Doubt is only a particular state, or phase, of consciousness, and it is
worth while to observe that any state of consciousness whatsoever, any
attitude of mind, must assume or postulate something real. Indeed, this
assumption of reality is so positive that no consciousness is ever
without some will to believe, while no will to believe is ever without
some real object believed in. Can there be smoke without some fire, or a
seeming without some being? Were either of these things possible, then
by the same token there could also be a willing without some doing or a
wanting without some having. To be conscious of something, [p.194] then,
means not only that something is assumed and, if assumed, willed to be,
but also that something really and truly is. Of course, the
consciousness is; but, however subjective, the consciousness must have
more than its mere subjectivity, than its mere seeming or wanting or
willing, being in some way genuinely objective or grounded in reality.
In a word, all consciousness implies and demands, postulates and
possesses, a real world; possibly not just the world formally presented
to it, but nevertheless reality, and reality, too, in which somehow the
presented world has a place and part.
This may or may not be axiomatic, but at the very least it is very near
to being axiomatic, and, near or far, it quite agrees with the
conclusions to which, although along somewhat more specific lines, our
own thinking and Descartes' thinking have been constantly pointing. As
Descartes might have said, there is no consciousness without a
thoroughly warranted "I am," and no "I am" without an also thoroughly
warranted "The world of my consciousness is and is objectively real."
But in implications about reality the doubter's consciousness differs
from the believer's consciousness; not by any mere denial, for
unqualified denial must be wholly alien to honest doubting, and the
doubter is himself a believer, but by a peculiar assumption as to what
the reality is. Simply doubter and believer, so far as they may be taken
as independent characters, do not live in the same real world. Thus, for
the distinct believer--that is to say, for the specifically dogmatic
believer, for him who is, or who for the moment may be supposed to be,
[p.195] tenaciously and immovably loyal to some specific body of
doctrine and to some specific manner of life--reality is always tethered
to some stake; while for the doubter it is too real and too free to
suffer any such bondage, being infinite and all-inclusive. For our
doubter, at once fully self-conscious and honest, no possible experience
can ever be in itself real and final, nor, on the other hand, can any
possible experience ever be altogether unreal and illusory. His reality,
I say, must be at once free and all-inclusive. Indeed, it could not be
either of these without being the other. For him nothing is _the_
reality, just because all things must belong to reality. For him, again,
the world's reality is nowhere, just because everywhere; in no defined
thing fixedly and completely, just because in all things--in them not
merely distributively, it is true, but as they work together; and
invisible and intangible, indeed generally unknowable, just because any
consciousness is necessarily limited to the definite and inadequate
mediums, or forms, of positive knowledge.
So the doubter has a real world, but his own real world. Moreover, in
the great freedom of its reality we see how all things taken
individually or distributively, must be, as the word is used, only
"relative"; and in the perfect inclusiveness, how nothing, however
"relative," can ever be unreal. Relativism and scepticism have been
perenially associated, but relativism is not a nihilistic, but a deeply
realistic philosophy; it is just the sceptic's natural realism. All
things are "relative," but only because reality is at once free from
anything, and yet inclusive of all things. What is relative is [p.196]
thus not flatly unreal, as is often supposed, but significantly both
real and unreal or neither real--not real to itself alone--nor
unreal--not without its part and place in whatever is real. The sceptic,
though always a relativist, is thus also a most profound realist, and
the nature of his realism must help us greatly to our view of the
doubter's world.
Moreover, Descartes and his followers were also nativists or
intuitionists, and, at least for the freer interpretation here
permitted, their nativism was of a peculiar order, and it involved,
accordingly, a world which was real in a peculiar way. Usually nativism
has stood for the assertion of certain inborn and so necessarily valid
and unchangeable ideas or characters or powers; as when men contend that
particular ideas of God are unassailable because immediately intuited as
a part of man's very being, or again when men declare a particular
genius to be born, not made, or insist that a voice of conscience born,
not bred, in them, tells them explicitly to do and even to make others
do this or that specific thing, to live and make others live in this or
that specific way, to accept and make others accept this or that
specific programme of politics, morals, or religion. Furthermore,
nativism of this prevalent type not only has claimed final validity for
what is thus inborn--or given independently of the changing conditions
of experience--but also has commonly punctuated this claim by viewing
the inborn, or the intuited--for example, the dictates of conscience--as
direct, immediate, unequivocal signs and mandates of God himself. Genius
has been not human, but divine. The intuition at large has [p.197]
passed for nothing more or less than a supernatural revelation. But such
an understanding of the innate, though serviceable beyond measure to the
"specifically dogmatic believer," and though implying too, as of course
it should, the natural, appropriate world of such a believer, does not
agree with the principles of Descartes.
