The will to doubt

by Alfred H. Lloyd

THE DOUBTER'S WORLD.

The doubter's world is a world in which, as we journey, we shall discover four features that are especially noteworthy and that accord fully with the principles of Descartes as well as with the findings of our own confession of doubt. Thus, in the order, or suppose I say in the itinerary, here to be followed: (1) Reality, without finality, in all things; (2) perfect sympathy between the spiritual and the material; (3) genuine individuality; and (4) for whatever is indeed real, immortality.

I. REALITY, WITHOUT FINALITY, IN ALL THINGS.

Doubt is only a particular state, or phase, of consciousness, and it is worth while to observe that any state of consciousness whatsoever, any attitude of mind, must assume or postulate something real. Indeed, this assumption of reality is so positive that no consciousness is ever without some will to believe, while no will to believe is ever without some real object believed in. Can there be smoke without some fire, or a seeming without some being? Were either of these things possible, then by the same token there could also be a willing without some doing or a wanting without some having. To be conscious of something, then, means not only that something is assumed and, if assumed, willed to be, but also that something really and truly is. Of course, the consciousness is; but, however subjective, the consciousness must have more than its mere subjectivity, than its mere seeming or wanting or willing, being in some way genuinely objective or grounded in reality. In a word, all consciousness implies and demands, postulates and possesses, a real world; possibly not just the world formally presented to it, but nevertheless reality, and reality, too, in which somehow the presented world has a place and part.

This may or may not be axiomatic, but at the very least it is very near to being axiomatic, and, near or far, it quite agrees with the conclusions to which, although along somewhat more specific lines, our own thinking and Descartes' thinking have been constantly pointing. As Descartes might have said, there is no consciousness without a thoroughly warranted "I am," and no "I am" without an also thoroughly warranted "The world of my consciousness is and is objectively real." But in implications about reality the doubter's consciousness differs from the believer's consciousness; not by any mere denial, for unqualified denial must be wholly alien to honest doubting, and the doubter is himself a believer, but by a peculiar assumption as to what the reality is. Simply doubter and believer, so far as they may be taken as independent characters, do not live in the same real world. Thus, for the distinct believer—that is to say, for the specifically dogmatic believer, for him who is, or who for the moment may be supposed to be, tenaciously and immovably loyal to some specific body of doctrine and to some specific manner of life—reality is always tethered to some stake; while for the doubter it is too real and too free to suffer any such bondage, being infinite and all-inclusive. For our doubter, at once fully self-conscious and honest, no possible experience can ever be in itself real and final, nor, on the other hand, can any possible experience ever be altogether unreal and illusory. His reality, I say, must be at once free and all-inclusive. Indeed, it could not be either of these without being the other. For him nothing is the reality, just because all things must belong to reality. For him, again, the world's reality is nowhere, just because everywhere; in no defined thing fixedly and completely, just because in all things—in them not merely distributively, it is true, but as they work together; and invisible and intangible, indeed generally unknowable, just because any consciousness is necessarily limited to the definite and inadequate mediums, or forms, of positive knowledge.

So the doubter has a real world, but his own real world. Moreover, in the great freedom of its reality we see how all things taken individually or distributively, must be, as the word is used, only "relative"; and in the perfect inclusiveness, how nothing, however "relative," can ever be unreal. Relativism and scepticism have been perenially associated, but relativism is not a nihilistic, but a deeply realistic philosophy; it is just the sceptic's natural realism. All things are "relative," but only because reality is at once free from anything, and yet inclusive of all things. What is relative is thus not flatly unreal, as is often supposed, but significantly both real and unreal or neither real—not real to itself alone—nor unreal—not without its part and place in whatever is real. The sceptic, though always a relativist, is thus also a most profound realist, and the nature of his realism must help us greatly to our view of the doubter's world.

Moreover, Descartes and his followers were also nativists or intuitionists, and, at least for the freer interpretation here permitted, their nativism was of a peculiar order, and it involved, accordingly, a world which was real in a peculiar way. Usually nativism has stood for the assertion of certain inborn and so necessarily valid and unchangeable ideas or characters or powers; as when men contend that particular ideas of God are unassailable because immediately intuited as a part of man's very being, or again when men declare a particular genius to be born, not made, or insist that a voice of conscience born, not bred, in them, tells them explicitly to do and even to make others do this or that specific thing, to live and make others live in this or that specific way, to accept and make others accept this or that specific programme of politics, morals, or religion. Furthermore, nativism of this prevalent type not only has claimed final validity for what is thus inborn—or given independently of the changing conditions of experience—but also has commonly punctuated this claim by viewing the inborn, or the intuited—for example, the dictates of conscience—as direct, immediate, unequivocal signs and mandates of God himself. Genius has been not human, but divine. The intuition at large has passed for nothing more or less than a supernatural revelation. But such an understanding of the innate, though serviceable beyond measure to the "specifically dogmatic believer," and though implying too, as of course it should, the natural, appropriate world of such a believer, does not agree with the principles of Descartes.

Such an understanding of the innate can imply only a world not merely of definite, substantial reality, but also of definite, substantial unreality. How real to some people, how definite and substantial the "unreal" is; how brutally fixed and yet how alien to what they are given to finding real. They are nativists of the conventional type, and for them the negatives of all things are as fixed and as really or as substantially not this or that as the positives to which what is innate for them bears its special witness. Their world, in short, is a world of tethered error as well as tethered truth, of hopeless, unmixed evil as well as a wholly untainted, unassailable—and why not say also hopeless?—virtue, of absolute and effective lawlessness as well as an unswerving law, of a free and omnipotent devil as well as a free and omnipotent God; for, in simplest language, the rule is a very poor one that does not work both ways. A world, however, which is so constituted, calls emphatically for revision of the view that imparts its character to it. Where the unreal is as real as the real, the evil as effective as the good, the false as conclusive as the true, there is certainly need of some second thinking. As some good Irish philosopher might put the case, if just this is wholly good or true or real, and just that is wholly evil or false or unreal, then the good or the true or the real cannot be exclusively just this, the evil or the false or the unreal cannot be exclusively just that, and the innate, responsible for a world so made, cannot be just in terms of certain fixed ideas or characters or powers. When, forsooth, has the manifest existence of evil in any form, of intellectual or moral error, of political anarchy, of religious heresy, or even of natural violence, not shaken man's conceits about what is and what is right? The very conceits—and this the more as they are definite and assertive—help to make the manifest evil, very much as a definite law has its part in making a particular crime, and the evil so arising, as it is distinctly manifested, cannot fail to assail and unsettle the conceits.

According to the Cartesian nativism, on the other hand, particularly as it was developed by such men as Malebranche and Spinoza, the innate, which is always at once the final appeal of man's conceits and the conclusive witness to what is absolutely real, was indeed one with the divine or supernatural, but it was perhaps just by reason of its truly divine or supernatural character and origin untethered. How could the universal doubter be born with a specific knowledge or a specific programme of anything, when the definite or fixed, the specific in any quarter whatsoever, must always be a possible object of doubt? Only the purest principle, or spirit, is impregnable against the attacks of the sceptic. To doubt such a principle is indeed only to enhance its importance. The sceptic, then, the universal doubter, is born only with, and what is more he cannot be born without, a real interest and constant faith in truth, in true knowledge and right action, but no special experience can ever compass the length and the breadth, the depth and the height of this interest or this faith. He has a native love for truth and righteousness, a belief in them, as real and as inviolable, as universal and as necessary, as his doubt; but the very doubting in him forever saves both the truth and the righteousness from being destroyed by satisfaction or crucified by any final embodiment. He loves and he trusts with all his heart, and he lives in a world that forever serves the truth and the righteousness of his love and faith.

So, taken at least for what he promised, or for what he said between the lines, Descartes was a nativist without the nativist's disastrous bondage to form and creed, to fixed character and specific programme. He was a nativist, but for him the innate lacked its self-destructive definiteness; it was just a spirit or principle, or what I have also called a life or power, ever present not in some, but in all experience, and so at once sanctioning all things, and, because able to find perfection in none alone, each single thing being relative, sanctioning also a constant conflict between things as good or true or real, and things as bad or false or unreal. Whatever is relative is necessarily, so to speak, both-sided or divided against itself. The relativity is such conflict. Before the judgment-seat of the innate, in short, all things, being relative, must be parties to conflict both individually and collectively, nor is their conflict anything but an old story to us. All the paradoxes of experience have been evidences of it. The conflict apart for the present, however, the meaning of Descartes' nativism is just this: truth in all experience, reality in all things, and reality, or truth, a principle, not a programme. Just this, too, discloses to us the nature of the doubter's real world.

