IV
And of course it is not contended that scientific men in general are unhappy, which would be absurd. On the contrary, it is probable that, with the infinite variety and solace of their pursuits, they are apt to be an unusually contented and cheerful class of men. There is the poignant saying of Voltaire, who was full of the scientific spirit as of most others: ‘Study consoles for everything.’[97] And Montesquieu expresses it more generally: ‘I have never had a sorrow which a half hour of reading would not dissipate,’ and again, with more specific elaboration: ‘The love of study is almost the sole passion that is eternal in us; all the others fail as this miserable machine which sustains them falls more and more into decay.’[98]
Yet for the mass of mankind assuredly the scientific spirit and the pure pursuit of truth are not enough, and the abstract thought of them leaves a void which only persistent, concentrated action can fill up. We are living, moving, acting creatures, and for most of us knowing, thinking, except as a means to living, is inadequate, infertile, and essentially provocative of discontent. As Sterne’s Yorick expresses it, in his homely, pointed fashion: ‘I think the procreation of children as beneficial to the world as the finding out the longitude.’[99] ‘I’ll do and I’ll do and I’ll do,’ cries the witch in ‘Macbeth.’ It is the natural, universal, prevailing cry of humanity, doing, doing, doing, till the end—and then, what? It skills not to inquire.
And there is the further point, that not only too much abstract knowing does not help for doing: it is apt to hinder. Especially, the scientific virtue of the recognition of ignorance is far from being a benefit in practical life. The best of doing, the best of action is undoubtedly instinctive, flows by quick, unapprehended, processes out of the vast subconscious accumulated storehouse of our being. The supreme illustration of this is the achievement of the athlete. Watch the complicated action of the highly skilled baseball-player. A dozen intricate related movements are accomplished with sure, unfailing speed, any one of which would be utterly dislocated and thrown out of adjustment by the slightest attempt to analyze it on the part of the player, who is usually disinclined to such analysis precisely in the proportion of his practical skill.
And the same thing obtains to much the same extent in what might appear to be more intellectual lines of practical action. The soldier, the man of business, the statesman, all require no doubt immense and competent detailed knowledge in their particular professions. But here also too great analysis, a too curious probing of motives and processes and alternatives and possibilities hurts rather than helps. The pure thinker is too often apt to cry out with Goethe’s horror: ‘There is nothing more frightful than active ignorance.’[100] Yet nine tenths of the work of the world is done, sometimes efficiently, sometimes haltingly, but done, by active ignorance, and could not be done otherwise. The thinker, the profound analyst, debates, hesitates, falters, and too often accomplishes nothing.
It may be that, not only in the realm of muscular effort, but in all practical action, the best results are obtained by comparatively instinctive methods. Yet it is evident that deliberate conscious reasoning is an important instrument in the work of the man of affairs. Also, reason, the enchainment of thoughts through elaborate logical processes, is the chief agent of the scientific spirit. In an earlier chapter we have analyzed the dangers and betrayals of reason. But the greatest betrayal of all is when reason turns upon itself and devotes its brilliant, magnificent powers to self-dissection, instead of to accomplishment in the practical world. The extreme illustrations are in such minds as Sénancour, Maine de Biran, Amiel, men naturally equipped for the performance of great things, but in whom the force of genius is paralyzed by the perpetual introspective consideration of the means and methods by which genius operates. As Amiel expresses it: ‘I also feel at times the mad rage for life, the desperate impulse to seize happiness, but much more often a complete prostration and a silent despair. And whence comes this? From doubt of my own reason, of myself, of men, of life, from doubt which enervates the will and destroys the powers, which makes one forget God, forget prayer, forget duty, from unquiet and corrosive doubt, which renders existence impossible, and makes a ghastly mock of hope.’[101]
Perhaps reason offers the most curious of all the antinomies or self-contradictions which arise when one seeks to develop the physical, mental, and moral nature of man, on an evolutionary basis, from the fundamental instinct of self-preservation. A lesser but striking form of this self-contradiction is, for example, the habit of thrift, which is naturally explained as a tendency of self-protection, yet in its sordid extremes may work to destroy life rather than prolong it. Or, again, there are the strange contradictions involved in the social instinct. As one sees it in the insects, or in the gregarious grouping of the lower animals, the self-preservational basis is obvious enough, and with a few wrenches of excusable ingenuity one may put all human affections and devotions on the same foundation. Yet in the end one arrives at the astonishing paradox that the instinct of self-preservation has developed devotion to others so that a man may be willing to lay down his life for his friend, or even for those who are not his friends. But the extreme of all these contradictions, if one accepts the evolutionary development of reason, is that that marvelous instrument should be produced for the preservation of the individual and yet that the final working of it should be to show how utterly insignificant, pitiable, and unworthy of preservation this very individual is.