Such an understanding of the innate can imply only a world not merely of
definite, substantial reality, but also of definite, substantial
unreality. How real to some people, how definite and substantial the
"unreal" is; how brutally fixed and yet how alien to what they are given
to finding real. They are nativists of the conventional type, and for
them the negatives of all things are as fixed and as really or as
substantially not this or that as the positives to which what is innate
for them bears its special witness. Their world, in short, is a world of
tethered error as well as tethered truth, of hopeless, unmixed evil as
well as a wholly untainted, unassailable--and why not say also
hopeless?--virtue, of absolute and effective lawlessness as well as an
unswerving law, of a free and omnipotent devil as well as a free and
omnipotent God; for, in simplest language, the rule is a very poor one
that does not work both ways. A world, however, which is so constituted,
calls emphatically for revision of the view that imparts its character
to it. Where the unreal is as real as the real, the evil as effective as
the good, the false as conclusive as the true, there is certainly need
of some second thinking. As some good Irish philosopher might put the
case, if just this is wholly good or true or real, and just that is
wholly [p.198] evil or false or unreal, then _the_ good or _the_ true or
_the_ real cannot be exclusively just this, _the_ evil or _the_ false or
_the_ unreal cannot be exclusively just that, and _the_ innate,
responsible for a world so made, cannot be just in terms of certain
fixed ideas or characters or powers. When, forsooth, has the manifest
existence of evil in any form, of intellectual or moral error, of
political anarchy, of religious heresy, or even of natural violence, not
shaken man's conceits about what is and what is right? The very
conceits--and this the more as they are definite and assertive--help to
make the manifest evil, very much as a definite law has its part in
making a particular crime, and the evil so arising, as it is distinctly
manifested, cannot fail to assail and unsettle the conceits.
According to the Cartesian nativism, on the other hand, particularly as
it was developed by such men as Malebranche and Spinoza, the innate,
which is always at once the final appeal of man's conceits and the
conclusive witness to what is absolutely real, was indeed one with the
divine or supernatural, but it was perhaps just by reason of its truly
divine or supernatural character and origin untethered. How could the
universal doubter be born with a specific knowledge or a specific
programme of anything, when the definite or fixed, the specific in any
quarter whatsoever, must always be a possible object of doubt? Only the
purest principle, or spirit, is impregnable against the attacks of the
sceptic. To doubt such a principle is indeed only to enhance its
importance. The sceptic, then, the universal doubter, is born only with,
and what is more he cannot be born without, a real [p.199] interest and
constant faith in truth, in true knowledge and right action, but no
special experience can ever compass the length and the breadth, the
depth and the height of this interest or this faith. He has a native
love for truth and righteousness, a belief in them, as real and as
inviolable, as universal and as necessary, as his doubt; but the very
doubting in him forever saves both the truth and the righteousness from
being destroyed by satisfaction or crucified by any final embodiment. He
loves and he trusts with all his heart, and he lives in a world that
forever serves the truth and the righteousness of his love and faith.
So, taken at least for what he promised, or for what he said between the
lines, Descartes was a nativist without the nativist's disastrous
bondage to form and creed, to fixed character and specific programme. He
was a nativist, but for him the innate lacked its self-destructive
definiteness; it was just a spirit or principle, or what I have also
called a life or power, ever present not in some, but in all experience,
and so at once sanctioning all things, and, because able to find
perfection in none alone, each single thing being relative, sanctioning
also a constant conflict between things as good or true or real, and
things as bad or false or unreal. Whatever is relative is necessarily,
so to speak, both-sided or divided against itself. The relativity is
such conflict. Before the judgment-seat of the innate, in short, all
things, being relative, must be parties to conflict both individually
and collectively, nor is their conflict anything but an old story to us.
All the paradoxes of experience have been evidences of it. The conflict
apart for the present, however, the meaning [p.200] of Descartes'
nativism is just this: truth in all experience, reality in all things,
and reality, or truth, a principle, not a programme. Just this, too,
discloses to us the nature of the doubter's real world.
