The will to doubt

by Alfred H. Lloyd

But it is one thing to say, or even to reason out cogently and satisfactorily in every way, that the special science, if both persistently special and honestly scientific, must be sooner or later inwardly contradictory and treacherous to itself, and it is quite another thing to show the contradiction in actual cases. The actual cases, however, are more easily found than many are likely to suppose, and at mention they may even seem like forgotten memories, like things which at some time we have noticed but become callous towards. Thus the atom is through and through a self-contradiction, being itself only a part of a divided reality, yet at the same time itself real only because indivisible; and a science harbouring such an atom can hardly be said to be unmixedly physical. The vibration, too, already referred to here as motion in poise or at rest; infinity as one more quantity that is significant because not quantitative; the sensation, a component element of consciousness that cannot possibly be composite; the plenal physical medium, which can be physical only if displaceable by other material things, and so plenal only if not physical, and which has served besides as an immobile yet infinitely elastic basis of motion or its transmission; and, to give just one more instance, in moral and political science the person, a self-existent, actively free being or entity whose every deed as well as whose every thought is responsible to something, being adaptive and therefore social, social with other persons and with nature, and whose every virtue implies dependence and an existence shared with something else: these are all also self-contradictions. And in view of them who must not see how the special sciences are always more than special, ever correcting in ways that may be unappreciated by themselves their partiality of view, ever responsible to the totality of things even while they would observe things only under selected view-points. Such contradictions, once more, show mind loyal to what students of logic are familiar with as the "universe of discourse." Even in science you cannot discourse about anything without at least implicitly discoursing about everything, although in order to do so you must speak in such paradoxes as the atom, the person, the biologist's "vital unit," the vibration, the plenum, and the like indefinitely.

Nor is the scientist the only dreamer of paradoxes among men. Ordinary practical life, as we have seen, teems with paradoxes. But, for purposes of illustration, not to say also of giving greater breadth and depth to the view, a reference to the situation in the religious consciousness will have peculiar value here. A religion that supplements reverence for a personal God, working miracles and caring for the elect, who even nowadays are more or less elect, with belief in a devil, even nowadays more or less personal, is clearly a blood relation to science, and it is besides by no means so unnatural or irrational as is often declared, particularly by the scientists. Its two errors, just because opposed, conserve what is real, and no science can claim more than that. Indeed, a science, notably a special science, like a theology, might well be described as a system of mutually corrective errors, of abstractions that, because abstract, distort the reality of things, but that also because being at difference with each other and eventually falling into contradictory and so counteracting pairs are at least parties to what is real and true. By hook or crook, by the hook of abstraction or the crook of contradiction, every science gets in touch with the universe as a whole, and so even with its errors is a "working" science. The errors of many a religion, by their working together, have not failed to save men.

So we may return to the assertion that in its specialism, as well as in its demand for objective knowledge, science is self-contradictory, and with this conclusion established the exposure of science already offers a very strong case for the doubter. Yet it does this only to the extent and in the sense that contradiction warrants doubt. After all is said, have we been only exposing science? Has attack been our only procedure? Do we not find, as we reflect, that in our exposure there has also been something very near to defence? Or, once more, through the science to which we have taken exception have we not seen a science in which we could believe? In the examination of science's objectivism we saw that technique buried science, but—though we did not say this in so many words—that there might be a resurrection. If fruitful in inventions serviceable to life, science was justified in spite of its cultivated objectivism, and the objectivity itself, besides an aid to accuracy, has further significance as possibly an earnest of wider social relationship, of broader and deeper life. The question of fact, too, if appreciated and so made subordinate to the question of meaning, was even allowed, and science, although at once formally conservative and materially negative and destructive, seemed after all to be the promise, so to speak, of a new dawn for the very things denied. And now in what has been said of the specialism of science, the same turning of the edge of attack is all but manifest. Every special science is narrow and relative—it is in the form of an unreal dream; but reality somehow gives form to the dream, for there are always the compensating conceptions. The contradictions by which the compensation has been effected are, then, interpretable not more as causes of doubting science than as reasons for confidence in it. Thus, to be tedious again, the special science is relative and formal; it is a peculiar system of ingenious abstractions that in so far are also errors; but its formal character includes also contradiction; its errors are so related as to correct and balance each other; so that, even in the face of our necessary scepticism about it, science has been evident to us, as also was the consciousness of ordinary life, as somehow always building better than it knows or than its methods or ideals and doctrines viewed only from without would lead one to expect. Moving in it we have certainly felt the presence of, something, not yet called by name, which is very like a principle or power of validity, preserving the reality of things even in and through the relativity and contradiction under which the things are seen. While the letter of our knowledge, even of our scientific knowledge, must ever have an indeterminate future; while rest or stability, ultimate reality or consistency is quite impossible to it, still its inner, active spirit seems a source of faith that is inviolable, that cannot be shaken. Different quantities, such as four and two, and sixteen and eight, do not make the same sum, much less are they the same digits; but they are in the same ratio, and similarly the truth of science would seem to lie in the ratio, the working together, of the errors of science. Outwardly and materially changing with time and with people, assuming ever new forms and comprising always new doctrines, science nevertheless, as an active force, as a positive resultant, is at least now conceivably always the same and applicable to the same life. Even the Babylonians of an ancient day successfully predicted eclipses, the very errors of their astronomy working together for truth, exactly as the heresies of pagan religion seem to have balanced each other to the preservation and the development of the life which we of the present day and the Christian civilization are pleased to call our own.