In the last chapter we saw in particular the idea of God which the universal doubter would naturally and consistently entertain and cherish. We saw how in the proof of God Descartes, deposing the programme, set the principle in the place of authority, and how in consequence God became identified with all that was human, with all the seeking and striving, the hoping and despairing, the erring and the suffering, of man's life. God's nature just drew all things into itself; the very conflicts of life were his perfection; the incongruities of experience were his infinite wisdom. But the doubter has a metaphysics, or cosmology, as well as a theology; Descartes lost and regained a world as well as a God; and the doubter's metaphysics, or cosmology, proceeds from this simple creed: Reality in all things. So runs the creed's supreme article, and its two important clauses are these, equally familiar to us: Reality without form or residence—real as a spirit, not a programme, and: Nothing finally and fixedly real in itself, yet all things working together for what is real. With this creed clearly in mind, moreover, we may look out upon the world and see things that possibly we have never seen at all, or not seen so clearly before.

We see that just because reality is so profound, so spiritual, and so inclusive, just because nothing can be absolutely real in itself, all things must be "relative"—this we saw before, but have we ever quite understood stood the meaning of relativity?—and must be relatively at once real and unreal. Perhaps I am still adding little, if anything, to what has been said already, but distinctly and emphatically the real world can comprise only things that individually are relative, relatively real or good or true, and that being thus relative secure their place and part in absolute reality only by being also relatively unreal or evil or false. The very conflict of the relative ipso facto puts it in perfect unity with the absolute. And so, seeing this, we see not only a world of relativity and consequent conflict, but also a world whose universal relativity makes for a genuine absoluteness, and whose conflict can never be in vain, but instead is always realizing and effective. Thus, all things relative, that is to say all things at once real and unreal, good and bad, true and false, are in the constant service of the absolute; and then, only employing again the language of religion and, if not exactly interpreting, at least adapting some well-known lines:

All service ranks the same with God—
Whose puppets, best and worst,
Are we; there is no last or first.

All things, serving reality, are whatever they are together; yet could not be that, were there not a constant conflict in and among all things. All men serving God are whatever they are together; yet, in like manner, could not be that were human society not a sphere of conflict harsh and unceasing.

So we find ourselves well upon our way in the world of the doubter—and what a world it is! No finality, because so much reality. Conflict, forever necessary to its effective realization. Relativity, that is to say finiteness, of all things, of all things in it, just for the sake of its own true absoluteness, just to conserve its own actual infinity.

And, also, in such a world human life, individually and socially, gets new interest and vitality. There is given to human life so much fellowship, and yet, at the same time, so much hostility and competition. Society and the individual, though neither loses its own peculiar importance, are so vitally intimate with each other. We cannot, however, enlarge now upon this point. Another consequence of the peculiar realism of the sceptic has a more pressing interest.

Is our universal doubter naturally and honestly an evolutionist or a creationalist? Of course, he may be neither, or he may be one or the other with a meaning different from that usually recognized. Terms like these are so very hard to control. Conceivably the doubter, a very versatile character always, might even be both evolutionist and creationalist. But, as the terms are commonly used, he must be said at least to have his face towards an evolutional and away from a creational view. The difference, again, is seen in that between principle and programme. An evolutional world is the working out of a principle; a created world, of a programme—the fixed design of some specified being. True, one may speak with much significance of persistent, continuous creation, of a creation active at all times and in all things, and it is to the point that the Cartesians made much of a doctrine that was very near to such a notion; but a truly continuous creation could be only an orthodox substitute, or disguise, for evolution. A truly continuous creation could be bound by no programme; by definition it could have neither date in time nor location in space. And, what is of even greater moment, a continuous creator, ever present and ever active, could never be more or less than the persistent reality of the world itself. How could he be aloof or different? So have we come, once more, to the immanence of God as a necessary idea of the sceptic.

The doubter's world, then, is the scene, as realistic as you will and perhaps we may say, too, without unwarranted enthusiasm, as bright beneath the morning sun, of the ever present, ever active life of God or—with the same meaning—of an evolution which we may call God or nature as we please. From this thought, too, if only we remember that nothing is unreal and no experience is without some contact with reality, there is but a step to the idea that God and man are actively parties to one and the same life. To repeat from above, the conflicts of human life are the perfection, the perfect living of God. God is, nay, God's life is, not what some, but what all men do, and the doubter's world is just the world, the world of things always relative, the world of constant conflict, in which alone this can be true.

II. THE PERFECT SYMPATHY BETWEEN THE SPIRITUAL AND THE MATERIAL.

But we pass to the second feature of this world in which we are journeying, namely, to the sympathy of the spiritual and the physical.

As a matter of course the sceptic, by his peculiar attitude of mind, must imply something with reference to the relation of the two worlds, or the worlds commonly supposed to be two, the spiritual and the material, and because for him the reality cannot be exclusively one definite thing or any number, small or large, of definite things, all of them independent and exclusive, he must imply in the world of things, be these two or as many as you please, that they always work together for whatever is real. Such an implication at first hearing may or may not appear to be a pregnant one, but at least it suggests that in some genuine way there must be sympathy between the two things, the two worlds—spirit and matter, mind and body. These two must work together for whatever is real.

But by this necessary sympathy between the spiritual and the material is not meant a mere parallelism so called. Thinkers, present and past, have tried to be satisfied with such a meaning. To be quite real, however, sympathy must be substantial even to the point of unity, not formal. Some friends, and even some married people, are parallel, life matching life at each and every point, but not positively and vitally sympathetic. Still, in parallelism, the very name for which is fairly indicative of its import, there is a convenient approach to the meaning here intended. Moreover, our Cartesian philosophers were much given to a theory of parallelism in their views of the relation of the two spheres of mind and matter; their specific doctrine of continuous creation, already referred to, was parallelistic; and they found the human mind and the human body, though distinctly two, still "parallel." Then, too, in more recent times, parallelism has been in evidence, figuring conspicuously at least as a working standpoint in the psychological laboratory, and figuring also, I venture to add, as an important assumption in philanthropic work. Accordingly, although the term itself does convey a good deal of its meaning, I shall try, in words as simple as possible, to show exactly what the theory of parallelism is. This done, we shall be able to see, or think through parallelism to sympathy of a more genuine and a more vital sort.

As was said, the doctrine of continuous creation, holding as it does that the mental and spiritual life of God and the constant changes in the natural world, the world said to be of his creation, are always in accord, God in his relation to the world being, so to speak, always up to date and having his attention on every place and part, is distinctly a parallelistic doctrine; but, quite apart from any theological reference, parallelism asserts that all states, or events, in the two spheres of body and mind, of spirit and matter, are (1) equally real and substantial, and (2) perfectly harmonious and consistent, in just the sense that always in connection with any condition or change in one realm there is an accompanying condition or change in the other, although (3) between the two there exists and can exist no causal connection whatever. Obviously to make either, whether by what is known as causation or in any other way, the producing and wholly determining condition of the other, or of anything in the other, would be at once to unsettle the equivalence or balance of their reality, and equally real they must be. Thus, in more detail, mind is denied any independent part in the production or determination of anything in the material realm, and matter is in no way the source of what transpires in mind. Each is, so far as the other is concerned, quite its own master. Each is absolutely without any arbitrary influence, any influence not natural or sympathetic or co-operative, upon the other. So to speak, neither imposes on the other a "must" that is not at the same time already the other's "would." In other words, any state in one is always the occasion, but, so far as an independent causation goes, the wholly passive occasion of something quite pertinent occurring in the other. Is there an idea, a state of consciousness; then, corresponding, there is some real thing, some physical object adequate to the idea. Is there an act of will; then, corresponding to it, some movement in the material world. Were the relation different from this, were mind and matter ever independent causes, not merely coincidents or perhaps co-operative causes, of each other, then, as is worth adding, besides the disturbance of the equivalence of reality, already referred to, there would be implied a fixity of plan, or manner of action, and a definiteness of possessed power in the nature of the supposed causes, and these implications would also give offence.