In the last chapter we saw in particular the idea of God which the
universal doubter would naturally and consistently entertain and
cherish. We saw how in the proof of God Descartes, deposing the
programme, set the principle in the place of authority, and how in
consequence God became identified with all that was human, with all the
seeking and striving, the hoping and despairing, the erring and the
suffering, of man's life. God's nature just drew all things into itself;
the very conflicts of life were his perfection; the incongruities of
experience were his infinite wisdom. But the doubter has a metaphysics,
or cosmology, as well as a theology; Descartes lost and regained a world
as well as a God; and the doubter's metaphysics, or cosmology, proceeds
from this simple creed: _Reality in all things_. So runs the creed's
supreme article, and its two important clauses are these, equally
familiar to us: _Reality without form or residence_--real as a spirit,
not a programme, and: _Nothing finally and fixedly real in itself, yet
all things working together for what is real_. With this creed clearly
in mind, moreover, we may look out upon the world and see things that
possibly we have never seen at all, or not seen so clearly before.
We see that just because reality is so profound, so spiritual, and so
inclusive, just because nothing can be absolutely real in itself, all
things must be "relative"--this we saw before, but have we ever quite
understood [p.201] stood the meaning of relativity?--and must be
relatively _at once real and unreal_. Perhaps I am still adding little,
if anything, to what has been said already, but distinctly and
emphatically the real world can comprise only things that individually
are relative, relatively real or good or true, and that being thus
relative secure their place and part in absolute reality only by being
also relatively unreal or evil or false. The very conflict of the
relative _ipso facto_ puts it in perfect unity with the absolute. And
so, seeing this, we see not only a world of relativity and consequent
conflict, but also a world whose universal relativity makes for a
genuine absoluteness, and whose conflict can never be in vain, but
instead is always realizing and effective. Thus, all things relative,
that is to say all things at once real and unreal, good and bad, true
and false, are in the constant service of the absolute; and then, only
employing again the language of religion and, if not exactly
interpreting, at least adapting some well-known lines:
All service ranks the same with God--
Whose puppets, best and worst,
Are we; there is no last or first.
All things, serving reality, are whatever they are together; yet could
not be that, were there not a constant conflict in and among all things.
All men serving God are whatever they are together; yet, in like manner,
could not be that were human society not a sphere of conflict harsh and
unceasing.
So we find ourselves well upon our way in the world of the doubter--and
what a world it is! No [p.202] finality, because so much reality.
Conflict, forever necessary to its effective realization. Relativity,
that is to say finiteness, of all things, of all things in it, just for
the sake of its own true absoluteness, just to conserve its own actual
infinity.
And, also, in such a world human life, individually and socially, gets
new interest and vitality. There is given to human life so much
fellowship, and yet, at the same time, so much hostility and
competition. Society and the individual, though neither loses its own
peculiar importance, are so vitally intimate with each other. We cannot,
however, enlarge now upon this point. Another consequence of the
peculiar realism of the sceptic has a more pressing interest.
Is our universal doubter naturally and honestly an evolutionist or a
creationalist? Of course, he may be neither, or he may be one or the
other with a meaning different from that usually recognized. Terms like
these are so very hard to control. Conceivably the doubter, a very
versatile character always, might even be both evolutionist and
creationalist. But, as the terms are commonly used, he must be said at
least to have his face towards an evolutional and away from a creational
view. The difference, again, is seen in that between principle and
programme. An evolutional world is the working out of a principle; a
created world, of a programme--the fixed design of some specified being.
True, one may speak with much significance of persistent, continuous
creation, of a creation active at all times and in all things, and it is
to the point that the Cartesians made much of a doctrine that was very
near to such a notion; but a truly continuous creation [p.203] could be
only an orthodox substitute, or disguise, for evolution. A truly
continuous creation could be bound by no programme; by definition it
could have neither date in time nor location in space. And, what is of
even greater moment, a continuous creator, ever present and ever active,
could never be more or less than the persistent reality of the world
itself. How could he be aloof or different? So have we come, once more,
to the immanence of God as a necessary idea of the sceptic.
The doubter's world, then, is the scene, as realistic as you will and
perhaps we may say, too, without unwarranted enthusiasm, as bright
beneath the morning sun, of the ever present, ever active life of God
or--with the same meaning--of an evolution which we may call God or
nature as we please. From this thought, too, if only we remember that
nothing is unreal and no experience is without some contact with
reality, there is but a step to the idea that God and man are actively
parties to one and the same life. To repeat from above, the conflicts of
human life are the perfection, the perfect living of God. God is, nay,
God's life is, not what some, but what all men do, and the doubter's
world is just the world, the world of things always relative, the world
of constant conflict, in which alone this can be true.