The Will to Doubt

Our confession must, of course, be thorough-going, and can be made so only through a complete statement of every possible reason that experience affords for the attitude of doubt.

To the end, therefore, of such a statement we shall consider in this chapter certain general and easily recognized facts about doubt itself, while in chapters that follow we shall continue the confession by examining, first, our customary or "common-sense" view of things, and then the view of science, and having brought together in each case numerous incongruities, or contradictions, which ordinarily are at best only casually noticed or timorously overlooked, we shall find ourselves facing in a peculiarly telling way, not only certain strong reasons for doubt, but also some of the real issues that doubt raises. As no issue, moreover, can be more central or crucial than the meaning of the contradictions found to pervade our views of things, before completing our confession we shall allow ourselves some reflections, that should prove useful to us in the end, upon the possible worth of contradiction in human experience; for even to casual thinking contradiction, although good ground for scepticism, suggests some positive advantage and opportunity; the advantage of breadth, for example, of freedom from special form, or the opportunity of personal spontaneity and initiative as against the restraints of formal consistency, of class, and of institution; and if these things, among others, can be associated with our case for doubt, our reflections will certainly not have been in vain. Then we shall close our confession by seeking the companionhip of a great doubter of modern times, and by learning what we can from him of doubt itself and of the doubter's natural world. And finally, as a result of all our own efforts, supplemented by his help, we shall be able to reap some of the fruits for life and thought that a confession so fully made may fairly claim.

From start to finish, moreover, of this study of doubt we have to remember that there can be no important difference between what is possible and what is real. Thus anything whatsoever that can possibly be doubted is really doubtful. Also, if anybody is amazed to hear mention of facts about doubt, as if doubt should not somehow submit to its own nostrum, let him merely reflect that, strangely enough, nothing is quite so indubitable as doubt, nothing so convincing as the reasons for doubt. Let me not be too subtle, but to doubt doubt is only to affirm it, and somehow-whether for good or ill need not now be said-all the negative things of life possess a peculiar certainty, and are all most easily proved. A great Frenchman once put the case quite plainly when he said, after canvassing very carefully the whole field of his consciousness, that his doubts were the only things there, the only things he could be quite certain about, and these were so very real that they left him absolutely [p.007] nothing but belief in himself, in his all-doubting and ever-doubting self, to rest upon. His was surely a sweeping confession, and his residuum of belief may not at first sight seem very promising or very substantial, but quickly, I think, we shall find ourselves in agreement with him, at least as to the reality and the wide scope of our doubting, and it is also a possibility well worth foreseeing that we may even find his belief in the reality of an ever-doubting and all-doubting self a rock for our own saving.

So, to turn now to those general and easily recognized facts, which were to be the special interest of the present chapter, in the first place: We are all universal doubters. We are all universal doubters in the sense that every one of us doubts something, and there is nothing which some of us have not doubted. Who would be so rash as to say that what a fellow-being had questioned might not be questionable to himself also, or that, if anything in his own experience had ever been subject to question, all the other things might not also be subject to question? But the merely dubitable is the already doubtful. In this sense, therefore, not so abstruse and formally logical as it may appear, we are all universal doubters.

Our life is ever cherishing what we are pleased to call its verities, some in religion and morals, some in politics, some in mathematics and science, some in the more general relations to nature, but what elusive things these verities are! How shallow, or how hollow all of them are, or at one time or another may become. To take a rather minute case, such as it is always the philosopher's license to make use of, a case that is, however, quite typical in experience; here is a word-any word you like-that has been spoken and written by you for years. Always before it has been spelt correctly and clearly understood, but to-day how unreal it seems. Are those the right letters, and are they correctly placed? Is that the true meaning? What has happened, too, to give rise to these unusual questions? Well, who can say? And who has not substantially asked every one of them, not merely with reference to some long-familiar word, but also with reference to much larger things in life? Self and society, love and friendship, mind and matter, nature and God have again and again been subjected to essentially the same questioning. The verities of life, all the way from simple words used every day to the great things of our moral and spiritual being, have lost, sometimes slowly, sometimes very suddenly, the reality with which we have supposed them endowed, and although we may still bravely believe we find ourselves crying out passionately for help in our unbelief. There certainly are the verities; not one of them can possibly fall to the ground; yet these very verities are never quite in our experience.

Still the world has its thoroughly confident people. Every one of us has met some of those estimable beings to whom doubt seems wholly foreign, people who assert with trembling voice and sacred vow that their convictions, political perhaps or religious, are unassailable, and that they must hold them to the grave. But, whatever may be said of political convictions, religious convictions have often been regarded as a contradiction of terms. How can one be sure and religious at the same time? Moreover, positive people under any standard are notoriously as fearful as they are dogmatic. Fear is often, if not always, the chief motive of dogmatism, and fear is hardly the most natural companion of genuine confidence. The part which the emotion of fear has had, both in the personal life and in the doctrine of the dogmatic among men, would make a most instructive study.

If, then, dogmatic people are slaves to their fears, while more thoughtful people, as has not needed to be said, seem to get no reward from their self-consciousness but the uncertain reward of their doubts, then only such as live quietly, asserting nothing, depending on nothing, and even assuming nothing, but simply taking what comes, are left to represent genuine belief. Yet how many such are there? A few may seem to approach the ideal, if ideal it be, but the class itself in realization must be said to be a hypothetical one, and few, if any, of us could ever really envy or strive to imitate its supposed manner of living; for, in spite of all the dangers and all the doubts and fears, only the constantly examined life can ever really lure us. Doubt, besides being a general condition of life, seems to be also incident to what gives life worth.

But, furthermore, not only are we all universal doubters; the case for doubt in the world is, if possible, even stronger; for also-and this is the second general fact: Doubt is a phase, nay, a vital condition of all consciousness. To be a conscious creature is to be a doubting creature.

In so many ways psychology is teaching us to-day with renewed emphasis that we are conscious of nothing as it is, and that more or less clearly we all know our shortcoming in this regard; or again, with still more directness and emphasis, that for us there is no such thing as a state of consciousness which does not indicate tension, or unstable equilibrium, that is to say uncertainty, in our activity. Nor have we need of the testimony of science to these facts, since common personal experience is well aware of them. In small things and in great consciousness transforms or refracts. In small things and in great consciousness marks a moment of poise between an impulse to do something, and more or less distinctly recognized conditions or relations that would put restraint upon the doing of it. Even the law of relativity, a psychological law only in its definite formulation, in its idea a simple fact of everyday experience, true for all conscious states from the crudest perceptions of the organs of sense to the most highly developed ideas of critical reflection, by binding as it does all the details of actual or possible experience into a whole, every part of which acts upon the other parts, points very directly to this fact of poise and instability, besides indicating also that knowledge never can be literally or objectively exact, and that at least with some clearness every knower must know it cannot. How can there ever be even a single stable or a single finally accurate element in the consciousness of a creature whose experience, in the first place, can comprise only related, interdependent parts, and whose nature, in the second place, is an essentially mobile and active one? Moreover, as just one other way of suggesting the inexactness and uncertainty of consciousness and the balancing, tentative nature of all conscious life, we always think, and think properly, of conscious creatures as having will, as doing what they do purposely or from design. The new psychology, however, to which we naturally turn, and which again has only formulated what we can recognize from everyday experience, declares that the purpose in conscious activity is not a developed, but an always developing one. Purposive action is action that never finally knows, but is ever finding out its real intent, purpose being identical with the progressively discovered meaning of action. A volitionally, purposively active being is always a seeker as well as a doer. Indeed, any doing would itself be empty, or idle, if it were not a seeking, and so if it were not subject to conditions of some uncertainty. In so many ways, then, through the necessary inexactness of consciousness, through the unstable equilibrium of all conscious activity, through the law and fact of relativity, and through the tentative and provisional nature which must always belong to purpose, we see how doubt must be a phase or condition of all consciousness.

Illustrations are abundant. Thus, once more to take a somewhat minute case, which is really more significant for being minute, with regard to conscious activity being in a state of tension, visual sensations always involve muscular sensations, and these are incident not only to expressed, but also to possible, yet restrained, movements. The eyes may have been moved and the head turned, but in spite of the impulses present in them the legs have not been used to bring the observer nearer to the object seen, nor have the arms and hands been raised to secure a contact with it, and perhaps a tracing of its lines, although some stimulus for such contact and tracing must be always present as a part of the actual or possible value of the experience. Or, again, to adopt an illustration used for a different purpose by Professor William James, so simple a process as the spelling of a word is complicated with all sorts of diverting and unsettling impulses as each letter is expressed. Let the word be onomatopoetic. Can I really spell it correctly? And what a gauntlet of dangers I have to run. The initial letter o tempts, perhaps with childhood memories of the alphabet, to p-q-r-s-t, etc., or to indefinite words or syllables, actual from my past or possible to my future experience, such as of, off, opine, October, -ology, -ovy, and so on, or, to suggest mere possibilities, such as ontic, oreate, ot, or ow; and every succeeding letter is equally a scene of combat, a place of dangers met-safely met, let us hope, and triumphantly passed. Worthy the boy, or the man, who reaches the end unhurt. And what a voyage of uncertainties, what a course between hope and fear, confidence and doubt, the spelling of words or the spelling of life as a whole always is. One's whole vocabulary, real or possible, or one's whole repertory of acts is more or less directly involved, whatever one does. As to the tentative nature of purpose, which seems the only other point here that can possibly require illustration, the right we all reserve to change our minds in the different affairs of life tells its own story. We never do do, or can do, exactly what we consciously would do; and recognizing this, men, as well as women, insist on the right of a change of mind, and sometimes even of conscious misrepresentation or of disparity between their seeming and their being in thought or in deed. That such a claim has its dangers does not now concern us; it has also its opportunities; but the fact of it and the ground for it are quite evident. Even jurisprudence, for which loyalty to established and visible forms is peculiarly sacred, has its ways, direct and indirect, of recognizing that purposes develop, that the returns are never all in, that any purpose or meaning must sooner or later assume a new form, and so may even now be other than it seems. Bequests for institutions, for example, are allowed to continue in force, although, with the demands of a more enlightened day, the formal conditions under which they were made have been openly violated. In short-for it all comes to this-"Not the letter, but the spirit," is an inevitable comment, or at least an inevitable feeling about everything that is done. A man vaults a fence, and then, even if he get over fairly well, vaulting is not what it was for him. He may continue to use the old word, or the same arms and legs, but with a changed meaning and a changed feeling of limb and muscle, and so with a new purpose and a new body to control and modify his next performance. And what is true for vaulting is true also for making boxes or tables, for writing essays, for talking, for thinking, for founding colleges or theological seminaries, or finally, for what we so indefinitely call living. An activity such as throughout its length and breadth ours is, conscious activity that must for ever heed the call: "Not the letter, but the spirit," an activity that never is, therefore, and never can be without the elements of the game, since it must ever wait on its own revealed consequences in order to grow into an understanding of its real meaning; such an activity, among other things, cannot but fasten doubt upon us as a most natural heritage. As man is conscious, to doubt is human. Other things may be human, too, but doubt is so certainly and conspicuously.

