Chapter 7 POSSIBLE VALUE IN THESE ESSENTIAL DEFECTS OF EXPERIENCE.

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 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, 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 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 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. 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] 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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