We believe in the very things we doubt. Doubt, this is to say, can
destroy nothing. It only calls for closer scrutiny, for wider and deeper
view, for greater achievement. Its effect is only to make over, renew,
or fulfil what has already been and must ever remain an object of faith,
and so doing it keeps the old faith alive. It questions all things, but
properly, consistently it raises, not questions of mere existence or
reality, but questions of meaning and worth, and whatever it truly
questions it always quickens. Have [p.253] we not found that with its
inborn and insatiable passion for truth doubt must believe in
everything, and that to satisfy this passion, since all things must work
together for what is real and true, it must reject nothing but seek even
the universe in everything? All things, from the momentary sensation in
your little finger, or the tree yonder on the lawn, to the personality
of God or the divinity of Christ as an idea in the consciousness of
millions of people, all things are; they are in experience; they are
unassailable realities of experience; but--and just this is as far as
the truth-loving doubter, the doubter who is honest with his own
self-consciousness, can go--what really are they? _What are they?_ is
such an honest question. In this question, too, there is more reality
for the things inquired about even than in any man's assertion that they
are this or that they are that. But the question _Are they?_ would be
downright treachery. We doubters, then, believe, but would ever know
what we believe; we have, yet would realize every possibility that what
we have affords.
Doubt, I repeat, destroys nothing. From time to time certain doubting
people have called their prophets impostors, and have imagined
themselves able to put the impostors out of the way, but, as history has
always shown, only with the result of reviving among themselves and
often of awakening in the minds and hearts of others the sense and
conviction of just that for which the offensive impostors may have
suffered violent death. Even history's petty impostors, too, as well as
those who have proved heroes and great leaders, have always had their
justification. An [p.254] absolute impostor has never been. Again,
certain people have cried illusion and unreality at things political or
moral or even at things physical, but only in the end to feel, and to
make others feel, first, their evident narrowness, if not their actual
dishonesty, and then their need of a more hospitable idea of what is
valid and real. Nothing can be, or ever has been, unreal. And, in
general, doubt of a thing or a person or a God only needs its own
conscious assertion to turn actually into an appeal from its particular
object to the ideal or spirit or principle for which the object had
stood, and upon this appeal even the object that has been for a moment
condemned is justified and glorified. Thus, doubt may deny or depose or
put to death, but as it is honest it also realizes or restores or
revives. Through doubt the sensuous, which is the particular and
visible, is ever becoming spiritualized; even this corruptible puts on
incorruption and this mortal puts on immortality. Or, in these words, if
we doubt we may reject the object, the letter, but we cannot reject the
letter without accepting and asserting the spirit, and we cannot assert
the spirit without recalling and exalting and even worshipping the
letter. The rejection makes for universality by casting down the
barriers of the particular experience of time or place, of person or
nation, of the Greek perhaps, if again I may look to history, or of the
Jew or of the Christian, while the recall and the worship make for
definiteness. Without the previous rejection the worship could be only
idolatry. So, as Descartes will be remembered virtually to have said,
doubt is innately loyal to reality in [p.255] everything, and just
through this loyalty the world it spurns, the world of God and man and
nature, is for ever called back, a real world once more, because a
realized, a spiritually realized world. Why forget, as so many seem to,
that reality is an achievement; achieved it may be, as with the brook,
even by a great fall?
But have you ever climbed a mountain up and up and up, through thick
woods, over rough, almost impassable trails, into clouds dense and
chilling, stormy and angry, over treacherous snows and frightful cliffs,
and come out at last on the very top to see both earth and heaven,
yourself between, the clouds dispersed, the hardships and dangers all
forgotten, the whole world real and yours? Well, that is doubt become
achievement. Have you worked at some problem of everyday life, or a
problem of science or philosophy, patiently or impatiently applying all
the rules and precepts at your command, trying every resort known to
you, and in final desperation many you only guess at, and then, when
failure seems almost certain, caught a glimpse of the real meaning and
the real way, attaining to an insight that reveals a new world to you?
That, too, is doubt rewarded. Have you ever visited, perhaps more
curiously than reverently, some great Catholic cathedral, or, better
still, some temple of the far Orient, and watching the worshippers
there, suddenly had a vision of religion as greater and deeper than any
Protestantism or even than Christianity? That, again, is doubt's
achievement. Have you ever suffered a great heartrending disappointment,
let me say a great personal loss, and [p.256] found it seemingly
impossible to return to the routine of your former life, but
nevertheless, almost imperceptibly, come into a sense of presence and
gain from the very thing that seemed taken from you? That, once more, is
doubt without its sting, robbed of its victory. Doubt means sacrifice,
often enormous sacrifice, but always a more than equal gain. The light
that casts the shadows of doubt, when one can face it, and really does
face it, as, for another example, in this book we have been trying to
face it, is so splendid and so uplifting.