Thirdly, in this presentation of general facts: Doubt is inseparable from habit. Habit is usually associated with what is permanent and established, but just here lies its undoing. As we usually understand it, habit really deadens what it touches by leading to abstraction or separation from actual conditions. Conservative as it surely is in things important and in things unimportant, in things personal and in things social, it sets him who is party to it behind the times, for no act in its second expression, no simply repeated act, no mere habit could ever be up to date in the sense of really meeting all the emergencies of its own time. Personal habits make fixed characters; social habits make customs and laws; religious habits make churches and creeds; intellectual habits make schools; and of all these products, which for the sake of the single term we will call institutions, it must be said, however paradoxically, that in being made they are also outgrown, for the habitual turns formal and unreal and so unsatisfying. A growing nature has her ways of making even conservatives keep pace with her. An institution in the sense of an acquired manner of action, personal or social, can never really be an end in itself, although to a narrow view it may often seem to be; it is at best only the manifested means to a newly developed or developing end which must eventually transform it. In so large a thing, for example, as political life, the institutes of monarchy have become the instruments of democracy, and this conspicuously ever since the French Revolution; in the history of thought, of man's intellectual life, the objective dogmas of one time have been only the subjective standpoints of the next, the metaphysics of one time has made the scientific method, the working hypothesis, of the succeeding time; and in so small a thing as a child's vocabulary, the oft-repeated and finally mastered syllable ba, or some other equally intellectual, has become in time only one of the means to a whole word, say baby or bath, or even basilica or barometrograph. In all life the thing we get the habit of is only a tool with which we strive towards something else. Some one thinking no doubt of Hercules has called the institutions of life a great club which the irresistible arm of society, always a hero when looked back upon, swings fatally against the present.

So intimately is change seen nowadays to be related to habit, or indirectly involved in it, that in technical science a new account of habit has been formulated. To cite but one case, Professor Baldwin, says:[1] "Habit expresses the tendency of the organism to secure and retain its vital stimulations," and such an account, placing the interest of habit in so general and so changeable a thing as "vital stimulations," is designed to make habit fundamentally, not merely a tendency to repetition or imitation, but instead a demand for constant adaptation or differentiation. In the doctrines of inheritance, also, always moving necessarily in close sympathy with those of habit, a similar departure has been made. Both habit and inheritance are in fact seen to belong to life in a world of change, or variation, and they have assumed what I will style a protective colouring accordingly. The habit of always being adapted is at least as radical as it is conservative.

With this reform in the account of habit we have not only analogous reforms, as was said, in the account of inheritance, but also in the scientific view of character, custom, law, creed, and the institution generally. Moreover, if in scientific theory we find these new views, in practical life there are at least signs of the same standpoint. What may be called a new conservatism-the most truly conservative thing being taken to be the most thoroughly pertinent or adaptive thing-has for many years been getting possession of us, and is now quite manifest. Our political constitutions are amendable constitutions; our religious rites and doctrines are recognized as only symbols; our theories are only standpoints.

So, once more, because change is at least an ever-present companion, if not actually an integral part of habit, doubt must be as real and general as habit. Change must make doubt. Sociologically, institutionalism must always imply a contemporary scepticism; the conservative must have an unbeliever for his neighbour. Indeed, to add an important point, some go so far as to say in general that change, that is, something new and different, is not only a necessary incident but also an actual motive in all activity, and when all is said they seem quite right. Perhaps habit, as always an interest in adaptation, would imply as much. Certainly novelty is a universal motive, and as for society there can be no question that it has a very strong predilection for lawlessness in all its forms. True, it may be objected that at times men, individually or collectively, seek not something else, but simply more of something already secured; more money, it may be, or more learning, or more territory, or more pleasure. There is, however, in spite of man's many conceits to the contrary, no change that is purely quantitative. More is also different or other. Accordingly, we both always find, and, what is even more to the point, always seek a real change whenever we do anything. To speak again in most general terms, the motion in the outer world, which is the fundamental stimulus of all 'consciousness, both physically, that is, literally, and figuratively, is more than merely an outer stimulus; something there is within the nature of the subject which answers to it with perfect sympathy and makes it equally an inner motive. Forsooth, could any stimulus ever produce a response without its being in accord with an existing motive? Life, then, is a game, and the game of life, doubts and all, is a real interest as well as a necessity. We are creatures of habit, but we have, and we cherish, no habit stronger or more essential than the habit at once of adaptation and variation.[2]

A fourth general fact, very closely related to the foregoing, is this: Doubt is necessary to life, to real life, to deep experience. Doubt is but one of the phases of the resistance which a real life demands. Real life implies a constant challenge, and doubt is a form under which the challenge finds expression. The doubter is a questioner, a seeker; he has, then, something to overcome; he fears, too, as well as hopes.

Were all things settled once for all, were all things clearly known and freely executed, or were the consequences of the things to be done always capable of being accurately foretold, there would be no real living, there would be nothing really to do. In such case life in general, or in any of its different expressions, religion, or politics, or art, or science, or industry, or morals, if one may suppose for a moment that any of these differences could ever develop, would consist in a purely passive condition, a mere fixed status; it would be a wholly static thing falsely called life; its movement, if movement there were, could be only the rest or routine of strictly mechanical motion.

To a real life, then, doubt, as an evidence of challenge and resistance, is absolutely necessary, and appreciation of just this necessity is certainly an important part of our present confession, and the confession is important, because it is sure somewhat to brighten what heretofore may have seemed a dark horizon. Confession often changes night to dawn, and here the association of doubt with real living, with a world in which there is always something to do, awakens emotions that such words as relativity, and instability, and change, and even game, have discouraged, or even wholly suppressed. Leasing, perhaps better than any one else, has given expression to these emotions, and has at the same time reflected what in his day had certainly begun to be, and what in our own time very widely and very deeply is, the ideal spirit. Thus, as he wrote:-

"Not the truth that any one may have or may think he has, but the honest effort which has been exerted to compass it, makes what is really worthy in human life. For not in having, but in seeking truth, are those powers developed, in which alone man's ever-increasing perfection consists. Possession makes us inert, lazy, proud. If God held in his right hand the perfect truth, and in his left the ever-restless struggle after truth, and bade me choose, although I were bound to be ever and always in the wrong, I should humbly select the left, saying: 'Father, give; surely the pure truth is for Thee alone.'"

This is a splendid utterance, and it has touched a responsive chord in human nature the civilized world over, not so much, however, for the humility of the choice as for the zeal in a life of seeking and striving, or for the idea that knowledge is itself a dynamic thing, a living, moving function, not a passive possession. The knower is made also a doubter, and the doubter appears as having, in a sense, forgotten, without for a moment betraying, the constant doubting within him. If I may so speak, he has, even while he lacks; such is the condition of his seeking; such is the way in which doubting is necessary to real living. Doubt saves from the possession that makes "inert, lazy, proud," yet does not take away. Doubt makes experience always deep, even putting consciousness in touch with reality, and it makes life for ever living.

Still others may be quoted in the same vein. Socrates made life, particularly mental life, if this may be supposed distinct, essentially active or dynamic when he identified true wisdom with self-conscious ignorance, with a power in one of always finding oneself in error, and in modern times Hegel has done the same thing as effectually, though perhaps not in general so intelligibly, by finding a principle of negativity or contradiction the very mainspring of all consciousness, of all thinking. Known truth is at once imperfect or even false, being necessarily partial, relative, and at best only tentative, very much, let us say, recalling something already remarked, as an established form of life is no longer the real life, but merely the developed means to a revolution, a life that is passing even as soon as it has come.

For the rest, the positive value of doubt to real life can hardly need further emphasis. In one form or another the idea, as important as many may find it commonplace, must constantly recur in these pages. We turn, therefore, to our fifth, and for the present, last general fact, with which we shall find ourselves still in sight, perhaps even in clearer sight of the brighter horizon. We are all universal doubters; doubt underlies all consciousness; even habit has gloomy doubt, as Horace would say, sitting up behind; like pain or want, like ignorance or contradiction, doubt is a dynamic principle, making experience deeper and ever deepening, and life real and alive; and fifthly: As man is dependent and feels dependent, he is a doubter. His widespread, or rather his universal, sense of dependence begets doubt. Witness the fact that doubt shows man a seeker after company; the company of nature, the company of his fellows, the company of God.

Of course the social impulse, thus to be associated with doubt, is only one of the phases of its dynamic and life-giving character, for a social life, a life of dependence on what is without, of real relations beyond self, must be a life of real and constant movement. Nothing so much as such relations gives vitality. This special phase, however, of the place of doubt in real life is a very interesting one, and it suggests, besides, so much that is of positive value as almost to transform what so far has been in large part a sceptic's confession into a sceptic's boast.