Yet in the world of our journeying there must be causation—on some plan—of some sort. Parallelism, though sometimes supposed to be more sweeping, is really and consistently a denial only of isolated, independent causes. It denies, not causation, but causation as ever localized or with an exclusive residence. In very much the same way certain political ideas, growing to explicit expression contemporaneously, have denied, not sovereignty or power, but an exclusively localized sovereignty or power, as in the case of absolute monarchy or of an absolute institution, whether church or state. Parallelism, or at least the inner meaning of it, simply imposes certain conditions on a still real causation. These conditions, too, necessarily involve a significant, even a revolutionary change in the nature and value of any cause, but beyond peradventure they are unavoidable conditions. Thus, every active thing having any part in the causation of the world must always be only one among other active things, each also with some part. Then, secondly, all active things must co-operate, in, if not actually through their differences working together and harmoniously for what is real. In short, they must be "parallel." And, lastly, as something not formally asserted by parallelism but still far from incongruous with it and, as seems to me, even demanded by its inner meaning, all active things must be always acted upon as well as acting.

To give a single illustration, though this may be quite superfluous, parallelism would view the life of a skilled labourer at work in his shop as a process in two parts. On the one hand, the environment, comprising not merely all the tools and materials, but also the body of the workman, moves as a mechanism, each part flying to its appointed task consistently with the particular thing to be done; and then, on the other hand, the mind and the will of the mechanic, not by any independent ab extra causation, but nevertheless at every thought or sensation coincidently and pertinently accompanies the environment's mechanical movement. Each process is consistent within itself, not following nor yet preceding, but accompanying the other in perfect step. What makes the environment so tractable or the mind so practical? The credit here has usually been given to a tertium quid, to God, who is so made more a mediator than a creator. God is the Great Paralleler. But the third condition that was to be met—how about that? Are the workman's mind and his environment each at once acting and acted upon? Are their two processes virtually one instead of two? and is the mediation accordingly, just in the fact of such unity instead of in some being acting as if from without? So far as the formal theory goes, as was said, this third condition is not fulfilled, but the theory cannot be understood as opposed to such unity; rather it is a first step and a long step towards an appreciation of it. The formal theory, alike in its assertion of the parallelism and in its view of God as mediator rather than positive creator, is an effective attack, consistent, as we have seen, with the demands of an honest, thorough-going scepticism, upon the fixed, independent, arbitrarily creative cause in any form. It does not openly assert causation in any other sense. Seeming quite oblivious, for example, of causation as action with an accompanying reaction, or of what I should style an organic or differential causation. But, besides making and needing to make no denial of this, it all but opens the door to recognition of such a view.

In such manner, then, as simply and as briefly as I find myself able to put the case, runs the theory of parallelism; with its equal reality and its non-interference of two distinct but thoroughly correspondent agencies or substances, certainly a theory of a formal, rather than genuine and vital, sympathy. Metaphysically it is dualism still persistent. But one needs only a little insight, and perhaps also a slight leaning towards the gruesome, to see that it is dualism—at least the dualism of the medieval type—already in a shroud. Even dualism demands, and should always be allowed, its funeral service and a decent burial. With the passing of dualism, however, the sympathy becomes more than merely formal. Two things always equally real cannot be really two, and a perfect parallelism, though satisfying to certain cherished traditions in philosophy or theology, is so saturated with unity as to be almost, if not quite, at the point of precipitation. Without attempting, therefore, any further appraisal of parallelism metaphysically, we may turn to what will seem more practical.

Looking or thinking through this metaphysical theory we can see that it is equivalent to a declaration that the physical and the spiritual in human life, or in life at large, are meant for each other. Perhaps in a somewhat stilted fashion, but nevertheless beyond any chance of question, it is a philosophy that makes man and nature always accordant and adaptable, and coming as it did in the history of thought near the beginning of the modern period, it can lay claim to this meaning on historical as well as on logical grounds. Its value to philanthropy, too, perhaps only another sign of its modernism, is easily detected, since it supplies just such tangible means as the material conditions of life for the accomplishment of philanthropic ends, and its service to scientific psychology, plainly an indispensable service, lies in its making the physical nature a medium, not merely for the expression, but also for the study of what is psychical. As for its relation to the argument of this book, it is simply dualism meeting; or trying to meet, the demand, in the first place, that reality itself should be indeterminate—always a tertium quid—and, in the second place, that the things that are definite, be they material or spiritual, should work together for reality. Under the same demand, be it said, atomism could stand only if supplemented by some doctrine of assumed unity or co-operation among all the elements—as, for example, by Leibnitz's doctrine of pre-established harmony.

But, furthermore, looking and thinking through the theory of parallelism, we can see something of special significance for the doubter's world. Men often forget that new relations of things mean new things, or at least new characters for the old things. Thus, mind and matter, or man and nature, if become, or found to be, parallel, are no longer the mind and the matter, the spiritual man and the physical world, that they were. The two things, just by their complete correspondence, are changed in a most important way. That they must be changed is quite evident, but how to state exactly what the change is is not easy. That the change, too, must be in the direction of their more vital union is evident to us, but again the precise description of it is difficult. Still, I submit that the effect of correspondence, whether this be natural or imposed, is to make the things concerned, in the present instance the spiritual and the material, at once dynamic and teleologic in character and function. Moreover, they are dynamic with the same reality and teleologic for the same end. To correspond to something, as parallelism makes matter and mind correspond to each other, is not, and cannot be, simply to have a certain character, self-contained and generally static; it is, and apparently it must be, to have a constant call to action, a constant motive to go beyond self, and so to make one's nature mediative or instrumental. Wherefore, if this be in truth the effect of correspondence, in our doubter's world mind appears as a thinking, not a mere knowing, and matter as a moving, not a mere being; and the thinking and the motion are instrumental, or mediative, to the same end, to the same reality. All of which, moreover, being translated, means, on the one hand, that in our doubter's world man is free to think to some practical purpose, and, on the other hand, that the material world will serve both his thinking and his purpose.

As to the first of these, the freedom of thought, mind by being relieved from all danger of any arbitrary interference from the physical world, has at once the conscious right of independent procedure and the positive assurance of its thinking, thus free and independent, being quite practical or applicable; for plainly the freedom is in, not from, the material world. Nothing possible to thought, no consistent chain of reflections upon experience, however abstract, can possibly fail to be exemplified in the natural world, or—as Hegel said, giving more direct expression to the same idea—the real is rational and the rational is real. The applicability of thought to life, therefore, the real utility of looking well before leaping, the ultimate service even of the most technically scientific theory is what we see from our present observation-tower, and the splendour of the view hardly calls for remark. Man is free to think, to think in his world and about it; and his thought is always incarnate; it is an unfailing mediator between him and the life of the material world about him. "Well begun is half done" is an old saw, and for human conduct a great truth, but "Well thought is well done" is even greater, if not older. Think clearly, and the fulfilling act, the overt expression of your thought, is already ensured. A thoroughly developed plan finds its execution, as it were, already provided for; such is the perfect sympathy between the mental and the physical world.[1]

Now, however, that we have observed the complete freedom of the thinker in the doubter's world, now that we see the thinker free, not only to develop his thought abstractly, but also to expect that the conclusions which he reaches will be exemplified in his world and so to be able to apply them there, we are in great danger of serious misunderstanding. Thought is indeed free, but the truly free thinker is no single individual developing some particular point of view, although even such a one must always have some part in the freedom of thought. Free thought is deeper than any of its formal expressions and broader than the positive experience of any of its exponents; it belongs to the life of mind as present throughout the whole sphere of all conscious life; and the single individual has part in it only when his actual, articulate thinking is supplemented by his conscious doubting of his own peculiar standpoint, his treatment of this as only tentative and mediative, and his consequent appeal to thought as always deeper and broader than just what he sees, or—amounting really to the same thing—only when his thought is mingled in social conflict and mutual accommodation with that of others. In the doubter's world the thought that is at once free and fully applicable is social—just as we know doubt to be social; that perfect applicability, so essential to truly free thought, simply cannot belong to all thinking, or to all thoughts, distributively and indiscriminately, to all specific thoughts and ideas, though all must be capable of some application, more or less enduring, but only in the first place to the thinking that, like pure mathematics, is exact and general simply because strictly formal and abstract,[2] and in the second place to the thinking that when material and concrete, when dealing, with actual affairs and definite practical relations, makes up for its consequent relativity and subjectivity by inner paradox or contradiction, in so far as individual or personal, and by open opposition and controversy, in so far as it is social, and assumes accordingly only the value of a means to an end.

