The will to doubt

by Alfred H. Lloyd

Perhaps the crowning fault of the agnostic scientist is his lack of humour. He takes himself too seriously. The lover, when his fair one has formally disagreed with him, rejecting his suit with her outspoken "No" and promising lasting friendship and good-will even to assurances of assistance in his next venture, takes hope, smiles grimly within himself, and feels sure still that she and he, however disparite, are meant to live together for better or worse. But the rejected scientist takes the unknowable's "No" as if it were final, and then, retiring to his study or laboratory, proceeds, though in a morbid, abnormal way, to mingle the scientific and volitional standpoints every time he writes a line or makes an experiment. We watch him as he goes, and find his case not without its humour. If the true lover upon being rejected were satisfied thereafter with caressing the lady's photograph, then he and the agnostic scientist would be in the same class.

But, as is needless to say, I am not writing a novel. So, romance aside, unquestionably the forms and doctrines of the scientific consciousness are peculiar, being, as has been shown, logically subtle, imaginary and innocent of direct practical realism, being, in short, the inhabitants of a world quite their own, and to impose them intact upon active life cannot fail to bring disaster, the usual disaster of a misfit. Yet, let us bring to mind, in the first place, that the scientific consciousness is not essentially different from consciousness in general, and that consciousness in general deals, and always must deal with artificial forms, with symbols, constructions, and transformations; and in the second place, that it always knows with some measure of sophistication that what it deals with is symbolic or constructed. Conscious creatures, from the moment they begin to draw breath, are trained to see one thing objectively and to understand or construe quite another thing for active expression. There is no visual sensation without muscular sensation, and most men, if not all men, have really learned in the long years of their own and their race's experience to get along without seeing and yet also without foregoing the sensations in their muscles! Man's long training, in a word, has taught him to use what he sees as not direct reality, but only a symbol of reality, and so in volition always to allow for the "practical" unreality of the objects before his consciousness. The mere words bread and butter, for example, or even the visible things in a restaurant window, have never brought satiety to a hungry child, nor do I myself fear that they ever will. Moreover, the long training that is the surety against danger, and that at the same time has made man keenly awake to the value as well as the humour of symbolism, is just what has rendered the high development of professional science possible, and is also what makes possible and properly controls the application of science to practical life.

It may now be asserted that the facts are not in accord with the view to which I have just given expression, that sometimes, and very of ten too, the forms and doctrines of science are imposed without modification or translation upon practical life. Thus, though the names for edibles themselves as present to the eye—or to any other sense—are not normal substitutes for food, nevertheless some people, whether from poverty or from indigestion, have fed on them, just as they have taken long journeys with maps, time-tables, and guide books. In education, too, the formal conditions of science have suggested object-lessons and pure induction; in political organization we have had programmes of extreme elemental individualism, of lawless democracy, and of abstract communism and Christian Socialism; in religion God has been like a thing seen, perhaps a tree walking or a man working, whether with hoe or rake or with other implement, perhaps a trident, and belief has been identified with an articulate dogma or formula; and many a realistic novel, treating the details of life as a scientist might treat them, or many a psychological novel, more problematic than artistic, has been put upon the market. But what can all this mean, undoubtedly true as it is, save that science belongs to life, yet is applied to it with difficulty and only under conditions of conflict? In the case of the edibles, poverty or illness, both of them incidents of conflict, is responsible for the unnatural substitution, and in cases of education, politics, religion, and literature, the substitution is equally a makeshift which the conditions of conflict impose upon life. An individualistic programme will not work, nor will a purely socialistic programme work. Mere induction will not educate. No visible God ever was divine, and no articulate creed ever was true. Life is a game throughout; its vital character, its very integrity is its experimental character; it is not a settled, abstractly perfect thing. Life is dynamic, not static. Accordingly it must move forward by its mistakes, or by storm and stress of the incongruous and misapplied, being inspired, not by somebody's complacent optimism, but by a sacrificial, always heroic idealism; and its scientific practices, however truly a mixing of things formally incongruous or disparite, are just aids to its reality. Moreover, those science-formed practices are always in some measure sophisticated. Human nature is rather a fine thing in its way, as many a man has flattered himself and his kind by saying. Witness the homeless, ill-clad, starving child feeding over the odorous grating and before the well-stocked window of the restaurant, and feeling, if not actually saying: "As long as I cannot have and eat, it is good to smell and see." Witness, also, the educator or the statesman or the priest or the novelist. Each knows his makeshift and feels some of the humour of it, and in his closet, when not before his public, acknowledges the violence to which he is lending himself.