Accordingly the science we have to doubt is also manifest to us as at least a possible object of faith. The very causes of our doubt before our very eyes have turned, or are in process of turning, into possible bases of belief, and our confession of doubt as it proceeds is proving ever more worth making. We are trying to be such honest doubters. We are indeed such penitent believers.

III. SCIENCE WOULD BE AGNOSTIC.

Still we have, thirdly, the agnosticism of science to consider and appraise. Agnosticism confines knowledge to actual positive experience, and in its form of "positivism" to an only tentative acceptance of actual experience, and it is thus in effect an admission of just those limitations which have been found to belong to science as objective and special. Objectivism and specialism have both shown science to be standing in its own light, or at least to be standing in the way of any direct and positive knowledge of reality. Whatever they make possible to our virtual as distinct from our positive consciousness, whatever indirectly or implicitly may through them belong to our conscious life, formally and visibly, positively and directly, we cannot know reality. In a word, science must and does recognize an unknowable, or at least an unknowability in things, and agnosticism is accordingly important among the three determining points of science's circumference. But here is now our problem: Does science put the right value upon, does it ascribe the right meaning to, its agnosticism? Is the implied scepticism of the sort that we can cordially accept? Especially, does science have any due appreciation of the negative, not to say of the suggested dualism, in the opposition between the knowable and the unknowable?

Now both objectivism and specialism plainly involve aloofness, which is perhaps only another word for what in the preceding chapter was called abstraction. By the first of these two "isms" science is held aloof from life; by the second, through the many divisions, from itself, that is to say, part from part. Men who would be scientists withdraw, as we hear them boast, from affairs, and as they withdraw it is also as if they put on distorting and even discolouring glasses, through which in one and another "special" way they would behold the "objective" world. Their withdrawal is thus not merely physical; it is also mental. To look out of the window one must turn one's head and lift one's eyes and adjust both head and eyes in other ways; but looking in general, whether from the needs of an objective or a special view, also demands certain pertinent adjustments, and the demanded adjustments make the resulting experience just so far aloof, just so far discoloured and distorted. Granted that these terms can be only relative in significance. To be aloof from something is to have it equally aloof from you, and you should be no more discredited by the separation than it. To be distorted and discoloured is to be so only with regard to something that in its own peculiar way may be equally transformed. Such relativity, however, cannot deprive the differences involved of real significance; it can only emphasize the general instead of the narrow, local application of the terms found to be relative. What is relative is not unreal; it is simply shared, like cousinship. So science, the looking of science, means real aloofness and real disfiguration.