Much has been said in earlier chapters[3] of the paradoxical nature of human experience. There was seen to be among men no knowledge without a contradiction, and the ever-present paradoxes of experience were recognized as causes of thorough-going doubt. But, although at first sight seeming to blast man's ordinary experience, and his science also, these paradoxes were eventually found also to give to experience movement and poise, reality and practicality, and to involve the individual in a life that was as social as it was real, and thereupon they became as certainly reasons for faith as causes of doubt; they were witnesses to a principle of integrity and validity, a spirit of veracity moving through all experience. Accordingly, once more, our truly free thinker, the thinker whose thought is thoroughly applicable to life, is such a one as lives for and with this principle of validity or spirit of veracity, having his every thought informed with it. He is not the single individual, holding tenaciously to some specific standpoint, but the doubter ever using what he sees and knows, and in using appealing beyond what he sees and knows, or he is even the social life that only more directly and explicitly embraces and uses the views of all individuals, these views always working together for what is true and real; or, lastly, he is the truth-spirit itself which is ever superior to anything that is either merely individual or merely social. The free thinker is just the honest doubter; a believer in what he knows or thinks, but only as a working view to something else; and, consciously, a social being, through controversy sharing with others the practical experience of what is real.

With regard to the peculiar case of mathematics, which is widely applicable because formal and as exact as formal, it seems enough to say that while mathematics has very properly become the ideal of all knowledge, not excluding such sciences as psychology and sociology, the final value, the peculiar applicability of mathematics, lies in its character as a general attitude or method. It is not strictly a science, but the ideal method of science. Doctrinally, that is, as to any specific intellectual content, there can hardly be said to be any pure mathematics, any final body of formula absolutely exact and fully applicable. Has not doctrinal mathematics had a history? Has it now no promise of future changes? But whatever has a history—can this be quite "pure"? Have even those axioms, which once upon a time you and I learned to respect for their self-evidence, been free from the criticism and revision of the mathematical experts? Then, too, taking any particular formula from so-called applied mathematics, such as that simple but altogether typical one of the lever, what do we find? An equation is said to exist between the product of the weight by its distance from the fulcrum, and that of the power by its distance from the same point, but in application this formula can never be fully exemplified. The fulcrum never is a point. The perfectly homogeneous lever, so necessary to the equation, is unattainable, if not also unthinkable. There can never be complete absence of friction, nor perfectly ideal suspension of the weight or application of the power. And the necessary atmospheric disturbances, even in a "vacuum," to say nothing of the difficulties of absolute measurements, are not less fatal. Only as method, therefore, which really means as procedure according to standards of strictest accuracy and of highest logical consistency, or as closest, most constant loyalty to a spirit of truth, not as doctrine, can mathematics be said to be freely applicable. Mathematics seems to me to be at the very heart of the working hypothesis. Its tests of accuracy are such as forever save science from anything like doctrinal dogmatism. Historically there is much significance in the fact that our doubter, Descartes, was almost the inventor of the Analytic Geometry, and that this and the Calculus, which came afterwards, and which we owe chiefly to Leibnitz and Newton, comprise rather a methodological than a doctrinal mathematics. With their invention and development the application of mathematics to material facts, or it would be better to say to the investigation of material facts, took tremendous strides. So Descartes, who doubted mathematics only because it was not satisfying doctrinally, regained in this case, as in that of his God or his material world, not exactly what he had lost. Alike in mathematics and theology he lost doctrine and creed; he won method and life. And, to return, with reference to the relation of mathematics to the free thinker, nothing can be clearer than that this science, at least sometimes so called, as a method or attitude exacting clearest possible procedure and highest logical consistency, is the very principle of veracity, upon loyalty to which the freedom of thought must always depend. Like this principle, too, mathematics—so much more truly than any other discipline—is superior to anything that is either merely individual or abstractly social.

So, looking and thinking through the theory of parallelism, we see how thought is Bet free. Man is free, as was said, to think always to some practical purpose. Secondly, then, with regard to the material world, said to serve his thinking and his purpose, this in its turn is liberated also; it is liberated for a life of its own law and order. Nature, the material world in general, is no longer the victim of arbitrary changes. Such changes as spring from the occultly creative acts of the spiritual world, or more exactly the spirit-world, represented by God in the character of an extraneous being, by a personal devil or by those minor spirits or powers of light or darkness, often if not usually described as objects of superstition, no longer interfere with nature's orderly course. She is left, unmolested, to be just her natural self, consistent and persistent in the way prescribed by her own inner being. And then, while subject to no arbitrary interference, she is herself never given to interference, but is, on the contrary, in her own right, essentially at one with that other world, the world of the thinker. Poets have ever fondly sung of nature's sympathy with man, and her sympathy deep and abiding is exactly what we now observe, nor can any poem too loftily give expression to it.

And what, in more detail, of this sympathetic nature—of this ideal world, or perfect home, of thinking man? With much interest we certainly might trace all the aspects of its character corresponding to the different phases of the thinker's life, but discussion of them all would take too much of our space and might seriously tax an already tried patience. So we shall confine ourselves to one thing alone. The truly free thinker was said to be one who believes in what he knows or thinks, but only as a working view to something else. No thought of his could ever compass the fulness of truth within him. What, then, of nature?

Corresponding to the thinker's positive knowledge, to the specific law or order, which at one time or another he finds manifest in his world, there is the well-known, but often misunderstood, character of nature as a great mechanism, moving of course under the law. But corresponding to his only tentative acceptance, though always trustful use of what he knows, there is the much neglected character of nature as not an idle, unproductive mechanism, always doing exactly the same thing, but, if I may so speak, a moving, developing, ever-productive one, serving some end larger and deeper than the known law. Nature must indeed be a machine if the thinker's knowledge demands uniformity or law, but an instrument of something other than her mechanical self, in short, not a merely revolving, but an evolving, always productive machine, if the knowledge itself is never final.

The material, mechanical character of nature, as I have said, is often misunderstood. The real meaning of it is lost, and with serious results. In the first place, it is taken as if it involved a wholly external, physical nature, and in the second place it is taken as if it represented this nature only as moving through its changes according to a certain law and as having in consequence nothing to do but keep up the dead, strictly "mechanical" existence of its law-fixed character and incidentally involve man in the tireless turning of its fatal wheels. But nothing could be more superficial, or even more needlessly superstitious, than this. Obvious facts are overlooked or, if seen, forgotten. The simplest demands of a truly scientific mind are slighted so inexcusably. Could any law of an alien, external nature ever be an actual or possible object of knowledge? And could such law as is known —of a nature not alien—ever have any but a relative value, a provisional mediate character? Nature may be a machine, but the law of her moving is never identical with any law in positive knowledge, though what is known is always informed with the law of her moving; and this is to make her more than a mere machine. Again, no known law is ever the law, and under the law nature must be qualitatively different from what under the known law she appears to be. To neglect this difference, then, is seriously to misunderstand the mechanical character of nature.

Yet some one promptly objects that I am not at all fair to the common understanding of mechanicalism. I am told that no one ever thinks of nature as revolving strictly in accord with any known law. All men who give any thought to the matter concede that the really ultimate law must be not anything that is known, but only what is yet to be known, and is merely like in kind to such laws as men have cognizance of. This interesting concession, however, quite fails of its purpose, since it does not meet the real difficulty here in question. It shows mechanicalism, not indeed bound to any particular knowledge, but nevertheless still conceiving the final lawfulness of nature after the analogy of a particular law, the merely known or unknown or unknowable character of which matters not at all. The analogy is what misleads. The analogy only serves to deaden what really lives.

When will men cease to think of the whole after the analogy of the part? Of the, as if it were a? When will God cease to be only another person? And the universe only another thing? And the lawfulness or unity of all nature only another formula? This or that formula may show nature a mechanism as smooth running and as blindly given to dead routine as could be imagined, but nature is ever more and other than known formulæ of men, and as more and other, or say as answering to the free spirit of truth that moves in the thought of men, she is as free in her real lawfulness as she is infinite. By reason of her infinity there is no law that she may not break. A law may make her a mechanism, dead and idle; the law makes her an organism living and productive. How a positivistic science, making all knowledge wait on actual experience, and accepting all knowledge only tentatively, can ever be mechanicalistic or appeal to the ordinary understanding as an argument for the mechanicalistic view of things is hard to conceive. If one reasons from known forms to uniform activities, must one not also reason from the always provisional and developing knowledge to productive activities? Must not the mechanism evolve into something more, adding something to man's life, realizing something for all life, enlarging even the nature of God himself?