Another weakness of the scientific spirit, and the curse of its passion for truth, is the difficulty, not to say the impossibility of ever attaining it. In the detail of scientific research this is, perhaps, not an evil, and difficulty is merely a splendid spur and stimulus to ever renewed effort and achievement. But when it comes to profounder and more fundamental matters, the difficulty is more serious, and if it may be justly said that one wearies of everything except to understand, one wearies of the failure to understand more than of anything else. After all, there are but two things that it is really important to know: oneself and God. And it is precisely in regard to these that the impossibility of final knowledge most overwhelms us. In the rugged language of old Ben Jonson: ‘I know no disease of the soul but ignorance; not of the arts and sciences, but of itself.’[102] And a Greek, two thousand years before Ben Jonson, gave vivid utterance to the same sufficiently obvious idea: ‘Many things are obscure to man, but the most obscure of all is his own soul.’[103]
It is precisely in this impossibility of attaining truth in the ultimate things that the Fundamentalists find their justification for the attempt to control the search for it. ‘You tell us,’ they say, ‘that everything must yield to the search for truth. You undermine secure, established morals and traditions in the name of truth. Then truth slips away from you and in the end you can offer us nothing but a shadow and a dream. Accepted convention is at least a solid basis for living. You have nothing solid to offer us, for any purpose, anywhere.’ And the argument would have some validity, if the inborn movements of great nature could ever be stopped by laws or legislatures or Fundamentalists.
But, after all, the value of ignorance, or at least of the knowledge of ignorance, which goes with the scientific spirit, lies in the charming qualities that I have indicated earlier in this chapter, tolerance, patience, humility, gentleness. Only, to produce these qualities, the recognition of ignorance must not be aggressive, combative. Fifty years ago such recognition was erected into a dogmatic religion called Agnosticism, the triumphant, militant assertion that no man knew anything about the fundamental verities and no man could, and this dogmatism was even more exasperating than other dogmatisms, because it purported to be based on an attitude essentially undogmatic. The true, the fruitful, the profitable recognition of ignorance is not dogmatic or assertive at all. It is purely personal, begins and stops with my ignorance only, and lets your ignorance altogether alone. This is peculiarly true and important in the age of ignorance in which we live, the age which has piled up general knowledge with such vast celerity of accumulation that no individual can pretend to grasp more than a very small portion of it. And all we can any of us say is, I do not know. You may know, he may know, especially as he thinks he does, which goes so vastly far, but I, I, I, alas, do not.
Agnosticism is too violent a word for this purely personal and infinitely humble ignorance. Scepticism even is too proud a word, too philosophical a word. Yet scepticism, if used with caution, may perhaps serve, for want of a better. But there is one thing about scepticism too often forgotten. Universal doubt surely carries with it the privilege of universal hope. The professed sceptic is too apt to be critical and cynical, to use his doubt simply to upset the certainties of other people, and to rest always in the darker side of possibility. But if anything may be true, surely the beautiful may be true, the good, the joyous, the lovable, as well as the gloomy and despondent.
And if the privilege of scepticism is hope, the essence of it is questioning and questing. There is a doubt which, in its despair of ultimate truth, is content to trifle, to beguile the misery of life with jest and play and momentary diversion. Or there is the doubt in deeper matters which, as with Darwin, turns to eager, assiduous investigation of the mere, fascinating detail of the external world. But there is also a doubt which lives in passionate, perpetual earnestness and the unfailing, unyielding, indomitable effort to find out God, being assured that without Him the universe, with all its splendor and all its endless evolving glory, is nothing, merely nothing. Such doubt will express itself in words like those of the modern poet:
‘Day and night I wander widely through the wilderness of thought,
Catching dainty things of fancy most reluctant to be caught.
Shining tangles leading nowhere I persistently unravel,
Tread strange paths of meditation very intricate to travel.
Gleaming bits of quaint desire tempt my steps beyond the decent.
I confound old solid glory with publicity too recent.
But my one unchanged obsession, whereso’er my feet have trod,
Is a keen, enormous, haunting, never-sated thirst for God.’
THE END