Thus, in the first place, doubt seeks the company of nature. "Return to nature!" has time and again in human history been the cry of the human heart. Has civilization lost its hold, seeming unreal, artificial, formal? Has morality become hollow? Has a lover suffered the shattering of his dearest hopes? Has a creed lost its credibility? Have you and I wearied of our study or our labour, whatever it be, and come to wonder if it, or anything, is worth while after all? Have friends, ideals, and God Himself deserted us? We turn, and all people turn to nature. Exactly so the homesick traveller takes himself homeward, or the prodigal arises and goes to his father. And your experience and mine, and the poetry of all literatures, which tells so deeply the experiences of all men of all times, are a constant witness to the comfort, and forgiveness, and renewed confidence in self that nature imparts. Nature is our infancy, in which all things are possible; she is our untrammelled will; she is infinitely hopeful for us and infinitely kind; her necessity is so wide and so open that its very law, so different from any human law, is our greatest opportunity. True, our resort to nature is sometimes, perhaps in greater or less degree always, by the way of moral dissipation, or political anarchy, or intellectual suicide, or religious profanity; but even these dark ways to the home and the great mother-heart of us all have never been hopelessly misleading. If history and literature and personal experience can be trusted, even they have led to a kind nature. Have you never failed in anything and become reckless, and then profited from the very knowledge of yourself which the recklessness uncovered? Personally and socially recklessness, return to nature that it is, is always a helpful assistant to nature's great teacher, experience. Great is the pathos, but also, as it is understood, great is the inspiration of Rousseau's passionate outcry that his will was perfectly good. He was incapable of a single wholesome relation in life, yet, so he said, no man was better than he! Rousseau, philosopher of revolution, spoke for nature. Out of her great love, nature always takes the will for the deed-and perhaps she alone should have the privilege of doing that; for she knows that the deed, however violent, however bad, is sure to leave at least the will good.

But intellectually, as well as morally or politically, or as well as in any of the departments of the practical, emotional life, when trouble comes we turn to nature. Nature has a mind as well as a heart, and when state, and church, and social tradition have lost their validity and infallibility, their various formul? being no longer reasonable to us, when we have to depose them from their position as our accepted teachers, then we become scientists, which is to say, intellectual prodigals. Science, the open-minded study of nature, is only a homesickness for truth seeking relief. Does the scientist doubt? He is one of the princes of doubters. He doubts, as in due time we shall more fully appreciate, even to the extreme position of agnosticism. He doubts all things human that always he may be learning of nature.

So the companionship of nature for the comfort and pardon which she is sure to give, and for the deeper knowledge which she is certain to impart, is a passion of the doubter. True, no passion is free from dangers; yet this passion, at least this passion, has somewhat of hope in it.

But, secondly, the companionship of one's fellows is not less strongly desired. Huddling together in time of distress is by no means peculiar to the animal world; in human life it has more than once made distress seem richly worth while. "We have each other" in word or thought has been the comforting reflection of many a family, or many a community, when the money has gone, or when in other ways, possibly through a great fire, or a great earthquake, or the ravages of a disease, afflictions have come, and "Now we know how others have suffered" has been not less common. Indeed, it is my own conviction that these two reflections always rise together. The distress or affliction of doubt, however, is certainly no exception to the rule. Doubt often separates an individual from the customary corporate life with which he has long identified himself, throwing him out of his church, or his party, or his society, or even his immediate family, but the doubter at once feels his loneliness, and gets a yearning, never realized before, for social relations. Benedict Spinoza may have been better than most of us, but he was not in any other way different, and though maligned and insulted, as earlier in history another of his race had been, for his doubts and heresies, and though exposed to the dangers of the assassin's knife, and finally, when other measures failed, with special cruelties excommunicated by his synagogue, he loved his people, and all men besides, as few have loved them. Doubt makes one dependent; isolation gives a sense of loss; and, if ever a solution of the doubt comes, in the life and consciousness which it enjoins the lost companions, whether they will or not, are included with oneself. In many ways this is an important fact; yet it must suffice that we see the affinity of the doubter for society. Man ever confidently seeks what man has lost. Dependent man and doubting man must have society.

That doubt, furthermore, not only creates a motive to social life, even to the restoration of lost companions, but also by weakening the barriers which have divided some class, a sect perhaps, or a party, or a nation, or a race, from some other class, puts social life on a broader and deeper basis, is also an important fact, and full of significance beyond our immediate interest. Thus, to suggest indeed how those two reflections mentioned in the preceding paragraph are inseparable, besides his wish to retain or recover his wonted companions, the doubter would also associate them and himself with new companions, I venture to say, as if in a figure, with Gentiles as well as with Jews, and this gives to doubt, or to those who experience it and adequately use it, a most significant r?le in the evolution of society, the r?le of mediation between old friends and new, between the past and the future, the narrow life and the broader and deeper life, what is conservative and what is progressive; but at least for the present it is again enough if we see that doubt, not only by its personal losses gives the motive, but also by its removal of barriers gives the larger possibility of society.

And, in addition to the company of nature and the company of man, doubt, springing as it does from man's sense of insufficiency, seeks also the company of God; yet not of the God of any theology. As here conceived, God is that which lies at the back of nature, and at the back of man in the sense of being in character broader and deeper than either of these, and quite superior to any difference between them; he is the single, all-inclusive, wholly indeterminate reality upon which the doubter depends, and must depend; he is as nameless and unspeakable as he is indeterminate and all-inclusive, and he is real and perfect only as so nameless. To theology, God is determinate; to doubt, imperfect if determinate. At times, perhaps only half in earnest, or at least not clearly knowing if he is in earnest or if he wishes others to think him so, the doubter speaks of nature as his God, of the hills, or the fields, or the sea, or the sky, or the busy street as his church, or the great book of the universe as his Bible. At times, with the deepest emotion and with open avowal, nature and God are fully one to him, and the poetry, or the science, or the philosophy, to which his doubting leads him, is veritably a religious revelation. But always his doubting, as he knows it, as he is honest with it, is an appeal, not merely to nature as physically a powerful agent in the life he is pursuing, nor to others like himself who, by sharing, may lighten his distress and enhance his final victory, but also to a full, inclusive experience; to a life, perhaps like his own, yet indeterminately deeper than any he has known; to a mind and a heart, such as he knows must be present in that which surrounds him and moves within him, in knowledge more enlightened and in emotion more inspired, than his doubting mind and faltering heart have ever been; and such a life or such a mind or heart, whatever name it be called by, is God. Can mind appeal to anything but mind, or heart to anything but heart? And doubt-can it be doubt without the appeal?

The doubter who refuses or hesitates to speak the name of God may thus be a protestant, but plainly he is no atheist. A mere name, in any case, is quite as likely to obscure as to illumine the reality; the chiaroscuro effect must ever belong to it. Doubt is no road to atheism. As a way to theism it may be beset with hardship, and its goal may be quite beyond the horizon; but the doubter is not by nature an atheist; quite the contrary. As no other, feeling dependent, he is a seeker, and even a confident seeker after what is perfect. He truly and confidently seeketh, for he seeketh after what hath neither visible form nor body, what is without habitation or name, what, like the Son of Man, hath not where to lay its head. He seeketh, what his very seeking itself is, not a God, but the life of the God.

* * *

The general facts about doubt are now before us, and although much needs yet to be said in explanation, and a further fact is reserved for a concluding chapter, still not so darkly as it began this first chapter in our confession of doubt has come, perhaps somewhat abruptly, to an end. We have next, entering more fully and critically into the conditions of our human experience, to scrutinize closely our ordinary habits of mind, those common-sense views of things that on the whole prevail among men. In these ideas, impulsive, unreasoning, above all often flatly contradictory, we shall find some of the strongest reasons for our doubting nature.

[1] Mental Development of the Child and the Race. Methods and Processes. By James M. Baldwin. Macmillan, 1895.

[2] Let me add, that if certain people, struggling in the present maze of educational theory, and objecting, with a zest and a combativeness that fairly belie their contentions, to the use of interest as the primal educational motive, if these people would only recognize change as always a part of interest, their greatest trouble would be removed. They refuse to have education easy or pleasant; interest, they insist, must make it so; and doubtless the advocates of interest are in part to blame for this view; but change, which to my mind is involved in all interest, includes resistance and struggle; change is ever a challenge to effort; and, such being the case, an education led by interest is not necessarily easy or idly pleasant. The real meaning of the interest theory, at least as I have to understand it, is simply (1) that the natural child or the natural man always has something to do, and (2) that education should promote that something. It is far from meaning that there should be no compulsion or discipline, no pain or self-denial. Whoever honestly over expected to do, or ever did any thing without these? The interest theory, then, would not eliminate hardship or discipline, but, to my understanding, by making education serve actual life, would substitute a natural for an artificial and externally imposed hardship. Not hardship, but real achievement makes the educated man.

* * *

If the doubter were brought into court under indictment for his offences against common sense, against ordinary experience and belief, and the jury of his peers sitting upon the case were composed, as of course it would be likely to be, of faithful believers chosen at random from the different walks of practical life, no better defence could possibly be offered than a simple statement of the incongruities which the consciousness of ordinary life is constantly addicted to.

True, for some reason lying deep in human nature, a defence that ends by convicting the jury of error, is hardly likely to lead to the immediate discharge of the prisoner; judges or jurymen are not in the habit of taking a rebuff in that way; but in course of time the prisoner will be justified, and his justification, however tardy, is all that now concerns us. To his defence, therefore, and the discomfiture of his judges, but to the latter without any malice, we turn at once.

And where shall we begin? Our predicament in this defence is something like that of the small boy, bewildered over the task of "picking up" his nursery. "I can't do it," he says. "There are so many things; I can't tell which to take first." Poor little fellow! If he halts now, what will he do when the littered room-I had almost said the littered playroom-of his later life confronts him? Contradictions under foot everywhere are certainly not less confusing than blocks, horses, papers, trains, marbles, picture-books, and the like-or unlike-scattered over a nursery floor.

Here, for example, in practical life is the natural, physical world. How real, brutally real, it is; its very law is fate; its forces are no respecters of persons, inexorably ruling and compelling all alike, giving life and taking it, full of the grimmest humour, raising hopes only to cast them down. Is some one rash enough to suggest that things physical are only so many ideas, real only as states of mind, of God's mind possibly, in some way coming to consciousness in the senses of men? The practical man knows a thing or two about that. He kicks a stone, or strikes his fist loudly upon a table, and so ends the matter, laughing the mad idealist away. And yet, prestissimo change! What do we hear him saying now? This brutally real world of physical things and powers is but a fleeting show; a thing only of space and time. What is really real and abiding is the spiritual that is everywhere and always. Another world there is, not to be spoken of in the same breath with this present world, a world compared with which this is but a mist before the eyes.