The truth of this has already been apparent to us in a general way, but it will be worth while here to be more specific. The space and time, for example, in which scientists observe things are widely different from the space and time of will and action. In ordinary life a difference is felt between the world we know and the world we live, but the extreme professional attitude of science greatly widens the differences. For science space and time are quantitative, divisible, formal, mathematically correct, and independent of what is in them, their reality or qualitative value to active life being hidden or at least only very indirectly presented—I suggest, in the constant opposition of their finiteness and infinity—while for will and action they are qualitative, indivisible, inseparable from what is in them. Who ever did anything in a composite, divisible space and time? Action in such a sphere would be hopelessly jerky; with Zeno's flying arrow it would just always rest in statu quo, though its status in quo might have an indefinite series of positions. Again, the scientists reduce causation to mere uniformity of co-existences or sequences, which is no real causation at all, being only so much passive existence or mechanical process, while will or action is causation, the positive interaction of things, the active relation, the vital unity, of what was and is and is to be. It is true that here, too, the causation of real life is darkly presented by science in a constant opposition between a single first cause and an eternal series of causes, for such an opposition makes real causation in an important way quite transcendent of the mere differences of time; but, setting this concession aside, who ever did anything in a world either of one cause active long ago or of an infinite series of causes? And, once more, science needs elements, while will or life is the eternal denial of elements or anything like them. Says a well-known writer:[3] "It is one of the greatest dangers of our time that the naturalistic (or scientific) point of view, which decomposes the world into elements for the purpose of causal connection, interferes with the volitional point of view of real life, which can deal only with values, and not with elements." The danger involved will occupy us in a moment, but the bondage of science to elements, to a composite world, to a thoroughly "decomposed" reality, will hardly be questioned. Through contradiction, again, as in the chemist's component atom, itself not composite; or the biologist's "vital unit," which bids fair to be the master paradox of the day, science may darkly and indirectly preserve the world of real life, the world that is neither one element nor many, but in this case as in the others the indirection, after all is said, only emphasizes the aloofness.

So science is aloof, and in being aloof it disfigures and defaces reality, and the argument for agnosticism is consequently unassailable. No one more effectively has shown this than Immanuel Kant, although one may question Kant's final appraisal of the fact. Here certainly is no place for an exposition of the Kantian philosophy, but, briefly and simply put, that philosophy has characterized space and time and the relation of cause and effect, not to mention certain other very general data of experience, as the a priori forms of all valid, objective knowledge, and being translated this is to say that these so-called forms are the enabling attitudes of the merely looking consciousness or the peculiar glasses which, as it were, the mind puts on whenever it turns just to look. The typical Boston girl, according to the cartoonists, is never without her glasses. In like manner the typically, professionally correct looking consciousness, the observing, scientific mind, is never without those enabling attitudes. Do you ask if they are then only subjective attitudes? They are subjective only as they are relative. They are subjective only as they express the aloofness of the scientific observer. And they are subjective, lastly, only in so far as can be consistent with Kant's further characterization of them as in every instance imbued with essential opposition or "antinomy." Remember that an attitude that harbours opposition is always tip-toeing to overcome the bounds of its own natural vision. Such an attitude cannot be unmixedly subjective.

But what now is the danger of science's agnosticism, of science's own admission that being "objective" and "special," or being under the constraint of certain enabling attitudes, or being at best only tentative in all its doctrines, it is not and cannot possibly be formally realistic? One might imagine, or expect, that confession of its limitations would be good for the soul of science, and in truth we shall certainly find some advantage resulting from the confession, but even science's agnosticism is faulty in a serious way. The writer quoted above has told us that the great danger always threatening science is that the scientific will interfere with the volitional point of view, and this is equivalent to fearing, in the interests of science, that the scientist will forget his agnosticism and try to render what he cannot know in terms of what he does know, or that the man of affairs will look to science for his programmes of action. Such a fear, however, may play to the professional conceits and the professional isolation and abstraction of the scientific point of view, but it is very far from grasping the true import of the conflict between knowledge and unknowable reality. I should myself assert, in partial if not in complete opposition to Professor Münsterberg, that science's very natural danger is that the scientific and the volitional point of view will be kept apart, that the professionalism and the formalism and what Kant called the phenomenalism of science will prevent their interference. At least, this danger is just as great, and just as seriously a danger, as the other. Most people know well enough that keeping science and life or theory and practice apart has the effect of making the former lose itself in a highly morbid intellectualism, and the latter in the dead monotony, of a mere existence, sometimes presumptuously styled "practical life," but such a result seems not to trouble either Professor Münsterberg or the conventional scientist whose cause the vigorous professor has espoused. In other regions, fortunately, a formal disparity is not accepted as arguing to a natural divorce, but is even considered, let it be said, a reason for association; and as for the disparity between science and will, it is quite true that life without science is lifeless and that science without life is meaningless.