Once more, therefore, corresponding to the law that men may know and that they can know only as their working hypothesis, there is nature, a mechanism moving and herself at work, while corresponding to the great living fact of nature's final lawfulness, or to the thinker's sense of truth as a spirit or principle, not a form or creed or programme, there is the constantly, genuinely productive life of nature, the mechanism, as has now been said several times, ever evolving beyond its form and law. Her law is not a law, any more than the thinker's passion for truth can be finally satisfied by a formula or than God's continuously creative life can ever culminate in a single finishing act. The doubter's world, in short, or so much of it as is said to be material, is not law-bound, but law-free:[4] an organism, not a mechanism; and upon the value of this vision of nature, upon the theoretical or the practical value, whether to science or to philosophy, to morals or to religion, to politics or to industry, it seems hardly necessary to dwell. But, to add a word or two in very general appraisal of it, such a nature, served as it is by every law, by every mechanical action, yet bound to move, is active always from design; its life is essentially purposive. Not that it serves the purpose of anything, or any being, beyond itself, but in every part and movement it is itself always maintaining an end, the end of its its own untethered reality. In words used before, and applied alike to the spiritual and the material, it is at once dynamic and teleologic.

Such a nature, be it especially observed, is the basic condition, if not also the very inspiration of our modern industrialism. This industrial age, struggling against the old-time militarism, in its religion, in its art and in its literature, in its leisure and in its labour, in city and in country, is an age of machinery; of machinery in all the manifold forms demanded by all the various departments of human life, not of wheels and belts alone; an age of the conscious employment, for human purposes, of the resources of all sorts, the materials and the forces which the natural environment affords. Freedom, not slavery, is recognized as man's ideal portion, and in order to ensure the freedom, not human nature, but physical nature is mechanicalized; or, with the same intent, all the formal means, or instruments, of life are taken as incidents of environment, not as essential to man. So is industrialism supplanting the old-time militarism that sought, in all the relations of life, to identify the human with the instrumental. Witness the values now put upon theories and creeds, upon rites and institutions, upon personal habits and social laws. All of these, to begin with, are means, not ends; and, further, they are means whose devising—so man is insisting, as never before—must be, as near as possible, true to nature. The sovereign conviction of this age of industrialism appears to be that the only sure way to human freedom is the way of nature; employment of such instruments as she can supply; obedience to such law as she may disclose.

But many have found this age of industrialism insufficient. It seems to them so materialistic. It would view things so much from the standpoint of cold naturalism. The attitude of laissez faire as meaning "Let nature do the work," has so widely possessed the minds of men. If only we could get back some of our former idealism and regard nature as once more subject to some supernatural will! Despair like this, however, is blind and as needless as blind. Dependence on a lawful, mechanical nature can bring to human life no loss of what is truly ideal and personally worthy. Instead, it brings constant gain, for the knowledge of law and the making of machinery do not rob men of personal opportunity, but rather make the opportunity for personal achievement only the more manifest. A mechanical nature is always for man, not man for a mechanical nature; and its movement is always productive for man. If, then, industrial life has tended, as it has been supposed to tend, towards materialism and fatalism, the reason can lie only in the blindness of such as refuse to see clearly this visible fact. Not merely something always doing, but something always that man is doing is the definite message of a nature that ever manifests herself under the form of law. To the thinker, in no uncertain syllables, she says: Go forth and do. And our age of industrialism, if hearing this bidding, will lose its unnatural materialism, and find itself quick with a moral and religious instead of a narrowly practical and commercial motive.

So in the doubter's world are the spiritual and the material genuinely sympathetic.

III. A GENUINE INDIVIDUALITY.

Besides the reality, without finality, of all things in experience, to which we gave our first attention in this chapter, and the perfect sympathy of the spiritual and the material, which we have just seen to give new dignity to the intellectual life, making thought free, and new worth to the life and movement of nature, making nature not lifelessly mechanical, but mechanically productive; besides these two features of the doubter's world, there still remain two others to be observed by us. For the first of these there is the fact of a genuine individuality. Different persons, as well as different things, possess a substantial worth to the real and the true. No one may be either real or worthy by himself, but no one is unreal for being dependent on others. The persons, like the things, that work together for what is real, find the service its own reward. Reality, having no exclusive resting-place must itself be dependent. It is dependent on an infinite multiplicity of differences. Therein lies the person's chance for individuality; nay, it is his right to it and assurance of it.

Before the days of Descartes, to speak generally, the typical individual in human society—and let me say also, though at the expense of running into a rather violent metaphor, the typical individual in any class or group whatsoever—was the soldier, a creature of another's will, doing only another's work, and having reality only by virtue of characters so apart from individual peculiarities as actually to imply existence in another world. The individual, in other words—if at once real and worthy—was then an unearthly being. For a being so constituted, or living as if he were so constituted, the creationalistic theology and the analogous monarchical politics were of course largely responsible, since in their different ways they took individual independence of action from the general run of mankind. They imposed on men at large a certain uniform of life and belief, and then, as it were, appeased them for this suppression with a doctrine of another life in a world yet to come. Plainly, then, the time was not one when personal individuality, except as it was referred to the other world yonder and apart, was recognized as of much positive worth. Under the regime of prescribed routine, of life with regard to the hereafter, and of mysterious powers of all sorts, more or less in good standing in the realm of the unworldly, personal individuality, though in itself not without some honour, was valued chiefly and primarily for the different conditions, the different relations to the things of this world, and the different views of these things, which men succeeded in overcoming, or rather in completely denying and eschewing. A worthy individuality was thus secured rather through self-denial than self-expression; through the vassal's devotion to his lord, the gallant's submission to his lady, the courtier's humility before his king, or the saint's self-abasement before church and heaven. Just think a moment of resting your claim to distinct personal worth on the mere fact of what you have eschewed or escaped being in some way different, perhaps more worldly, more dangerous, and more powerful, from what some others have eschewed or escaped, and you will be able to appreciate the main ground of the ideally significant distinction between man and man in the days before Descartes.

But with the advent of the doubter's view of life absolutism and its appropriate other-worldism melted away like snow beneath a noonday sun, and upon their going self-denial ceased to be the cardinal virtue and the chief ground of an approving self-consciousness. Authority came to be placed not in a visible form, but in an abstract principle. Law became superior to laws; monarchy to monarchs; divinity to Gods; truth to truths, and righteousness to rites and habits. The abstract principle, too, instead of being, as many might imagine, a wholly shadowy thing, real only to the logician, stood for something vital and substantial, for something wholly real, for an inner spirit or life or power in the very things of experience. Authority, henceforth refused to any specific thing, whether person or manner of life, institution or formal belief, became a prerogative of all things together, of all persons or all manners of life or all creeds; and, residing in the working together of them all, it made personal worth consist no longer in the denial of individual characters and relations, but in honest assertion and open use of them. As some have liked to describe the change, the "universal individual," the individual as an authoritative and heaven-made type, that dictated a life and a belief to others generally, passed away, and in its stead, instead of unity as itself an individual, instead of an incarnate type, came unity as in the relation, or the activity maintaining the relation, of all individuals. Instead of a single planet, for example, as the controlling centre of the heavenly bodies, came the unity of the solar system through the force or the law of gravity. Instead of a monarch or a book or a city the self-sufficient ruler of human life and human thought, came unity through the ballot; through freedom of thought—always loyal only to a real unity and in being thus loyal also always tolerant; and through all sorts of like means to individuality. The "universal individual" died, and there arose, as it were, out of his grave the living unity of manifold individuals, each one different, yet each quite essential.

And the change brought a transfiguration. It was as if the human soul had entered a new body, or as if the human body had received a new soul. Not least among the significant evidences of the new life were the rise of the study of history and the awakening of a keener and more practical interest in men and things the wide world over. With its valuable accounts of the manifold experiences of different peoples and different times, at last seen to be real parts even of the life present and at hand, the study of history became wonderfully absorbing and inspiring; and not less valuable than this travel in time was the travel in space, the real travel or the imaginary, which accompanied it. Furthermore, such ideas as balance of power and preservation of the worth and integrity of the individual nation, and division of labour and right of free speech and of political and religious liberty, developed into most powerful influences in the life and consciousness of society. And, to return definitely to the single person, he found himself, not in spite of, but because of his special place and special standpoint, an active participant in the effective life of his time. Instead of being a mere soldier as before, he found himself a mechanic; certainly the proper inhabitant of a mechanically productive nature.