In so many familiar ways this duplicity towards what is real is manifest. People go to church to do such a wonderfully strange thing; nothing more nor less than to save their real souls from an unreal world, or sometimes to hide a real worldliness under unreal rites or symbols. "You may think me worldly, selfish, sensuous," says some one, "and I can not deny that often I do seem so, but this life of mine is ever only a yearning after the things that are spiritual, for which, as you see, I pray so earnestly, and which have nothing at all to do with one's worldly life." Yes, we do see, and particularly we see that things spiritual are often an impertinence in worldly affairs. The "real self" never does the things that are really done. Only this, just this is where the duplicity lies. Again, from some one else, a practical man presumably and an accuser of the doubter, we hear the following: "Only the spiritual life is real; look to it that you fear, as I fear, deeply and constantly the material world hanging like a sword over us all." Can it be, as would certainly appear, that superstition is still among us, that so readily we can give reality to unreality, that belief in ghosts still holds our human minds? Once upon a time-at least once-the Christian Church rose in bitter resentment because a certain man, by merely questioning the separate reality of the physical world, threatened to deprive the holy priesthood, with all its time-honoured prerogatives, of its heaven-appointed labour. Yet what is to be said of a church that prefers to think of an independent physical world, by which man is bound and damned, in order to save for itself the task, either hopeless or useless, of rescuing him? Labelling a man "rescued" or "Christian" does not make another-world creature of him. In political history, too, what a paradox it is that kingship by divine right has always been also kingship by physical might. The practices of an avowed supernaturalism have always been strangely materialistic.

So, in high places and in low, in the affairs of men now and in the past, the physical and the spiritual have ever been in a most remarkable relation; each real in and by itself, but with a most unusual courtesy also unreal at the slightest motion from the other; each now supreme, and now wholly subject; each now the whole life of man, and now the very opposite, the antipodes of all that is human; and each self-existent and independent, yet never without its real need of the other. Here surely is contradiction, or vacillation, in experience that is, to say the least, very confusing to him who reflects.[1]

But, to take up something else certainly not less confusing to the ordinary mind, "practical," and unaccustomed to reflection, this is a world of separate, individual things, of chairs, hands, atoms, eyes, stars, men, stones, books, leaves, rivers, lives, mountains, relations, notions, distances, days or years, and so on, indefinitely and above all indiscriminately; a world, moreover, into which in part God, in part man, defying an equally powerful agent of chaos or dissipation, has put at least for a time a certain kind of order, an order that might be said to be good enough for all practical purposes. Yet with all its indiscriminate manifoldness, and with the irregular, uncertain conflict between chaos and order, it is nevertheless a single world, in short, just one more individual thing, one more example, perhaps outdoing all others, of the marvellous license with which human beings are wont to speak and think of a "thing." Chairs, hands, mountains, men, stars, and the whole universe, are all "things," and in this world of things, that is itself another thing, or, should I rather say, apart from this world of things, that is another thing, there are two, at least two, discordant powers taking turns at making order and disorder.

Confusion indeed! Nor have I exaggerated it. The loose association of chairs, distances, and days; the easy assumption of two supreme agents working against each other; the certain uncertainty about these agents being in the world or out of it, of it or not of it; and the readiness with which the whole universe, the all-inclusive thing, is treated as only one more thing to be included: these habits of the ordinary mind show a confusion that seems like insanity. Can we even face them safely and soberly?

For special regard I select just one, perhaps the central one; the habit of treating the universe, the unity of all things, as but one additional thing, the whole, as if it were only another part, the complete and infinite as if distinct from or outside of what is finite or incomplete; or again, in good old philosophical terms, the One as if it were another and so in effect, but one of the Many. Now some there are, and their number may be large, who never have thought of the contradiction and consequent confusion in the notion of a single world made up of many single things, yet itself another thing, or of the Infinite as external to the Finite, or of the One as not in and of the Many, but the contradiction is there, and can scarcely need more than mention to be seen.

Even in theory, scientific or philosophical, the wholeness or unity of the many things of the world has sometimes been taken for just one more thing, as when Anaximander taught that it was "that thing which is no one of the world's things," or for one of the many things supposed by it to be unified, as when Thales so na?vely declared all things to be water. Anaximander and Thales were only ancient Greeks, albeit very wise and enlightened Greeks, living as early as 600 B.C., but in very recent times they have had followers. Electricity has been taken as the one force of all other forces. Our chemists, some of them, have been hunting down the one element among the rest. Statesmen and churchmen have often dreamt of one man as somehow in his single person expressing the unity of all human life, and more than once they have even imagined him present in the flesh. God, although the Being in whom we, as ourselves persons, live and move and have our being, has Himself been another person. Society and its supposed component individuals have made two orders of existence. Life and living creatures; history and its many events; the solar system and its planets: nature and all her various kingdoms: these have also been held apart, making amazing dualisms. But, simply to repeat from above, taking the whole or the unity of all things as itself an independent thing, as itself one more thing, is a contradiction that needs only to be stated clearly to be appreciated. Let me hope that I have stated it clearly.

Nor is this particular conflict in our ordinary ideas yet before us in all its fatefulness, for-as if to defy the principle of consistency to the very last degree of its forbearance-we are often, if not usually, given not only to unifying our world of things in terms of just one more thing, or of persons in terms of just one more person, but also to thinking of this one more thing, or person as sui generis, as altogether different in nature and substance. So do we mingle our duplicity about reality with that about the unity of things. The many, for example, are physical or of the substance of matter; the one is ideal or of the substance of mind or spirit. The many persons are merely human, the One is divine. Strange, indeed, that men should ever take one more as the unity of all the rest, but if possible it is at least, at first sight, stranger that this one more should be relegated to a sphere wholly apart and peculiar. In the madness of such compounded contradiction there may lurk real method, but of the contradiction and of the compounding there can be no question.

Even the soul, a something, an entity, that each one of us has been in the habit of claiming for himself and of holding very sacred and inviolate too, has been subjected to the same way of thinking. Doubtless, since God has not been spared, we should hardly expect the soul to escape. We view the soul so materialistically, even while we insist that it is not material. We say, we think, that it is something in the body; yet, of course, we are at our wit's end to tell just what particular place it occupies there. Similarly, God is supposed to be somewhere in the Universe, yet in no assignable place, and the chemist's universal atom is somewhere also, though surely not in the same place, and, wherever it be, waiting with its own, yet certainly a divine patience that ought to be inspiring, for experimental discovery. But with regard to the soul, although the life and unity of the body, although one of the things in the body, the soul itself is not bodily at all; it can enter the body and is important-who dares say how important?-to the body, and it can, as at death, leave the body, but though for a time in, it never is of the body. A strange standpoint certainly, but men insist that it is quite as true as it is strange. It seems very much like saying that when you build a house, in order to ensure it real solidarity, to give it real permanence and integrity, you should make a special point of putting your bricks or your lumber together, not with clinging, well-set mortar, or strong pins and straight-driven nails, but so much more sensibly, because so much further from what would be like the material bricks or lumber, or like the equally material mortar or nails, with those real and really compact things, absolutely continuous or indivisible, or at least indestructible even when disintegrated, empty space and pure uneventful time. With such space and time there would be union indeed I But, again, strange as such a procedure in building a house would be, men insist or at least I can readily imagine their insistence, that houses are built in that way, and built successfully. The method may seem absurd, but they insist that it is not madness. Are not abstract plans and such seemingly unsubstantial things as mathematical formul?, which are very near to being made of empty space and time, the real strength and integrity of all our great modern structures? And the soul, whatever be said of its being an immaterial thing, is nevertheless, even for being both immaterial and thing, the very sinew of the body.

Here may be method, then, and sanity, but there is always contradiction, obstinate contradiction, compounded contradiction! The soul, unity of the body, is only another thing or part in the body, and at the same time, though in the body, it is after all not really of the body. Possibly, perhaps necessarily, such patent contradiction, and, more than all, such compounding of contradiction, like doubling a negative, make for what is without contradiction, but this wholesome result is not consciously intended, and in the face of all, whatever our hopes or our beliefs, we must feel grave doubts and confess our doubting. Those who do build better than they know, if enlightened, would not again build in the same way. Two contradictions may be better than one, but even two make us wonder.

Closely connected with the contradictions in our customary ideas of reality, and ideas of wholeness or unity, there is the way in which we calmly take opposite sides in our notions about space and time, and about that very fundamental factor of our experience-causation. These are, all of them, so general and fundamental as possibly to seem too abstruse even for mention in this place, since throughout these chapters we are courting simplicity, but of space, and time, and causation, only what is very simple needs to be said. Thus to the ordinary consciousness how fatally things are separated from each other by conditions of space and time. Then is not now. Here is not there. Space and time are only physical and as brutal as all things physical, separating this from that with a finality that knows no degree. Lovers, continents apart, despair over the cruel distance. Time tears us ruthlessly from those dear to us. What is to be, as well as what was, though in the next moment, is absolutely beyond our grasp. Could anything be freer from dispute than the reality and the separating brutally of space and time? Yet, almost at a whisper, all distance and all duration become as nothing. Do not the lovers write to each other, flatly and passionately denying that they are far apart? Do we not constantly forestall the future and retain the past? Indeed, when all is said, a thousand years are as one day, and all the places of the earth are one. So real, and so vast, and so physical to us but a moment ago, space and time have now passed into mere phantoms of the imagination. We live, then, not only in a world that is brutally spatial and temporal, but also, and at the same time, in a world that is not spatial and not temporal at all; and living here-or there?-we have again to wonder and to doubt even in our belief. To our own constant amazement we find that we make our life a bridge over what would seem to be an absolutely impassable chasm.