And another fact, besides that of the actual applications of science, which, however violent, prove the need as well as the dangers, and besides the sophistication, perhaps also the sense of humour, which always accompanies the applications and at least tempers their violence, must also be mentioned. Those science-formed programmes always go in pairs. Individualism and socialism, realism and mysticism, Epicureanism and Stoicism, orthodoxy and heresy are inseparable, socially and historically; and the effect of such pairing is plainly to correct whatever of violence the sense of symbolism and the sophistication and the humour of the time may be unequal to. Thus in the movements and programmes of society for any given misfit there is always a counter-misfit. Possibly human life, at least as socially organized, is only a competition of misfits, its programmes coming, not through the acquired supremacy of one side or the other, but through the constant mediation, the balancing and interacting of the two, and the misfits are perhaps exclusively the gifts of science or at least of the observer's consciousness generally, and man is at once serious and humorous enough to impose what science gives on the real life of his fellows, as a ready-made clothier might on a stray countryman; but is a city, then, to have no Hyam, and is the life of society also to dispense with the gifts of science because they are imperfect? There are worse things than clothes not made to measure or than the men who sell or buy them. There is the life that never changes its old clothes for new. There are the clothes that never get on the market at all.

Accordingly the interference of the scientific with the volitional point of view is, to say the least, not the only danger which the scientist or the practical man needs to recognize. There is also the danger that the disparity between science and life, or between knowledge and the unknowable, will be construed to mean that the two are never to live together. Science may be innocent of any direct accord with reality, being in form quite innocent of a real realism, but after all, whether by itself or in its various applications or renderings in human life, it is so innocent only in a qualified sense, only with reference to the form of its specific doctrine and attitudes taken individually. As itself a living whole, part acting upon part, each abstraction corrected by some counter-abstraction or perhaps by some inner self-opposition, as conscious too of its own conditions and limitations, as sophisticated and even humorous, both for all logical purposes and for all purposes of applicability in the life of society it is realism itself. As harbouring what above was called, in so many words, an inner active spirit of veracity or power for reality, a constant agent of validity and applicability, it is itself a party to the real life.

But return to the idea of the divorce of science and life, which is such an easy conclusion of agnosticism. If divorced, it was said, they are lost, the one in a morbid intellectualism, the other in the dead monotony of mere existence. Now, in view of the fact that many have found such a divorce to possess the highest ideal value, it seems worth while to remark that after all is said the separation can be only apparent, not real. Even if we neglect wholly the writing and the experimentation of the scientist, as volitional as they are scientific, and the practical consciousness, moral or prudential, of the disciple of the "real life," as scientific as it is volitional, we shall find such to be the case. We know men who have what may be styled, and what sometimes is abusively styled, a double life. They have their science, perhaps their laboratories and their books and their own pet doctrines, and they have also their social affiliations in business and in politics and in religion; and, whether it be ideal or unideal, admirable or reprehensible, their life certainly does seem double, because their sociology and their business, or their political theory and their party ties, or their biology and their religion simply will not mix; but their apparent duplicity has apparently little or nothing to rest upon. It may count as two, numerically, but such counting never makes being. Men should count less and think more. On the terms of such a numerical separation, as was said, the science can be only formal, the life only dead; but such a science and such a life make one existence, not two; and, however amusing the conclusion may be, it is nevertheless true that the science, for just what it is, has been applied, making the life just what it is. Are scientific technique with its aloofness and logical abstractions and a life that in its own special, affairs can be only conventional and ritualistic, or say routine in the study or the laboratory and routine in the church or market-place, are these so different as really to be, whatever the appearances, independent and distinct? They may count as two for being in just so many different places, but the man, scientist or practitioner, is always necessarily with himself, and in this sense never in more than one place, so that in character and value the two routines are one and the same. Moreover, the ennui which together they are sure to induce must end sooner or later in a common cry for help, in a passion for reality that will turn each toward the other with an irresistible appeal.