Doubtless the term soldier lends itself more readily to philosophical generalization than the term mechanic. Perhaps, too, distance in time lends enchantment to the view, for the day of the soldier was, while the day of the mechanic is. The day of the soldier has reached the stage of romance and reflection, while the day of the mechanic suffers from what is commonplace and prosaic, from the associations of a particular life, from dust and smoke and factories, from tools and utilities. Yet the mechanic must be the romantic figure of the future. He is the typical individual of these modern times, of these times of the free because practical thinker, and of a nature not lifelessly mechanical but mechanically productive. Forget the grimy hands and the noisy machinery, the overshadowing smoke and the apparent absorption in mere utility, and think only of the man, who in his best moments feels himself individually responsible and capable, who believes in himself as having at once a peculiar and a necessary part in the real life of his time, and who expresses himself through some skilful mastery over the resources of nature, applying to them the principles his own thinking has uncovered, and using her machinery to the ends of his own nature, which, as we have seen, is bounded only by the "unity of experience."

Remember, too, the mechanic of our modern world is not the factory labourer alone. Wherever in social life, whether in political activity or in industrial management, in educational methods or in religious effort, there appears a man who appreciates the need first of observing natural conditions and finding natural laws, and then of acting only in accord with the suggestions of the laws discovered, just there is the mechanic, the responsible agent of a law-free but always lawful nature. The soldier as creature of this world was only a passive, wholly material part of a mechanism which depended for its movement upon some outside power or will; but the mechanic, be he humble labourer skilful in the use of tools, or political leader supporting no law that is not, so far as can be known, in accord with natural life, or religious reformer loyal to life as it is, shares positively in the activity that makes the machinery go and in whatever this activity produces.

And yet one thing more must be said. Just as before we had to view free thought in the light of a divided labour, the individual sharing in it only as he treated his own peculiar experience as hypothetical, as a means to an end, not merely an end in itself, or as he was subject to the restraint and correction of the different experiences of others, so now we must recognize that effective activity, not less than true thinking or than realistic experience, is also necessarily the labour, never of one alone, but of many. The successful mechanic—in other words, the fully responsible agent of a law-free nature—is never an isolated creature with merely such a sentimental concern for his neighbours as might spring from the recognized chance of meeting them in that world of the hereafter, where all are to be equal and where love and peace are to supplant the present hate and rivalry; he is, on the contrary, one among others, different from him, it is true, and often very positively at variance with him, but engaged with him in a single activity and achievement. His difference works not against, but with their differences for thoroughly controlled, truly effective activity. As things are real, though never final, so men, at work in the world, are individual and individually important, but never alone.

The facts in the case, logically and practically, appear to be somewhat as follows: The individual's view-point, and the special machinery by which he undertakes to realize it, can be only tentative or provisional; they have the character, and usually he knows that they have the character, if I may use a somewhat extravagant term, of makeshifts; and, such being the fact, he is bound always to be in a state of constraint or tension, in a relation of suspense towards them and towards the environment to which they refer or belong. He feels a positive resistance, a something disposed to counteract what he would do, and of course the feeling means that he is really party to a growing life, not established in a completed life. Suppose a view-point, or a machinery that was perfectly applicable, that worked perfectly, that never did and never could give out, that might not even very suddenly go all to pieces, and that therefore put no strain nor uncertainty upon him who held or employed it; could such a view-point or such machinery be of any service to a growing life, to productive activity? Most certainly not. Tension, or a strained relationship, is necessary to every individual's conduct and to every individual's ideas. But this strain, to be real, just to accomplish its own purposes must be not merely of a person with his own ideas or with the outer world to which the ideas refer, but of a person with other persons; not merely of conscious man with a mechanical nature, but of conscious and mechanically active man with other conscious and mechanically active men.

It is now an old story for us, but an important one, that there must be society. A genuine individuality requires society. Society is a medium not by which something is added to individual life, but by which something in individual life is kept real and manifest. By maintaining, as it were always from without, the natural tension of individual life, it ensures to the individual the constant growth that is his legitimate inheritance. The doubter is a social creature. The free thinker accepting his ideas only tentatively, though at the same time using them hopefully, sure that they will lead somewhere, is a social creature; and the mechanic is a social creature, being one with others for whom life is not routine but growth, and among whom the growth in which each has his part induces constant tension, the tension of difference, the tension of opposition and competition, the tension of mutual correction and compensation, the tension, finally, of reality refusing to be bound. Not the individual's provisional standpoint, nor yet the machinery that he employs and that sooner or later must go to pieces, not these alone, I must therefore reiterate, make the individual effectively active in a growing world, make him a worthy creature doing the work of nature or of God; these have their place and part; but constant relation to other individuals, the objects not less of hate than of love, not less of rivalry than of friendship, is also essential.

In the so-called material world all things, in and by themselves unreal, get reality, yes, get individual reality, only as through their very differences they work together for what is real. In the world of mind, or thought, if this can be imagined apart from the world of things, all thoughts or ideas, in and by themselves untrue for being subjective, relative, and partial, get truth only as also through their differences, so tense and interactive, they work together for what is true. And, likewise, in the world of persons, if indeed this can be imagined apart from the world of thought, all individuals, call them now mechanics or what you will, though in and by themselves without personal worth or real individuality, without freedom or immortality, get genuine worth and are assured even immortality only as shoulder against shoulder they work together for a life that is true and real, worthy and genuine.

But in an earlier chapter, dealing with "The Personal and the Social, the Vital and the Formal in Experience," a different argument for individuality was insisted upon. Then the person was individual because of his independence of particular form; now he is so because a real life demands the particular and different, with which he is assumed to be necessarily identified. Then he was the "living, integral exponent of the unity of experience," free with the genius of universality, now he is one among all the particular conflicting elements of that unity—or at least of the reality to which that unity refers. So there appears to be even an inconsistency in my thinking. Yet, I venture still to think, the inconsistency is only apparent. Certainly it should be remembered that the person's asserted genius for universality was not for the universal in an abstract sense, in the sense of the universal as something by itself and apart from particulars; rather it was for a constant enriching of the universal through particulars, for the translation of any one particular relation and experience, which had reached a higher state of development, to all the other actual or possible relations of life; and this can mean only that the universal, in which the personal individual has a place, is not denying or betraying, but always holding and lifting up to itself all particular factors or elements in the unity of experience or of reality. Simply, though perhaps abstrusely too, the universal is just all the particulars; unity is always in and through difference; and there is, therefore, without inconsistency, a case for individuality from either side. Indeed, the life of the individual being, as was said, always in a tension or strain of difference, of opposition and competition, is bound to have, it can be real only as it has, both a particular form and a genius for universality. Not in the sense of that conventional theology, crudely dualistic and unthinkable, but in a sense that is not to be gainsaid and that may give some meaning even to the conventional theology, every individual is real only in having a body and a soul. The soul of a man is only his genius for universality, but for a universality that works through, not that is independent of, the particular.

So the difference between this chapter and the former chapter is merely one of emphasis. The double character of the individual, however, as it is now before us, starts an inevitable question. Is the individual as immortal as real? If he is immortal, does the immortality belong to both sides of his character, to his body and to his soul, or only to one? And, admittedly, this question offers more serious difficulties than the suspicion of inconsistency. How can it be met?

IV. IMMORTALITY.

To write a useful essay on immortality has long been one of my ambitions, and, as regards the views in that essay, my faith and my reason alike have so far brought me to this thesis: Whatever is real is immortal.[5] "A most meagre contribution to the subject," I hear some one exclaim. But is it so very meagre after all? "A most gloomy contribution," says another, "for evil, and above all death, are real." But is it so gloomy? Remember, not even death can be real alone. Possibly, too, the meagreness will seem less and the gloom will be illuminated if the need of the real being also the ideal, is brought to mind. That the real must be ideal, that the world must be so constituted that the law of whatever is good will prevail in it, has been a faith manifested among all men and expressed through history in countless ways. True, no particular experience ever satisfies it. Not even the particular things we adjudge to be best are adequate to it, and the things we think evil, the suffering and the hardships of all kinds, the always tragic death and the too often offensive life, seem its eternal rebuke. Yet the faith remains, and you and I and all others are forever calling out to it. Our very doubts are its altars; our honest, rational thoughts, as they are uttered, are prayers; perhaps the only prayers to which we have any right.