As for causation our temerity is not less surprising. Wet and dry moons, unlucky Fridays, holy and unholy numbers, haunted houses, so-called providences, free in the sense of indifferently, irresponsibly free wills and fiat deities with their suddenly made worlds may not be generally in vogue at the present time, at least among the better educated, the enlightened and not infrequently conceited classes, but even among the wise and the consciously informed they have their natural offspring, and I am not so sure that many of them might not be found almost intact, at least in the more retired parts of the consciousness of my readers. To illustrate, for some if not for all of us, this is a world of many free and independent causes, yet also it is the single effect of one cause; it is again, our mood having changed, the single effect of two absolutely unlike beings or natures, each of them an all-powerful cause; it is a sphere here and now of causal, creative, productive activity, but it was itself created once for all long ago, at a date which the exegete hopes-in the equally distant future!-to determine for us; it contains some things that are only causes and some that are only effects, or some, or all, that are both causes and effects; it has parts that are the accepted causes of other parts; it has causes, those acting now and the one original cause, that are temporally antecedent to their effects; and, not to make the list longer, it is variously a world of one last effect, of one first and only cause, of an infinite series of causes and effects, and in whole, or in part, it constantly shows something made out of nothing or nothing resulting from something. A wondrous world most assuredly; and yet at first statement this record of our various notions of causation may not appear as a very serious arraignment of the consciousness which it exposes. Moreover some people actually glory in such a wonder as it presents. But, to be plain, though also monotonous, the uncaused cause or the effect that is only a part of the whole, or the cause or the effect that refuses to share in the other's nature, or finally the causation that is now so individual and so manifold and so effective, and that was once so single and so complete, is something that must give any thinker pause. Can a moving body move an immobile body? Can some things in the universe be mobile; others not? Can the moving body and the moved body belong to different moments of time? Can motion lead to rest or rest to motion? But our ordinary ideas of causation would allow, or even require, an affirmative answer to every one of these questions.

Alas! Shall this labour proceed? Can we afford to continue it? The defence of the doubter is getting almost too successful; it is becoming too personal to be pleasant. The task of picking up the room of our ordinary life grows harder, not easier, as it moves forward. Every thing that we touch tells of a spirit of violence in our nature. Even the small boy can not have been more lawless, for his toys were all battered perhaps, but not, like ours, all broken. Can we afford to go on? Afford it or not, we simply can not help ourselves, for our self-confidence is already shattered; our attention to the disorder is already beyond our control; each one of us is the doubter we would defend.

Here close at hand, where we have to see it, is another contradiction common in all human experience. It inheres in our conceits about knowledge. For us, on the one hand, the world we know not only really is, the tree out yonder or the planet miles and miles away being really and actually there, but also is just the world which our knowledge reports to us. What we have knowledge of is in our belief a real thing in and by itself, and we know it literally and directly, not figuratively, not afar off through symbols; we know it as it is; we know a real world, and we know it face to face. Yet, on the other hand, with all this simple confidence in our knowledge, what are we also given to saying, or assuming when we do not say it? Even in the moment of our confidence we humble ourselves with the cry of our utter foolishness, making our recognized foolishness only a counter-conceit. What but perfect folly is our knowledge before God's knowledge! "Illusion! The dream of a few hours or a few years!" is so often the best we can say of the whole fabric, past and present, of human consciousness. Not now, but only in the hereafter are we to see reality face to face; now we see only very darkly, if at all.

Some one here protests strenuously, raising an objection that might very properly have been raised before. Thus, I am told that only different people, or only the same people at different times, ever hold two opposite views, whether about knowledge or any thing else; never one and the same person at the same time holds them both; and so the present arraignment can not be as serious as it is made to appear. Well, with this objection I can agree in part, for there is at least a half-truth in it, but by no means does it tell, either in general or in particular, that is, with regard to the special case of the conceits about knowledge, the whole story of double living or double thinking among men. Indeed the easy way, in which men make the distinctions of society or the distinctions of time bear the responsibility for what must always in the end be the conflicts of their personal lives, is but another illustration of the difficulties besetting their ordinary views of things. Duplicity of view, like anything else in experience, must always be more than a matter of different people or different times, for the simple reason that, whether directly personal or not, it is present in the environment of the individual person. So, even if those two positions, confidence in worldly knowledge and religious trust and humility, for the sake of argument be momentarily associated only with different persons or social classes or times, our present point will really be just exactly as pointed, for there is always a third person or class or time into whose direct single experience the duplicity or contradiction is bound to enter. Consider, for example, the case of a child. For a part of the week he is perhaps at school; on Sunday at church; and the life in which he thus takes part must appear to him, there being in all probability little or no reservation on either side, to be hopelessly divided against itself. Now is knowledge power; now hindrance and greatest danger. Now he is to learn all he can; now, on the other hand, to forget what he may have learned. So is the conflict about him made his personal conflict, and exactly as in his case, so in all human experience the individual must share personally whatever the environment affords.

The individual and the environing society are the closest of blood relations, though we often allow ourselves, all too easily as has been said, to lose sight of the fact; they live under the same roof, and rely for sustenance on the same fare; and while to some the contradictions of life may be overlooked as personally impertinent and unimportant, being referred wholly to the environment, they are plainly the unavoidable heritage and the personal responsibility of every individual that counts himself a member of the human race. The objection, then, that was raised does not remove contradiction as a cause of doubt, but merely emphasizes what in a subsequent chapter must occupy us, the social aspect of experience.[2] Thus, not only does experience, in ways now coming to our view, teem with contradictions, and is contradiction a cause of doubt, but also experience so conditioned is social as well as individual, a matter of personal relations between man and man as well as a matter of the single person's inner responsibility. Society in its manifold classes, in its conflicts and in its history, may help us to see the whole of experience, the unity of experience on all sides and in all parts, but it never does, and it never can, relieve the individual, or deprive the individual, of any side or part of what makes up an experience-whole. Grown men and women may be more definitely set in their lives and their ideas to certain specific things than children, but in no one, young or old, can such specialism ever be wholly exclusive of any of the other things.

To return to our immediate interest, if men are given to being doubters in their views about reality, spiritual and material; about unity or wholeness; about space and time, on the one hand fatally vast and independently real, and on the other formal and illusory; about causality, so actual and positive now, and yet so complete yesterday, or ever and ever so long ago; and about knowledge, so perfectly wise and so thoroughly vain and foolish; if, I say, men are double in all these different ways, in their moral judgments they seem, if possible, even more confused, and the confusion, the division against themselves, is the more serious for being with regard to what so directly concerns personal life and human fellowship.

To begin with, as will indeed readily appear, the offences of our moral judgments, which often, if not always, are largely influenced by religious or rather theological conceptions, are only a peculiar expression of the two-faced attitude towards causation, human persons or wills being the causes specially involved. In general the causes of the universe are of three sorts, those of natural force, those of supernatural agency, and those of human agency, and although toward them all essentially the same attitude is assumed, it is worth our while to consider particularly the causation that is commonly adjudged to belong to the human will and the moral ideas that spring from it.

For the purposes of the moral consciousness we translate the two conflicting powers of our world, or the spiritual reality and the material, into two agents of good and evil respectively, each having a power of doing whatever, true to its peculiar character, it may will to do, and then, as if in accord with this way of thinking, we find two distinct selves, a good self and an evil self, within each one of us, and we also divide the body social into two exclusive classes, the class of those who are identified with the righteous life and the class of those given to the unrighteous life, the sheep and the goats, the elect and the damned. But, to say nothing of the fact that these three ideas of the two powers, the two selves and the two classes, cannot be made really to accord with each other, although they possess an outward agreement, is it not clear that any attempt to take the good and the evil as two mutually exclusive things, be they spirits or selves or classes, is to destroy at once the real substance of virtue and the real value of the consciousness of evil? In practical life this means, what everybody knows so well, that an isolated, unduly holy righteousness, a sort of touch-me-not goodness, is bound to be empty, to be only ritualistic and aristocratic or pharisaical, and in any one of these respects it appears decidedly unrighteous; while an isolated unrighteousness, besides having at least the moral worth of a protest against its counterpart, is in itself exactly like the original sinfulness of the theologian; being unavoidable, it is wholly without any warranted opprobrium. Indeed, it all but comes to this, that righteousness as a fixed thing, fixed to a part of the universe or to a part of the individual self or to a part of society, is really in just so far evil, and the direct opposite of such righteousness is proportionately good. Good and evil, then, may not mix well, but certain it is that contradiction results from the common attempt of men to regard either as untainted or untempered by the other.

Still, not upon this real difficulty in our moral judgments would I now lay greatest stress, although it is real enough and important. In yet another way our moral consciousness is at war with itself. In estimating the worth of human conduct, so far as this is determined by its initiation, we are in an almost hopeless tangle. We are more than likely to think of other people as influenced by their environment in what they do, of ourselves as quite original and responsible, as independent of any such influences; or, more fully and more exactly, we are given to referring our own bad deeds to environment, our good deeds to ourselves, while for others we are prompted to do just the reverse, referring their good deeds to environment, their bad deeds to themselves. Such is human nature-not, to be sure, at its best, but common human nature; and even when we escape the foregoing personally invidious distinctions, we still-and this is the main point-treat self and environment as two naturally conflicting, altogether independent sources of conduct. Two different and independent sources of anything, however, can only make for conflict and contradiction. If only our courts of law could judge responsibility either wholly from the determinations of environment or wholly from those of personal will, or again, if only the will and the environment could be seen as not so radically opposed, what a simplification would ensue, and how much freer and more certain justice would be. To venture on a variation of an aphorism, where there's another way there is always a loophole; where there's environment there is always a shifted responsibility; where there's a "free will" there is always a will taken for some unperformed or imperfectly performed deed.

So the double origin of conduct offers a very serious difficulty, which, when it is understood, is not unlike that of the two powers or selves or classes, but even more is to be said in exposure of our moral judgments. Thus we have the confident conceit of freedom, of our own freedom in good or our neighbour's freedom in evil, or in general of man's freedom to act without regard to the determinations from environment, but we have also a strange though possibly a fortunate way of qualifying the very freedom that we claim. We claim freedom only to avow, almost in the same breath, duties and responsibilities. We have the freedom, but only the duties make it worth anything. A startling paradox this, so familiar to us all: "I am free to do all that I ought to do," or, "I am free to carry out certain necessities of my true life." A startling paradox; and, above all, a strange way of escaping the necessities of environment, unless, forsooth, it really opens the door, or supplies a secret door, by which the necessities of environment and the necessities of one's true life can come together? If freedom demands law, why should it hold aloof from the natural law, the law of environment so definitely present? Possibly, then, as once before suggested, one contradiction in experience may be the corrective of another, the paradox of freedom and duty only correcting the contradiction of two sources of conduct, personal will and environment. In the case, for example, of the disposition to distinguish between one's own acts and another's, with respect to their initiation by will or by environment, to mingle duty and necessity with one's own supposed freedom is equivalent in effect to denying one's neighbour's freedom because of the restraints of his environment. But such considerations, however promising for future reflection upon the conflicts in our moral consciousness, are not of immediate interest. Our doubts may once more find hope in the reflection that the faults of experience may balance themselves, but we have no occasion to abandon our doubting as idle or meaningless. Contradictions that balance each other, errors that are mutually corrective, are still contradictions, are still errors.

