There was once a brook that ran, at times slowly, at times more
rapidly, through fields and woods, under trees and over rocks. At
every chance, whatever the obstacles in its course, it fell, much
or little, as it could; but impatience and uncertainty filled its
life as the minutes and the hours passed. Had life nothing more in
store for its troubled waters? Was this groping downward all? Were
the memory and the accompanying hope, which haunted every thwarted
move, of no avail? Would true fulness of life never be attained?
But a great moment for the brook came, rewarding it at last,
bringing assurance in place of threatened despair. A precipice
intervened, and the waters fell hundreds of feet; a glorious fall
--spray, sunlight, colour, eloquence.
"Now," spoke the brook from the deep, smooth pool below, "now I
have lived; now I know that my life was real and that my life was
good, for I have found myself, I have found my world; and I have
found them where I thought them not. And, speaking so, the brook
flowed on contented.
The confession of doubt, which we set out to make with all possible
candour, is now nearly concluded even to the harvesting of the promised
fruit. The confession began, as will be remembered, with recognition of
certain general and easily demonstrated facts, of [p.249] which there
were five, as follows: (1) We are all universal doubters. (2) Doubt is
essential to all consciousness. (3) Even habit, though confidence be the
horse, has doubt sitting up behind. (4) Like pain or ignorance, doubt is
a condition of real life. (5) And the sense of dependence, so general to
human nature, gives rise to doubt, although also, like misery, it always
seeks company--the company of nature, of man, of God. Then, after this
beginning, which left us by no means so hopeless as might have been
expected, we proceeded to try the doubter, nay, to try ourselves, first
before the court of ordinary life with its ordinary views of things, and
secondly, before the court of science, and, in both trials, we found the
doubting justified. Alike in ordinary life and in science, even in
science where such a result was perhaps hardly to be expected, we found
what at least seemed like illusion and what certainly was paradox, and
almost against our will we had to conclude that a spirit of
contradiction and duplicity and vacillation dwelt at the very centre and
the very heart of our human experience. This spirit of violence, too, as
the evidence of its presence accumulated, bade fair to dispel whatever
hope our confession had left us. Yet out of the evidence there gradually
did appear a reason for deepest assurance, and in the end our fear, not
our hope, was dispelled. Contradiction was seen in its very nature to
possess positive value. It was seen to protect experience, even while
experience was specific and concrete, definite and individual, against
any fatal digression or partiality of view. It was deeply conservative,
corrective, and [p.250] compensative in its effect, but it was all this
without ever being merely negative or destructive towards anything,
since its own efficiency required persistent individual differences. To
experience it gave movement, constant unity or wholeness, realistic
value and poise, practicality, and, lastly, social expression. And we
were able, accordingly, to conclude, in so many words, that both
ordinary life and science, so given to duplicity in their standpoint and
in their ideas, were really building well, far better, indeed, than they
seemed or than they clearly knew. Contradiction, in short, as we came to
see it, meant unity, but not an empty, abstract unity; it meant unity
rich and real with an infinity of differences; and so what had at first
appeared an uncompromising reason for doubt turned, right before our
doubter's eyes, into an unassailable ground of belief, making the very
world which we had been so uncertain about a world for an inviolable
faith. But truth, we saw at once, could no longer be identified with a
formal idea, known or unknown or unknowable; reality could no longer
have the character of a fixedly constituted thing, whether such a thing
were present in experience or not; and perfection, even the perfection
of God, could no longer be a mere status, a passive possession of
certain characters, attributes, or prerogatives. Truth became, as was
said, in want of a better word, a spirit; reality was a life; perfection
was a power. And thereupon, with the new view thus afforded us, coupled
as it was especially with the sense in which personally a man could
claim reality for himself and yet be party to the factional life of
society, we were able to turn to [p.251] Descartes, an early modern
doubter, a father confessor of many doubters, and, overlooking some of
his shortcomings in thought and character, to appreciate both the use
that he made of doubt, the intimacy that he, too, found between doubt
and faith, and the world of reality, of most vital sympathy between the
material and the spiritual, of genuine, personal individuality, and of
immortality, through which he led us, doubter, universal doubter though
he was. That great Frenchman, as we were enabled to understand him, got
back the world, the self and the God which he seemed to have lost, but
he got them all back transfigured. He got them back, not by denying and
excluding what appeared negative and treacherous in their nature, but by
facing this and using it, by accepting it and turning it even against
itself. The very Paris to which he returned as believer was the same
Paris, the Paris of doubt and of evil in all its forms, that earlier,
hopeless and despairing, he had put behind him. And, once more, his
experience was ours, and so helped us to interpret and deepen ours,
quickening the value of our own previous discovery that within the very
sources of doubt lay the real bases of belief. Our own doubted world of
what was relative and artificial, and above all contradictory, had
already turned, without loss of anything that was in it, into a world of
reality and belief.
And so, for this concluding chapter, as but a sort of focussing of what
almost from the beginning has been borne in upon us, but especially at
the close has been rich in reality and meaning, we have a sixth general
fact, which may now be added to the original five. [p.252] _We believe
through our doubts; we believe, not in something apart, but in the very
things we doubt_. To this fact really inclusive of all the others, or if
not to this fact at least to this conviction which we have achieved
here, we shall now turn, and in our concluding chapter we may even
forget, or retain only as the appropriate background, many of those more
special or more technical details that from time to time have occupied
us. After so much, that to some, if not to all, who have followed me to
this place, may have appeared open to the charge of being mere theory,
certain simple, very practical considerations, appealing quite as much
to the emotions as to the reason, can hardly be out of place. Those who
are already satisfied, who foresee only repetition, who are themselves
without emotion, or who consider anything like the drawing of a moral to
be as useless as it is inartistic, need read no further.