perfectly veracious being, as if, to use their time-worn analogy, the
idea even of the very smallest sum of money would make the money itself
materialize in somebody's pocket. But, whether or not Descartes fully
understood his own thought, this criticism is very superficial, and it
gets only a specious cogency from the same matter-of-fact history that
we have already pushed aside. No idea, however clear, however necessary
even to the consciousness of a doubter, of perfect truth could ever
conjure into existence the unworldly, independently existing,
spiritually and intellectually isolated God of the Middle Ages; and for
that matter one might say, I think quite pertinently, that money not in
the pocket is something less than real money, or--which comes to the
same end--that the idea of money, if the pocket be indeed empty, must
imply some sense of the emptiness as well as of the money; and with such
an implication the idea taken for its full meaning is no such conjurer
as Descartes' critics have chosen to imagine it. After [p.190] all the
"mere" ideas, or the "mere" things in general, that appear in
controversies, are only ingenious ways of packing the jury. An adequate
idea--that is to say, an idea taken just for its full meaning, for what
it denies as well as for what it affirms, for the complete universe of
its discourse--does and must answer to existence; yes, and to
substantial existence too. So, again, the God that Descartes by the
doubter's idea of veracity proved to his time and to us, if not also as
clearly to himself, can have been no mere substantial existence wholly
outside the doubter's life and consciousness. In such case the universal
doubting would indeed have been only the insincere verbal strategy of a
conservative, the conceit of purely artful method, and the jump objected
to would have been quite necessary. But Descartes' God answered to just
the idea of truth which a universal doubter could honestly entertain; to
truth realized only in and through doubt; a God, living in and with the
seeking, struggling consciousness of the doubter.
Furthermore, for a being, call him doubter or thinker or what you will,
whose very nature in deed and in word is awake to a sense of lack and is
in consequence making a continued outcry: "Never this, but always
something else, something fuller and realer, something including and
using this, something maintained by the very conflicts of this,"--for
such a being very plainly there never can be anything that is wholly and
hopelessly beyond, that is not potentially and so actively real in him;
there can be no outer nature, but an including and developing nature,
and no transcendent God, but an indwelling, ever uplifting, [p.191]
forward-bearing God. Exactly such a being was Descartes' real self, the
self of his I _am_--"I as thinker and doubter am"--and this self had
need neither of struggling with nature nor of wrestling with God in
order to get one or the other on its side, for in its doubt, in its
constant confession of incompleteness, even--though this is a flagrant
paradox--of its own reality as in a sense always outside or beyond
itself, it had won the supreme victory at the start. Negatives are
always such very sweeping, comprehensive things; and to be, so to speak,
one's own negative, to be real and lacking, is somehow to include all
things within one's own life and interest. If I may apply an ordinary
phrase in an extraordinary way, to be always "beside oneself," always
doubting, always wanting, always striving, or to be, in the words of
earlier pages, ever and always divided against oneself, is to have
enlisted man and nature and God for ever in one's service.
There is truly such a difference between programme and principle 1 It is
the difference between medievalism and modernism, between supposed
finality and recognized and asserted movement, between supernatural
authority and the authority of natural growth. Enthrone a programme, and
it is arbitrary and exclusive; it claims, as it must, the sanction of
another world; it hopelessly divides human nature as personally embodied
or as socially organized; it makes life and its sphere irrational and so
dependent on a blind faith: but a principle, enthroned, draws all things
into itself, using to its own constant realization even the changes and
differences of life, making faith [p.192] and reason lie down together,
and transfiguring both a brutal nature and an inhuman God by revealing
them as not indeed formally but vitally rational, and not indeed
mortally yet humanly alive. In Descartes' proof of God we see the birth
of modernism; the programme deposed; the principle set in the place of
authority.
Finally, then, Descartes did not simply restore what had been lost.
Though we have been regarding only the religious aspect of his
philosophy, we can see in general that, just as not the old God, but
nevertheless God, remained to the doubter's life, so also not the old
verities at large, yet nevertheless the verities, or not the old
reality, yet nevertheless reality, remained also. Man, after all his
doubting, even because of it all, was enabled to return to the world of
all those "isms," the all-pervading materialism, the scoffing
scepticism, the dogmatic mysticism, and the intellectual formalism, with
a new spirit, a spirit of real confidence, a spirit of hope, a spirit of
life, that just by reason of its wants and conflicts believes itself not
only very real but also fully worth while.
And travellers to-day visiting the streets of Paris or going anywhere
the doubting and despairing world over, would do well to imagine
Descartes, as the modern doubter, travelling and thinking with them.
[1] See an article by H.C. Lea in the _American Historical Review_,
January, 1904, "Ethical Values in History," especially p. 238 seq.
[p.193]