So, to reduce our moral judgments, confusion and all, to small compass, we are free, others are not; they are free, we are not; and our freedom is bound by duty, by duty to the moral law, while their freedom, unless a hopeless lawlessness, is bound by the environment and its law. Again, good and evil are each unmixed, and moral acts serve two masters-that is to say, spring from two sources. We may, therefore, still believe in morality-yet how can this be? And freedom-yet how is freedom possible?

But finally, as last to be examined, there is the idea of law, just now brought to attention. This idea is a focus for a good many conflicting views. Witness the familiar argument from the knowledge of law in nature to fatalism, an argument as absurd as it is widespread, for the bare fact that we know the laws of nature really emancipates us from the blind fate to which the argument points. Can knowledge ever mean anything but freedom? Certainly no law can ever be known unless the sphere of its operation accords with the nature of those who have the knowledge. Simply to know is to share in and be at one with whatsoever is known, and the clearer and more cogent or rational the knowledge, the truer and realer is this participation or union. The law we know, then, must have all the meaning and the natural authority of a law of our own enactment, and so must actually have the sanction of our will. Will, I say, cannot help sanctioning knowledge, for knowledge is always true to, because conditioned by, the natural action of the knower. But no such message of freedom, or say of human opportunity in natural necessity, is commonly received by men at large from the evidences of law in nature. Superstitiously they see only fate. Clear knowledge and blind fate!

Nor are we commonly satisfied with only so much superstition. We go still further and make the case as bad as possible by treating the law we know as if in its spirit, if not in its letter, it were final. In other words, we view nature, with some of whose ways we have become conversant, not merely as a source of blind fate, or external necessity, for our lives, but also as essentially and ultimately a sphere of strictly mechanical routine. Yet here again we are surely reasoning beyond our premises-the very essence of superstition-for the routine we know can never answer substantially, or even formally, to nature as she really is. Our positive knowledge, our knowledge that arrives at specific formul?, even though these formul? reach the noble dignity of mathematics, is bound to be in terms of some particular experience, personal or national or racial; it is relative and special; it is partial knowledge; and he is superstitious, and does, indeed, argue beyond his premises, who takes the whole, whose law he does not know, to be literally analogous to the part, whose law he thinks he knows, but can in fact know only partially. No whole ever is one of its parts, or merely analogous to one of its parts; a law never is the law, or even in its lawfulness literally analogous thereto; and mechanicalism, whether as a popular or a philosophical "ism," has no justification save just this false analogy.

And the prevalent confusion in the notions of law or lawfulness is of course reflected in the corresponding notions of lawlessness. Here, as with other negative terms, men forget that negatives necessarily are quite relative to their positives. All specific, definitely manifest, known and positive lawlessness simply must have some place in the law of things; it can no more be an absolute lawlessness than any human routine can be supposed final; and, on the other hand, there can be no positive law whose breaking has not some sanction; there can be no lawfulness which does not warrant some lawlessness. This truth, perhaps as nothing else could, must show the error in the notion of mechanical routine as affording an adequate description of the ultimate nature of things. Where the whole always gives point to the negation of any of its parts, where the law always sanctions some breaking of any law, to think of the whole in terms of its parts may be human, but it is of the human which is prone to err. Those who would still insist upon seeing only routine in law, and upon judging lawlessness as only relative to such seeing, might do well, rising above their ordinary views, to remember with some real appreciation that once upon a time the law-breakers and the reformer were very closely associated; they were associated in life, and at the end they were crucified together. Whatever may be one's theology, there is a deal of food for thought in those deaths on Calvary and in the several lives which they closed.

Lawlessness suggests the supernatural. So many have promptly concluded that just as with the knowledge of law in nature human freedom must be resigned, blind fate taking its place, so anything or anybody at all supernatural, Satan-for example-as well as God, must once for all withdraw. If law reigns, God can will whatever he wills only because the law is so; the law is not so because he wills it; and this in common opinion only makes him decrepit, without real initiative, dead. Yet, once more, what superstition! The knowledge of law has never robbed man of his freedom, nor even slain his God; or this at least: the loss of freedom or the death of God, for which any law that man has had knowledge of has been responsible, has always been only the forerunner of a larger and fuller freedom and of his God's resurrection and glorification. This or that law may rob and may kill, but this or that law, let me reiterate, never is the law, and why common opinion has to judge all things in heaven and earth, as if it were, is hard to comprehend. Neither nature nor God, if these two need to be thought of as two, is law-bound; each rather, with a meaning which I must hope now to have made clear, is law-free. The law in which nature is free is as infinite, as transcendent of any particular human experience as the ever-developing freedom of man or as the will of God. And God, or the Supernatural, is not confined to the narrow sphere of what man knows, as man knows it; this stands only for what man calls nature. God is the all-inclusive sphere or source of the absolute law, for which knowledge can be only a constant striving, or which is itself even a party to the constant striving. Somehow the law must be a living thing, not a routine: the supernatural must be not nature as she is known, but nature's fullest and deepest life.

Very emphatically what has just been said about nature or God being law-free, or about the law being infinite, or not analogous in form or substance, in spirit or letter, to any thing in positive knowledge, is no argument for the Jonah story or even for the miracle of the wine at Cana's wedding feast; and yet time and again people who apparently should have done enough thinking to know better, to the great satisfaction of thousands have used the infinity of nature's or God's lawfulness, which is to say the only partial and tentative character of all human knowledge of law, as a clinching proof of all the miracles in the Bible. Can they not see that like what is lawless in general, the miraculous must be in the premises only relative to the experience of the time? Even chance is not less so. The spiritual meaning of those miracles may persist, for the miraculous we must always have with us; but if even our relative, imperfect knowledge stands for anything, if it be even a tentative knowledge, a working standpoint, the literal truth of most, or even all of them, disappeared long ago. Miracles, like laws, come and go; only the miraculous, like the law, goes on forever.

And this leads to something else, to something also very common, perhaps the reverse of the foregoing. With what an unaccountable delight many of us have accepted naturalistic explanations, for example, of the sun standing still, or of the retreat of the waters of the Red Sea, or of the Immaculate Conception, or of any of the many other marvels in either the Old or the New Testament, and have thought that so our old beliefs are to be preserved. I have myself heard honest and earnest men, even members of an academic community, appeal to parthenogenesis as a fact in nature which would at least make the miracle of Christ's birth scientifically plausible as well as spiritually significant; but such an appeal, besides being, in my opinion, positively irreverent, is as blind religiously as it is ignorant scientifically. Cannot such men appreciate, and cannot all others who do as they do also appreciate the fact that naturalistic explanation of any miracle, if really a genuine explanation, may prove the fact, but must in just so far destroy, I do not say the miraculous, which is indestructible, but the particular miracle?

The lawful miracle, then-lawful, of course, so soon as explained-is one more contradiction in our prevalent notions about law. That it exemplifies, too, a habit of mind which is exercised by us in many directions besides that of interpretation of the arbitrary things of the Bible can hardly need be said. In life generally the arbitrary is peculiarly fond of going to law, sometimes to what is called nature's law, as when revolutionists of all sorts-strikers and radical reformers-raise the cry of "natural rights," laying down the law as to what men are by nature, and sometimes to "human" law, as when the conservatives in government or business with their vested rights, be these coal mines, oil fields, or political privileges, appeal for "justice" to the courts or to the military.

But, to say no more, with the lawful miracle, with law the strange support of what is arbitrary, with this as a very good example of the duplicity which in general we are all of us wont to allow in our practical life, the present exposure of our ordinary consciousness must come to an end. With regard to the real substance of things, or to their unity, or to the nature of space and time and causation, with regard to the worth of knowledge, with regard to our human conduct, to its freedom and responsibility, or finally with regard to the place of law in nature and in the life of man, our ordinary consciousness is manifestly inconsistent and vacillating-nay, is grossly contradictory; and we are led at least to suspect that the disorder which we have found is inherent and essential, having the nature of an original human defect. Such a defect, however, is cause for doubt; so that man, above all "practical" man, having inconsistency or duplicity as almost, if not quite, an uncontrollable habit with him, should be himself a prince of sceptics.

And yet, although we have indeed found man spending at least his waking hours in a room that seems disorder incarnate, and although before the court of practical life the doubter seems thus to have been thoroughly justified, while his too hasty judges are in turn condemned, nevertheless the case for doubt is not of such a character as to leave absolutely no hope for belief. Now and again in the evidence, as it has been disclosed, have we not felt the presence of something, not yet given its due weight, that would make man more than a mere doubter and unbeliever? Have we not been led to suspect that somehow, without loss of their reality and validity, the most cogent reasons for doubt, even the contradictions in our views of things, might turn into bases of belief, that an experience essentially paradoxical may not be as hopeless as at first sight it may appear, that in all the madness there is at least a chance of some method? The view of science, however, must be examined before our attention can be turned definitely upon such a possibility. Enough if in our present doubting we are still left with a little hope.

[1] In the rise of Christian Science, against which I have no special grudge, although I have already taken exceptions to its claims, there is a special case, special because affecting a single, relatively small class, of the popular hospitality to contradiction. Thus, the Christian Scientists would reduce all reality to mind, but at the same time they busily deny reality to a large group of mind facts, namely and notably, the ideas of disease. Recently, it is true, according to the newspapers, their healers have been told to "decline to doctor infectious or contagious diseases," yet not because such diseases have any reality, but because the illusion of them is so real as to make the "Christian" treatment of them both imprudent and impractical. Philosophies and religions of illusion are certainly weird, uncanny things!

[2] Chapter VII.