So, a third time, doubt destroys nothing; it only makes reality forever
an achievement and belief a constantly active life. The fact, now no
stranger to us, that doubt is social, also shows this. Doubt is social,
as has been said, since by its isolation it makes the longing for
company, and by its greater freedom the larger opportunity for company;
and since also the very contradictions or controversies which arouse it
are never merely individual, being always social also, and social
relationship means effort and sacrifice, and is accordingly a peculiarly
interesting witness to the losses that doubt must suffer for its greater
gains. Doubt, in short, shows belief, working not merely for the reality
of all things, but also for the love of all men. As social, then, as
working for the love of all men, doubt involves sympathy. Yet not an
easy, passive sympathy. A restless, labouring, always growing sympathy
is the sympathy of the doubter; a sympathy that makes all it covers
labour and grow also. Does it hurt your business to doubt it
sufficiently to make you able to sympathize with the interests of
[p.257] another? To this question Adam Smith gave a timely answer when
at a critical moment in industrial history he found in sympathy a
condition of successful competition. Does it hurt your politics, if you
can lose enough of the partisan's conceit or the jingo's bombast to
sympathize with the other parties or the other nations? The value of
real independence in politics is one answer, and the idea of federation
among competing states, or of international polity as a basis of
successful national life, is another. Does it hurt your understanding to
outgrow your own profoundest ideas and see some validity in the
doctrines and formulæ of others? Does it hurt your Christianity to make
concessions to another's Christianity or to the worship of any land or
any time? The reading of the last great book, or the visit to the pagan
temple, is an answer. Simply the doubter the world over, social being
that he is by nature, imbued as he is with a living sympathy, must
recognize, and must labour to maintain or achieve, the unity of
humanity. For him just this is God, or truth, and it is worth far more
than anybody's religion or than anybody's rational formulæ. It must
stand, too, both as the universal authority which both religion and
reason have over the lives of men and as the motive or living principle,
or spirit, by which particular religions and particular formulæ, however
serviceable, are forever unstable.
But doubt, which is thus social and imbued with a living sympathy, and
which though requiring sacrifice does not destroy belief, but only makes
belief active and reality an achievement, may be viewed here in still
another way. It shows mankind using or spending [p.258] instead of
either hoarding or throwing away any of the resources of knowledge and
faith, of developed habit and personal association, which life
accumulates. Some doubters, as men say in the business world, invest
what they have; some speculate. Some are conservative, even timorous;
some are very rash. Yet doubt as expenditure is necessary to all who
would enjoy the proper, natural increase of their possessions, and while
the rash, be they transgressors or reformers, sensualists or
materialists, or equally impractical idealists, at a throw may win or
lose great riches of mind or spirit, the timorous and
ultra-conservative, the "practical" and conventional, are not less
dependent on chance. There are the new rich, too, and the aristocratic
poor, and both remind us strongly that the real use of what we have is
not only a duty, but also a very sober duty. To hoard blindly or spend
rashly is to risk unwisely, perhaps to lose all, or, if to win, to win
idly; while to use well, to doubt clearly and honestly, to doubt even in
one's belief, to doubt only for fuller meaning, for broader and deeper
life, for richer companionship, is personally to earn lasting spiritual
treasure.
Modern science, whose knowledge comprises merely working hypotheses, the
means to truth, not truth itself, or if truth, then only a living,
growing truth, affords one of the best examples of this. Modern science
is a great faith, a great belief, but only because it is a life, not a
status or possession, only because it is a constant spending, a constant
using of knowledge, that earns interest, even compound interest, as
regularly as the years go by. And experience in [p.259] general, as well
as science, is also a great belief, and also only because always
doubting and so always using and always earning.
Doubt, in a word, is more than a necessity of experience; it is
distinctly a duty. Experience itself is but another name for that hard
master who says to every unprofitable servant: "Thou wicked and slothful
servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I
did not scatter; thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the
bankers, and at my coming I should have received back my own with
interest. Take ye away therefore the talent from him and give it unto
him that hath the ten talents."