So the real, which must be also the ideal, is immortal; and this, quite apart from any particular questions about the body or the soul, makes a world to live in and to hope in, whatever happens. Of body and soul, too, it says something. These, in just so far as they are real, are immortal, and any real relation between them is immortal also, for the conclusive test of immortality is just reality, reality here and now. Whatever is real in your life or in mine, whatever reality our present personality may possess, be it physical or spiritual, be it both or neither of these, that and only that is immortal. That and only that, however, let it be said again, is now or never. The most serious error, so it seems to me, in all the controversy about immortality, is the notion, or the superstition, that something that is real now can pass away, or that something real in the future is not real, not freely real now. With this error corrected, of course at the expense of certain attempts to bind reality to something that is visible, if not to the natural eye, at least to the eye of the mind, man has nothing to fear. Reality will hold him to itself, will support whatever truly inheres in his friendships or his family ties, in his best hopes or in his personal conceits, for ever and ever. Reality can never betray what it has ever harboured.

And the whole trend of thinking in this book has been to make the reality here spoken of a most hospitable harbour. So innate to all experience is the spirit of truth, the principle of veracity, that life can have no absolute illusions. True, life also can have no positive knowledge final and exact, so that all things definitely manifest are only relatively true or real. All things definitely manifest, whether to the consciousness that looks without or that looks within, are mixedly true or false, real or unreal. But just this impossibility, now so familiar to us, at once of absolute illusion and of absolute knowledge, is, as said so often, a condition of the true and the real, and it means in this place that nothing which is ever defined, which is ever hypostasized or apotheosized, which in any way is erected into a thing or nature quite by itself, possessing determined or determinable qualities, can ever be said to be either mortal or immortal, since it must be as truly one as the other. It must be significantly, but never purely and exclusively either. Not this hand of mine nor that picture on the wall, not this body which, so to speak, I seem to wear, nor that soul, which you or I imagine to be in the body and more or less loosely connected with the body, is unqualifiedly immortal. Nor yet is any of these unqualifiedly mortal. Still, again, there is immortality, and an infinitely hospitable immortality, which the hand and the whole body and the soul, be it yours or be it mine, all have a place and a part in. There is immortality, and, besides those things that were just named, divinity is also immortal. But even a God dies, this being just one of the things that make him God. Any man, then, or any being, or any thing, may say, "I am immortal." No one, however—to speak now only in words directly applicable to man—may say, "My body is immortal," nor even, "My soul is immortal," if, so speaking, he means only what he seems to say. Body and soul alike, if two separate things, are both of them at once living and dying. They are equally mortal or immortal, for only so, as two things, can they belong to the real self. Can parts, be they two or many more, ever be unmixedly what the whole is? There is immortality, then, yet nothing, not the body nor the soul, is wholly or selfishly immortal. Reflect, to take an illustration from the practice, if not from the conscious thinking of men, how through the centuries of the dualistic view of human nature, the saving, or the losing, of the separate soul has been a keen human interest, and how the separate body, living, has been neglected and despised, and, dead, has been cherished and honoured. Yes, man's immortality is deeper, and it is more hospitable, than any distinction, be this invidious on one side or on the other or be it not, between the physical and the spiritual. Even in the case of the spiritual, the cannot be a.

The soldier and the mechanic have been mentioned as types of personal individuality appropriate respectively to the medieval and the modern period, to the period of the "universal individual," on the one hand, and of unity realized, not through a type, but through the working together of different individuals, on the other. The type was of another world; the living unity is here and now in this. For the mechanic, then, death is not what the soldier has found it, and immortality is different too. But how fully to describe the difference, and how above all really to appraise it, I do not clearly know. Perhaps there is not enough of the poetic in my nature. The soldier, as the political historian or as the philosopher sees him, has had his appreciative poets, but the mechanic has been little sung. The mechanic's death, however, and the life following it, afford a theme that some poet of the future, let me hope, will be able to do justice to. The soldier leaves this for another world, by his violent death only fulfilling his extreme subjection here. The mechanic, somewhat like the tools which he employs, actually continues with the always productive life of this world, by his death, natural rather than violent, even contributing to, as well as sharing in, what is produced. Not less than the soldier's is his after-life an appropriate fulfilment of his earthly career; each gains through death the natural reward of his life's service. But though I find myself so unable to say what I would, to express either in prose or in poetry all that I seem to feel, there is just one thought that I must try to articulate, and that will certainly assist the understanding of the difference between the two deaths or the two after-lives.

Soldiers are companionable, of course, but they live less in and with each other than in and with the will which they serve or than in and with the separate world which at any moment may suddenly take them to itself. Their lives, accordingly, or their deaths, are aloof from each other, and are brought together only through their common subjection or their common destiny, through something which is without. But the mechanic is social in his own nature, in his own right. The very reality, too, of the world in which he works is, as in so many ways we have seen, maintained only by a divided labour. It is, then, a reality, or a labour, that bridges the chasm between one man's life and another's, as well as between all separate lives and the unity of all life. It makes the many lives "parallel" and harmonious—nay, it makes them actively and vitally sympathetic. Not, as is certainly true, at the expense of any one's real individuality, for each man has his place and his part, real and immortal, and not one falls unnoticed or unguarded to the ground; but, nevertheless, whatever all have and do, they have and do together. They live-and-die together. There is, in a word, but one death, as well as but one life, the life or the death, which all share, and which accordingly is definitely and specifically nowhere and nobody's. And in the light of this supreme unity, while any live, none can be merely dead, or while any die, none can be merely alive or living to themselves or their time alone. And, living and dying together, in and with each other, all are parties to the immortality of what is real.

So, again, there is immortality for mankind—the immortality of him whom I have called the mechanic. There is immortality, mine and yours and ours. We die, but not as dies the soldier, who leaves this life for another quite apart, securing there a companionship denied him here; we die a death that is never death alone, and we die as we live, in a companionship that is real now and throughout all time. Furthermore, our death is always, or always may be, self-denial, and self-denial, too, in its supreme moment, the moment of its greatest achievement, but our self-denial is also very different from that of the soldier.

There is immortality, then, but what results has all that has now been said for the interpretation of history, for our feelings about the life and death of our fellows, and for the relevant doctrines of Christianity?[6]