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With science we usually associate accuracy and consistency, and at first thought we are not likely to expect that the work and standpoint of science can contain anything substantial enough for the doubter to base his claim upon; but second thought is our first duty at this time, and second thought always changes the view, and in this particular instance it will show science in important respects to be quite as vulnerable as the unreflective consciousness of practical life, for science also is honeycombed with contradiction and paradox.

More than once scientists themselves have turned sceptical about their work and its results. The cry of bankruptcy in science, not merely as a charge, but also as a confession, has been heard in the land not infrequently; now perhaps low and uncertain, but again clear and strong. And why not? Why should the scientist escape the questioning of other men? Subtle and wonderful as science is, does it transcend humanity? Surely, when all is said, the scientific consciousness is not formally different from the ordinary consciousness. The same eye is looking at the same world, only through microscopes and telescopes. The same mind is measuring the same environment, only with carefully devised instruments of precision instead of arm's lengths or stone's throws and rules of thumb. In a word, science is merely the ordinary consciousness highly developed, not without considerable abstraction, into critically conscious method and clearest possible perception. Indeed, perhaps without myself clearly knowing all my reasons, I am constrained to say that science is related to ordinary perception very much as the inventor's consciousness of his wonderful flying-machine to the simple sensations of a bird. The mechanics of flying, so elaborately present to the former, are nevertheless also present in the latter, while with both we have the same eye or the same mind looking and the same world seen. The boasted methods and ideals of the one are but the only half-waking instincts of the other, and whatsoever is essential to either belongs also to the other. But, to mark the great difference between them, the inventor has the disposition to treat flying abstractly-that is, as if a thing by itself, as if for its own sake; and he goes even farther, making abstraction of the mere explanation and mechanical expression of flying; while the bird simply flies, and, if I may hope to be understood, all things else, the sun and the wind, the trees, and all living things, and you and I who follow his course are flying with him.

But no poetic soaring such as this can satisfy our present needs. To understand and appraise the view of science we must trace its rise as clearly as we can, and then critically examine its peculiar conceits, its own ideal methods and attitudes.

As for the rise of the scientific view, we may well return to the definition of science given above: the ordinary consciousness highly developed, not without considerable abstraction, into critically conscious method and clearest possible perception. Perhaps development of anything is always at the cost of abstraction; but be this as it may, science certainly arises through an abstraction, namely, through the abstraction of consciousness of one's world, through the treatment of this mere consciousness as something to be cultivated quite for its own sake; and the motive and the meaning of such a treatment are not far to seek. Consciousness, to the exclusion or inhibition of direct, overt action, becomes a matter for abstract, which is to say, exclusive cultivation, with any serious change, with any upheaval in the familiar conditions of life. A man-or boy, if you prefer-is taking a cross-country run, and for a time all goes well; the manner of his going suffers no interruption, or no serious interruption; but gradually the undergrowth thickens from low bushes to higher brushwood, and at last, perhaps quite suddenly, breaking through some wild hedge, the runner finds himself at the very edge of a stream too wide and too deep for any ordinary crossing. Thereupon his running, or at least his forward running, say the running of his "real life," ceases, and looking takes its place. He is now, in a familiar phrase, "looking before leaping"; yet with his looking there is a good deal of running too, more or less overt, but also more or less instrumental or merely mechanical, as, going from one point to another, he measures the relations of bank to bank, or of possible stepping-stones to each other, or hunts for fallen logs or for shallow places. But, finally, the measurements all made, the peculiar conditions as fully as possible appreciated, in the way found to be most feasible he crosses the stream and runs again. And just in that "looking before leaping," with the accompanying check put upon the forward running and with the change of the "real life" of running into merely instrumental action, we get at least a glimpse of what science is, of the sort of abstraction that its rise implies.

Only science, specifically so called, is more than such a casual, merely personal study of a new situation. Science is the distinct work of a distinct class abstractly studying a new situation that has confronted the progress not of an individual, but of a whole people, and in this character it gets at once all the advantages and all the conceits that belong in general to the life of a class. It gets, too, all the limitations. Science, once more, is not strictly a personal experience, although in personal experience, like that of the cross-country runner, we can get a glimpse of just that which may develop into science. Science is characteristically a profession. The runner withholds his running for a time and merely looks and studies, yet his looking is only for a time; sooner or later he will run again; and even while he studies there is his continued moving about, his instrumental action, as we called it; but the professional scientist waives all thought of possible future activity. Although in reality his looking is before leaping, it is not consciously so for him; he is one who under the constraints of his class merely looks and studies, making of these processes things quite worthy in themselves.

In other words, to enlarge somewhat on what has just been said, the rise of the profession of science does indeed involve both the same check upon the "real life" and the same reduction of activity to a purely mechanical or instrumental character that we have pointed out in the case of the runner at the bank of the stream, but a number of different social classes divides the labour. In general, society as a means to the expression and development of human activity, be the activity running or living in a broader and fuller sense, always shows the different phases or factors of the experience identified more or less exclusively with as many different classes or groups, and, in respect to the particular case here under consideration, upon the rise of science society appears to delegate the work of careful observation and critical thinking to a separate class, which, as already suggested, gives up any direct responsibility to the real life. Another distinct class, arising contemporaneously, is composed of those who do feel directly responsible, or "practical," continuing the life of positive, overt action. This second class maintains the vital processes, although in a more or less consciously instrumental way, since its members have the lives of others as well as their own lives to support. So society gets its workers or labourers as well as its observers and thinkers.

The rise of science, then, involves a disrupted society. Moreover, the division is by no means so simple as the foregoing analysis may seem to have implied. Observing and thinking, for example, have often made, too, separate sub-classes, and also there have been many distinct groups among the workers, such as clerks, soldiers, artisans, road-menders, and tillers of the soil. The simple analysis, however, has been quite enough to show, what has seemed to need emphasis, that all the passions of social life, or rather of social caste, are brought to bear upon the profession of science, giving it the peculiar conceits and advantages of class or caste, and also imposing upon it the peculiar limitations. The advantages, among others, are the strength that lies in union, and the long continuity and the imitation that always ensure an accumulation of experience and a refinement of method and an attainment to impersonal, impartial standards; the conceits are exclusiveness, sense of sanctity or intrinsic worth, and consequent claims to aristocracy; and the limitations, although possibly already quite obvious, are hereafter to be pointed out. But whatever the limitations or the opportunities, it is now our chief concern that the social conditions of its rise must greatly intensify the abstraction of science, the treatment of the consciousness of the world, which is but the sphere of action, the totality of the manifested conditions of action, as something to be cultivated wholly for its own sake.

Nor is this fact that science is an abstraction, intensified by the conditions of class life, the only fact to which the rise of science bears witness. There is something else equally significant-something, indeed, so intimately involved in this as perhaps not properly to be referred to as another fact at all, being only a further manifestation of what is already before us. There never arises abstraction without duplicity.

Plainly a disrupted society, such as has been seen to be incident to the rise of science, means also a disrupted life. In general the corporate life of any single class resulting from the division can be only partial, I do not say in respect to "real life," since this phrase has itself been associated with too narrow a meaning, but to human nature, to human life in its entirety, in its real fulness, in its true breadth and its true depth. All class life, I repeat, involving as it does disruption and selection of some particular interest or relation, is inadequate to any human being, and the life of science is no exception to this rule. Membership in any class and conformity to its peculiar life, which is partial and abstract as partial, have never satisfied anybody, and the life of the professional scientist, again, is no exception to this rule. Accordingly any abstraction in life, the isolation of any specific interest, when seen in just the light of its necessary inadequacy, of its definite, more or less exclusive partiality, must imply in life a demand for reality and completeness, and this the more as the abstraction is assertive, as the isolation is insistent. Simply, the whole life will never brook an untempered neglect from any of its always self-assertive parts. Plainly, however, as plainly as a disrupted society must mean a disrupted life for each resulting group, such a demand can be met only in one way, if the cause for it continues; it can be met only by some form of duplicity, by some way in which, however indirectly, the life of those concerned will always really be more than it seems or will always actually imply what explicitly or formally it appears to exclude. No such narrow life, in short, as must always characterize any social group, can ever be without its compensating innuendoes or indirections for the life from which it is outwardly aloof, and while the peculiar manner in which the true reality and the wholeness of life are thus conserved will very naturally always be determined by the particular class or the particular class-character involved, being of one sort for road-menders and of quite a different sort for scientific observers, the organization of society seems bound at every turn to show that duplicity, compensation as it always is for partiality, is an indispensable condition. Duplicity, whatever may be its own special dangers, is always better, being nearer to reality, than narrowness.

Is not the road-mender also a good Catholic, or in some other way, conventional or unconventional, religiously devout, piously doing, not his own, but another's work? Does not the scientist give point to the idea of another and different life, that is to say, of his life of knowledge not being the whole of life, by the agnosticism which he not only carefully asserts but also actually embodies as a factor in his method? The road-mender slaves at his humble task, ignorant and yet trustful, believing in an infallible wisdom and an absolute power, and the scientist lives with great enthusiasm to know the world as it is, but tells us at the same time with no less enthusiasm and with a meaning that certainly ought to temper his exclusiveness that the object which he studies and describes is nevertheless really unknowable. To quote Mr. Spencer: "The man of science ... more than any other, truly knows that in its ultimate essence nothing can be known." Surely there is meaning for Stevenson's story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in other fields besides that of morality. Class life must always involve its members in a protective or compensating duplicity.

But now, whatever in the life of other classes this duplicity, which conserves the wholeness of life even when formally life is narrow and partial, ought to be called, in the profession of science it often goes under the name of dualism. Seen at different angles, it is now dualism, now objectivism, now agnosticism. In each of these different ways the scientist, quite outdoing or transcending his profession, recognizes a sphere of reality or a sphere of activity, that is beyond that of the knowledge which he makes his special business, and, as is very important to observe, the peculiar manner of his recognition of this sphere, or the peculiar character of his duplicity, is relative to just the abstraction which makes his science what it is. Thus his peculiar duplicity is one of conscious subject and unconscious, external object, of observing man and objective nature, of real knowledge and unknowable reality.