Once more, then, there is danger for science not merely in the interference, but in the obstinate independence of the scientific and the volitional point of view. A protected science may have no less, but also it has no more justification than a protected industry. Competition with life and will may often bring science low, degrading its methods and impairing its professional success, but protection involves at least equal risks. Professor Münsterberg—but may he forgive me my Homeric epithets—is a too zealous epistemologic protectionist.

The difficulty as to the agnosticism of science may be presented in another way. Dismissing all thought of either interference or divorce and all thought of the scientist forgetting his agnosticism or taking it too soberly, we may say that the scientific agnostic, being under the spell of the scientific way of dealing with things, is disposed to treat the unknowable as if it were but one more thing or fact among all the other things or facts with which he is wont to deal. The world for him is then composed of two departments or groups, which like a good scientist he classifies and labels, the knowable and the unknowable; and nothing could be simpler or more natural. Though the point of what follows may be lost in its appearance of mere wordiness, so to speak, the world of his interest, of his formal knowledge, includes, among the other things, that which he knows to be unknowable, and with the inclusion and the knowledge of unknowability he imagines his responsibility to the unknowable both to begin and end. Or, again, the agnostic scientist regards the unknowable as something apart from the knowable, as something not for him to know and also not having any vital, intrinsic relations to what he does know, but something nevertheless objectively presentable to a creature with knowing faculties altogether different from his. The unknowable is thus for him still the object of a looking and thinking consciousness, yet never of his looking and thinking consciousness; it is knowable, and formally knowable, yet not to him, not through any of the forms of knowledge, the enabling attitudes, at his command. And nothing, I say once more, could be simpler or more natural. But, properly and professionally scientific as it may be to give to agnosticism this turn, it is very decidedly an excellent example of professional blindness, being a sort of reductio ad absurdum, of the scientific point of view, for plainly it treats the unknowable as a matter, first, of knowledge—the scientist's knowledge of its unknowability, and as a matter, second, for knowledge—the knowledge of the creature with the different faculties. Surely such treatment is not honestly agnostic. Science, therefore, if it would be honest as well as scientific, must forget its professionalism and take the negative of the unknowable in another way.

In what way? In making reply to this question I must resort to a distinction, which I have frequently found useful, between the dogmatic and the merely instrumental. Thus agnosticism may be dogmatic, as the conventional scientist would hold it, flatly declaring for an unknowable, or it may be instrumental, esteeming the unknowability in things, not merely as relative to the existing conditions of knowledge, but also as a constant demand upon science that it never rest in itself, that it for ever treat its results as only a means to some end. So viewed an instrumental agnosticism is also teleological, but not in any sense of a fixed and static telos. Telic character or purposiveness and fixity are like oil and water. Whatever the traditional theologian may think or say, they simply will not mix.

Of the two kinds of agnosticism, the first hardly calls for further treatment, for it is plainly that which has been recently examined and found to be more scientific, or at least more professionally scientific, than fully and personally honest, and the second is very nearly akin to positivism, but must be scrutinized closely, for it certainly leads beyond the usual bounds of positivism. The positivist in science, as has been indicated above, accepts only actual positive experience and accepts that only tentatively. The working hypothesis is thus the master of his mind. What he knows, however well established in his actual, positive consciousness, is at best only relative and mediative. But—and just here appears the defect of his position, or just here we see him still only the professional scientist—the mediation which absorbs his interest is merely one of formal knowledge; what he knows always leads him just to more knowledge; his formulated hypotheses as they are tested are but aids to new formulations: whereas, besides this mediation, there always is another at least equally significant, for knowledge under the very conditions of its rise and formulation must for ever be a means to something besides mere knowledge. Recognition of this other mediation, accordingly, is all-important to any final appraisal of the meaning of agnosticism, to an appraisal that is justified just through being superior to the special interests of formal and professional science. Is it not one of the functions of the various negatives in our human life really to save life from the narrowness of its various professional abstractions, and is not the attitude of agnosticism but one of these negations?