We commonly think of history as the passing of persons, nations, and civilizations. Men come and go, but history goes on for ever. To be sure, history accumulates, as if its gifts from humanity, innumerable treasures, books, relics, institutions, buildings, machinery and the like, but the donors, as we are wont to think, are lost to it, remaining as ideal influences perhaps, but not as vitally active in the life they once assisted. This common view, however, must now seem wrong. The past must ever persist in the present, and not as an aside in some other world, nor yet as merely so much ideal influence, but vitally as a party to the present. Those that were must also live now. Have we their literature? Yes, and their consciousness too. Their institutions? And also their life. Their achievements? And their power and will. Altogether too fanciful, some one thinks; but give it meaning from what has been said here especially about individuality. In the real world there can be but one life and one death, and we individuals, whatever our century, divide the labour of them both. Even our present life and consciousness and our will must be said to belong, in return, to those who have gone before; for it is wrong, it must be wrong, to think of the life of the past and the life of the present as two lives, as independent and perhaps even different in kind. Not those that are now gone once lived and we live, but they and we are living, they in us, and we with them; they in the world of our life, not in a world yonder and apart. They live in us, to suggest a simple analogy, that is perhaps more than a mere analogy, very much as our own past selves, our infancy and our youth, are alive with us and in us to-day. If a physical scientist can see the same force in the military weapons and engines of ancient times that he sees in those of our own time, if a sociologist can find the same social phenomena then and now, may not the historian regard the older life in general and the newer life as not less intimate? Did different winds blow in 1492 from those that blow to-day? Was it a different sun that shone in 500 B.C.: from that which shone in A.D. 500, or which shines, or tries to shine, to-day? We do not deny that the animal nature is still alive in us as well as around us, although at the same time we suppose it to belong to a very early period in our development. Why, then, should we exclude what is so much more recent? Because it is too distinctly human to be so robbed of its temporal independence, of its own date and place? That is certainly a strange reason in view of the fact that men have insisted on erecting, in their minds, for the human nature that has passed away, a place which is altogether timeless and eternal. Why not dignify human nature, then, by making it, and all that it bears, eternal in its own natural life, not in a sphere that is unnatural? It is sheer materialism, in letter or in spirit, either to entomb the historic past, as some would, in books and monuments of all sorts, or, as others would, to lay it aside in a so-called immaterial world. Who does either of these things forgets how the books are written and how the monuments are erected, and how in general the things of the past come to be. The future is always a party to whatever is done. The men who have ever achieved anything have always been, in their character and in their work, as if made by the future, "ahead of their times." An uncanny phrase, unless one can think of the deeds and men of any time as in a vital unity with the deeds and men of all times. A man is great only as he identifies himself with some social force, with some actual movement of his day, fulfilling it out of a long past, bringing it to focus and so making it definite and manifest, and as the life around him which gave him birth, adopts his will and repeats his achievement. History has many cases of human societies repeating in their lives as a whole the careers of great men. Only it is not repetition exactly; it is resurrection and continuation. Great men make history, but they make it only because they are alive in it before their birth and survive in it, in its doing and in its thinking, after they die.[7] Would history be even thinkable without such continuity? Could we honestly call it history? What good American to-day is not, convinced that he has a share in what Washington and Lincoln accomplished years ago, and also—and this one may, or may not, regret—in the doings of Benedict Arnold and Booth? And, to put a very practical question, would it not be well if in the popular consciousness great men, good and bad, were really identified with history instead of being treated as fixtures outside of it? Make them separate fixtures and you make them oracles, the spirits of quite another world, with which the demagogue, as if a medium, can excite the people; but identify them in a vital way with history and they must grow with it, speaking quite as much out of the present conditions as out of the past. Hero-worship is too often idolatry, and for my part the literalism of it is only "spiritualism" trying to be respectable. Every extravagance, of course, has to have its lawful or conventionally respectable expression.

But what, now, of friendship and family ties? Can we view these in the same light? I think we would; I think we can; I think we must. True, it is easier to speak in this large, "philosophical" way of history and of the men who have had part in it, inventing and effectively using the machinery that has enabled its progress, than of such matters as friendship and family. In these latter matters the heart more than the mind is addressed. Still, the relations of friendship and kinship are not themselves born, nor do they die and all friends abroad and kin at home live and move and have their being only in these. Does it destroy or even weaken the meaning or the reality of friendship to have it said that the relation is as universal as particular or local, and as eternal as temporal? Is a relationship worth less than any one of its manifestations? Why, the universality of the relationship gives meaning or reality to any manifestation. Friendship, then, or kinship, for this person or that, cannot be separated from the experience in general. Separate it, and one's friends or kin surely do die, remaining after death, like the characters of the older history, as only ideal "influences," or as unearthly spirits that sometimes idly chatter. But in reality, friendship, or kinship, is one, not merely many, all of its members labouring together for, and forever surviving in, what it truly is. The friends, then, or the kin that lived, live still. In others about us? Yes; and in ourselves too; or rather in the relation of man to man or in the unity of all that lives. Not literally in others, then, although the meaning intended was a genuine one, nor yet literally in ourselves, for nothing crudely like transmigration of souls is in my mind, but—to repeat—in the living relationship of friends or kin. There is indeed a truth in transmigration, as also in other related notions; witness all the facts of inheritance, of historical succession or continuity, of social growth and personal character, of evolution; but it is the truth, or is near to the truth, of a reality that is conserved even in its changing. The soldier of the past, let me say, at his death was "translated," but the mechanic of to-day is transmuted. The latter word may be stranger and harsher in sound than the former, but there is truly less violence and more honour in its meaning. So, again, friends and kin that ever lived, live still. Friendship and fatherhood and motherhood and all the relations of kin, nay, all the relations of life, that make our individuality real, that make it personal, that make it social, that make, it natural, have been from the beginning, live now, and must survive forever, and by their survival hold for the present and the future life all who have ever been. Where would faith go, and where worth and responsibility, if birth really created and death destroyed, or if birth were a coming from no one knows where, from a realm unlike and apart, and death the return? Birth cannot create or introduce; it can only express, revealing and realizing. Death cannot destroy or "translate"; it can be only fulfilment at a crisis.

The mere wordiness of a philosopher! Possibly. And yet Christianity has very nearly implied, if indeed it has not actually said, and said or implied again and again, exactly the same thing. To science, I know, we are peculiarly indebted for the conception of the organism, or the organic, which enables us to bring together the universal and the individual, the eternal and the temporal, the omnipresent and the local, without losing the worth or the reality of either, and of course—for so they would not be together—without erecting separate quarters, or worlds, for their occupation; but, when all is said, science has only applied at large the very special and personal doctrines of Christianity, and has therein helped Christianity to a better consciousness of itself. The Resurrection, the Immaculate Conception, the Divinity, the Immediacy of the Kingdom, the Sacrifice, and the Brotherhood of Man are doctrines which one and all testify quite directly that our real individuality, our real being, lies not in a separate existence of any sort, here or hereafter, but in the abiding relations of the actual life now. In these the Christ resides, the always living Christ. What else can the following mean? "In as much as ye have done it unto one of these, my brethren, even these least ye have done it unto me." And again: "For whosoever shall do the will of my father which is in heaven, the same is my brother and sister and mother." The living Christ, one of the dogmas of our day, is more than a fancy and more than a dogma, and for no one so truly as the scientist, the evolutionist. Christ was too great, too deep-lying, too far-reaching in human history not to be more. The letter of Christianity, we are often told, has got to go, but it is quite as true that the real letter of Christianity has got to stay, has yet to come: the real letter, I say, not the parody of a mere physical appearance and reappearance nearly two thousand years ago. If Christ was really not born as men are born, if he did not really die, if truly he still lives in and with our lives to-day, if Christianity honestly means the brotherhood of humanity and the divinity of man, then simply the Christ was more than a pagan's messenger from another world, and more than the creature of a single moment in history or a single place; also he reveals to us more in ourselves than any of these things, and instead of resorting to such notions as parthenogenesis and trance to explain the birth and the resurrection, we must rather recognize in him, and in ourselves, an individuality that has, not in spite of, but because of, birth and death, a share in, a place and a part in the immortality of what is real. Now I am not a good preacher, plainly, nor am I exactly a sympathetic theologian, and also I know too well the defects of argument through scriptural quotation; but I have to hope, as personally I believe, that in the foregoing paragraph, given in conclusion to the discussion of immortality in the doubter's world, I have suggested what at least is not an unchristian appreciation of Christianity.

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Our journey in the doubter's world here comes to an end. All things are real, yet none final. The spiritual and the material in life are sympathetic even to the point of being vitally at one with each other, thought being free and practical, and material nature being lawful but law-free, and mechanical but productively so, and being in her productiveness definite opportunity, not blind necessity, to human life. And, the "universal individual" being dead, having returned to the other world from which he came, all particular individuals have real and personal shares in the life that is, in the work that is ever to be done. Living or dying, the individual, as we have found him, is the mechanic of to-day, not the soldier of yesterday.

[1] The last few sentences seem like a paragraph from some psychologist of the day. My colleague, Professor W.B. Pillsbury, for example, has just published a book on the attention, in which appears the following statement: "It seems that the problem of voluntary activity is largely, if not entirely, a problem of the attention ... . The processes which are effective in the control of a man's ideas are ipso facto in the control of his movements," and this, besides being the current psychology, is quite in accord with our doubter's vision: "Well thought is well done." (See Attention, chapter ix. London, 1907.)

[2] Chap. VIII., pp. 177 seq.

[3] Chaps. III., IV., V., and VI.

[4] See also an earlier discussion in this book, chap. III., pp. 49 seq.

[5] Two preliminary efforts have already been put in print. See the Appendix, "A Study of Immortality in Outline," to a book: Dynamic Idealism: An Introduction to the Metaphysics of Psychology (McClurg, 1898). See, secondly, an article: "Evolution and Immortality," in the Monist, April, 1900.

[6] Except for a few changes, the next few paragraphs are taken from my article, "Evolution and Immortality," in the Monist, April, 1900.

[7] In a small book, Citizenship and Salvation, or Greek and Jew, published some years ago, I have tried to show this of Socrates and Christ.

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X.