Yet here, before discussing further the relation of dualism to science, it is well to observe that the positive history of science justifies the account of its rise which has now been given. The age of science among the Greeks was coincident with the closing conflict between Greek civilization and the general life of the Mediterranean, and the age of modern science began, not to attempt a long story, with the discovery of America. All "looking before leaping" is transitional or revolutionary, and while, of course, there had been transitions and degrees of scientific inquiry before, the science of the Greeks belongs to that very critical transition from Greece to Rome; and modern science, to the transition, certainly not less critical, from Christendom to-who can say to what? But not only does history show science to arise when there is a stream to cross; also it shows the life of the time, in the first place, to be sharply disintegrated, its different factors being separately and abstractly expressed through as many different social groups, and, in the second place, in each of the groups to be given to double living, to the storm and stress of being one thing and seeming another. Always an age, conspicuously and characteristically scientific, has been an age of clearly developed classes and of a general duplicity in living.

Thus, to give a striking, although possibly too philosophical an illustration of the duplicity, Democritus, the great materialist and atomist, and Plato, the great idealist, were contemporaries and equally were creatures of their day and generation, and their century was the century of great achievements in Greek science. Moreover, as regards the coincident organization of society, we know at least of Plato that he was keenly conscious of the divisions of society into distinct classes. And in very much the same way materialism and idealism, not to mention hedonism and rigorism, or naturalism and supernaturalism, have been inseparately associated with the rise and the successes of modern science. These philosophies, it must be remembered, are always more than so many conflicting "isms." They are, too, more than the special conceits, in theory or in practice, of so many separate social classes or of the great leaders of these classes. In their very differences they are the definite, the "public" expression of a conflict, or division, that inwardly affects every individual member, whatever his class or profession, which the society contains. In the day and generation of Democritus and Plato were there not well-defined parties, manifest in all the different and separately organized phases of life-moral, industrial, political or religious, namely, the parties of the conservatives and the radicals? And were there not also, as typical individual characters, each of them revealing to everybody something present within his own life, the only conventional loyalist and the more truly loyal reformer, as well as the idle or careless transgressor and the coldly calculating traitor? A life so divided and so variously impersonated was certainly teeming with duplicity.

Nor have we yet finished with the evidence from history. An age of science has always been not merely an age with a stream to cross, nor yet merely an age of classes and double living, but also an age of a thoroughly conscious utilitarianism. Whether materialistically or idealistically, all things have been treated and also looked upon as means to some end, not ends in themselves. For the disrupted society all activity has been more or less consciously calculating and instrumental. As we know, the disruption means actual, when not also intentional, division of labour, and surely there never has been division of labour without eventual development of a distinct sense of the various special instruments and activities as utilities rather than things of intrinsic value. For a time, it is true, the several classes and their activities may maintain the semblance of conservatism and independence; but their inevitable duplicity is bound sooner or later to give a consciously conventional or utilitarian character to the conservatism, and just this makes the activity of the people instrumental or only mediately instead of immediately worthy. If, as some are sure to contend, the division of labour always tends to end, and often does end, in the formation of castes, and in consequence the instrumental character of the activities is forgotten, it needs only to be said in reply that an invitation is then given to some outside power to step in and to make use of, instead of just treasuring or hoarding, the developed instruments or utilities. Caste in the organization of society not only induces absolutism at home, but also, and in this way is fully revealed its real but suppressed utilitarianism, invites conquest from abroad. The days of Greek science were, almost notoriously, days of conventionalism and utilitarianism: witness the Sophists and their teaching, and the life which they waited upon for pay; while the surviving conservatism, by which, as cannot be questioned, the life of the time was blind to its own real mission or purpose, made possible and even historically necessary, first, the Macedonian, and then the Roman conquest of Greece. What the Greeks, being too conservative, though utilitarian, failed to make full use of, another people, less hampered by tradition, finally appropriated. And as for the days of modern science, these, so far as unfolded to our view, have not been unlike in kind: witness the Machiavellism, with which they began, and the spirit of commercialism, which has characterized them throughout.

One thing more, too, from the facts of history may have our attention, although possibly this addition is quite unnecessary-the fact, namely, of scepticism coupled always with a hopeful curiosity. A disrupted society, dividing the labour of human life, is as sceptical as it is conventional, and as given to experiment and exploration, which are never without their sense of mystery, and even to conquest, never without its risks, as it is utilitarian. Was it curiosity or mere Hellenic conceit, the sense of adventure or the mere dogmatism of a Greek, that took Alexander abroad with his armies, or that earlier turned the attention of Athens to the possibilities of the West? And which, curiosity or religious and political propagandism, a pagan greed or a Christian piety, inspired the Western and Southern voyages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? Which gave rise even to the Crusades? It would be interesting, if our present purposes only warranted the undertaking, to trace the forerunning conditions of a period of scientific endeavour. We could then show both how scientific curiosity has developed as but one expression of a general interest in experimental endeavour, in adventure and in conquests of all sorts, and especially how this interest, with its mingling of doubt and confident seeking, has been preceded by a period of art. Art, appeal as it always is from the human as expressed in the established ways of some given social organization to the natural, shows a people sensitive to a mystery, a real but unseen end, in its developed activities, but not yet willing to let the experimental and instrumental character of those activities have free expression. It appeals to the natural, which is of course the sphere of all adventure, but, still cherishing the human, it never gets, so to speak, out of sight of home. Science, the successor of art, shows home, that is, the human and the subjective, left far behind. But to follow out the line of thought here suggested would take us too far afield. Let it suffice, then, that we see these two things: how historically and socially the investigations of science, whatever their relations to an antecedent art, such as that of the Greeks or of Christendom in the Renaissance, are but an incident within a general life of appeal to nature-that is, of exploration and conquest-and then how the scepticism, involved in the inquiries of science, is intrinsic to a life that, for reasons now clear to us, has become both conventional and utilitarian, both formal-or unreal in itself-and consciously only instrumental. The first of these brings to mind what was referred to in a previous chapter, that science is man in his doubt seeking the companionship of nature; and the second will aid us greatly in understanding the attitude and method of science, to which, having the evidence of history, we have next to turn.

We have found the rise of science to imply a general abstraction of the various factors in human life, and to be itself, in particular, the abstraction of the consciousness of nature, nature being the totality of the manifest conditions of life. This abstraction has been developed and intensified by the formation of distinct social classes; and, in the special case of the consciousness of nature, by the formation of a class of scientists, so called, who cultivate their science for its own sake. We have found the rise of science to imply also a general duplicity, evident within the field of science in what is known as dualism. Duplicity is a natural accompaniment of all abstraction, and it has, as we saw at least in part, a certain protective and corrective function, which both the logic of experience and the social and historical conditions of its expression and development warranted us in ascribing to it. And, finally, we have found that in actual life abstraction and duplicity make activity conventional and utilitarian, that is to say, consciously instrumental or-let me now say-experimental. In just these conditions, then, the general abstraction and duplicity, the conscious formalism and regard for utility, and the sense of experimentation, we have the determinant, formative influences of science's attitude and method, for any given set of conditions always makes the method with which the conditions themselves are met. Socrates, with his method of cross-questioning so fatal to all ideas that should give knowledge any visible form or resting-place, was but the spirit of his time, the spirit of radical inquiry become incarnate and assertive in public places. He was but a visible, public exponent of the critical examination of life which the self-consciousness of his time made necessary. Indeed, no organic form, no living creature, ever reflected the character of its environment more fully, or more successfully effected an adaptive life than the method, with its searching questions, and its subtle, logical gymnastic, of that honestly and radically inquisitive Sophist. And the standpoint and the procedure of science, in respect to the relation to their environment, are closely comparable with the method of Socrates.

Thus science seeks a complete abstraction of the looking consciousness, and then with a timely duplicity it looks to a wholly external, natural world. So in the field of its peculiar abstraction does science take the character and colour of its surroundings. But, further, it presumes upon the peculiar forms and conditions of its subjective, looking consciousness, the activities of the mind, being mediative or instrumental to the presentation of the external objective world, and it uses also the activities of life at large, both the bread-and-butter activities and the mechanical inventions, both the political and the industrial organizations, as supplementary aids to its observations; for just science, the looking consciousness, is the end, and this end is presumed to justify every available means. So, again, does science take the cue from its environment, expressing in its own way and to its own purposes the general experimentalism; and this the more significantly when we remember that, besides being experimental, treating the mind as an instrument and life's activities at large as only aids more or less directly pertinent to the mind's work, it is agnostic. Its peculiar agnosticism not only reflects its duplicity, as was before suggested, but in addition shows how very abstract its knowledge is, and-I know no better phrase-how timelily adventurous. A time of science is a time when all things final are beyond; yet also, when all things present, however mysteriously, are really leading yonder.

Further, science always divides the field of its operations, and so, besides greatly compounding its abstractness, reflects in its own way, or, as it were, projects on its own plane, what I will call the specialism of the contemporary social organization. There is division of labour in this, but there is also a difficulty, which, among other difficulties, is hereafter to be considered.

And there is, finally, one more characterization of science which is suggested by the conditions of its rise, but by something in those conditions not yet brought into clear view. An age of science is an age of a rising, although perhaps formally suppressed and disguised individualism, and quite in sympathy, the method of science is "inductive," science, though interested in classification, always having regard for the natural rights of particular things, of single individuals, reasoning from the particular to the general, as the phrase runs, not in the reverse order. Individualism has been a much misunderstood thing, be it a social movement or a logical condition of inductive thinking. The individual as person or as objective datum has been greatly abused. But at least for the present, waiving any discussion of the true character of the individual or any protest that the individual and the definite or particular must not be confused, I would only assert, but I venture to assert strongly, first, that behind the conventionalism and utilitarianism of the life of a society divided into distinct classes, behind the abstraction and the inevitable duplicity, behind the sense of experiment and adventure, the individual person is the real power, and secondly, that in induction science has only translated this real individualism of its time into an attitude or method for the conduct of its looking consciousness. In this way, as in those other ways, has science been educated to its peculiar manner.

We have thus seen how science arises, and how its rise gives it a certain character. But already suspicion of limitations in the view of science, and so of a case for doubt with regard to it, has come to us. Abstraction and duplicity both suggest limitations, though these may not be unmixed. What the specific difficulties are, however, and how far they really justify our doubting, must be reserved for the ensuing chapter.

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