And now, if for a paragraph or two I may be even offensively abstruse, the conditions of our positive experience, of our actual knowledge, are such, and are commonly recognized to be such, that there must always be an unknown. Every working hypothesis by implication points to an unknown. It is equally true, however, that the conditions of positive experience are such that there is no fixity to this unknown; and the unknown changes in consequence, both in possible content and in possible quality or value, with every change in knowledge. But always an unknown which is never the same unknown must mean something more than merely a yet-to-be-known; yes, it must mean even more than an infinitely, eternally remote yet-to-be-known, for its being always, or its being infinitely distant, simply makes it something besides positive knowledge actual or possible. It must mean something which, though not knowledge, is nevertheless in knowledge, now and always; something served by all knowledge but itself other than any knowledge; something, then, which exceeds or transcends whatever the formal enabling conditions of knowledge are capable of presenting, but is itself intimately and vitally involved in the presentation; or, once more, something which is not at all in the character of a separate unknowable thing or sphere of things, nor even of a separate part in the things known or knowable, but is in the character rather of an unknowability, perhaps in a sense a relative unknowability, belonging to the very things and to every part of the very things that are known or, let me say, inhering in the bare possibility of all knowledge. Must there not be a sense in which just that which makes knowledge possible is itself quite impossible to knowledge? Who makes a law must be superior to the law, or "legally supreme," and what makes knowledge possible can hardly be fully and directly an object of knowledge. Given actual, positive knowledge, then, and there must always be not merely an unknown, but also an unknowable; an unknowable, however, that is in and of the knowledge, not in place or in character a thing by itself.
I said I should be abstruse, and I have not yet finished. In fully appraising agnosticism we need to consider at close range another idea of the positivist. Thus for the positivist knowledge is not a having, but a getting—on the principle that unto him that hath shall be given; not a knowing, but a questioning and seeking; not a being, but a becoming—that has its ground in a being so real as to be without fixity of form. And this is plainly equivalent to making movement and action essential to the very nature of the knowing mind or to making knowledge dynamic instead of static, and infinitely plastic—even like life itself, that is always greater than its cross-sections or specific forms. But in general to an active nature nothing can ever be quite external; to a truly active nature there can be no essential impossibility. For reflect. The mere existence of anything external or of anything impossible would in just so far remove and deny the intrinsic character of the activity; in just so far it would set the supposedly active being in fixity of life and definiteness of form. For an essentially active nature, therefore, all things—all things in heaven and earth—are both present and possible, and so, specifically, if that active nature be the knowing mind there can be no unknowable that is at the same time alien and altogether impossible to the knower. Even the very forms of the knower's knowledge must for ever compass pass more than they may visibly present. The knowing itself in its own right and nature must be more than formal knowing, or than the "objective," "special" science, in which the formal knowing has its professional realization. And the knower, as he knows, in and through his knowledge must always be compassing just that which is not impossible to him, but only unknowable—that is, impossible merely to his direct, formal knowledge. Is the inedible or the invisible or the impenetrable or the unbearable or the illegible or even the unintelligible ever wholly impossible? Such negatives, and in fact all negatives, besides saving life from the narrowness of its various forms, do this positive thing: they open the door of life's wider, nay, of life's infinite opportunity or possibility, and at the same time they render those various definite forms really mediative or instrumental, making them parts in an essentially purposive existence. With just this meaning, then, a meaning larger and deeper than that usual to positivism, the attitude of the agnostic is instrumental and teleological. Agnosticism simply endows the knower—must we not even put our conclusion so?—with a wider freedom than that of knowledge, and yet also makes his knowledge both share and serve the wider freedom that is given.
Instead, then, of pointing to a known "unknowable," before which either some non-human creature or some human vice-regent of such a creature is not obliged to be so knowingly humble, instead of establishing the conceit that knowledge or science is wholly for its own sake and so of divorcing knowledge and real life, instead of making castes out of the social classes of those who look and those who do, the unknowable must be taken to point to the necessary unity of knowledge and life, of theory and practice, to the fact that all looking is incident to a running and before a leaping, that all knowledge is responsible to life, and that only life, however directly unknowable, can ever inform knowledge. It even suggests I think with Carlyle that "the end of man is action, not thought, though it were the noblest." Yet, in truth, though its own emphasis may thus exalt action, it cannot mean any depreciation of thought or knowledge, only their enlistment in the service of life.
At this point it would be interesting to show in detail how action—that is, volition or application to life as central to the meaning of agnosticism—is not only the logically appropriate nor yet only the sentimentally ideal, but also the inevitable, the inner and actually real motive, the natural outcome of the scientific standpoint in each one of its three attitudes. Such a showing might follow historical and sociological lines, or it might appeal to psychology or it might be abstrusely logical, but I can ask attention only to a few suggestions of so general a character as not to be easily classified.
The natural consequence of objectivism is something like that attributed by many to modern militarism, since it ends by inducing the very thing it claims to prevent. An objective science discloses the mechanical nature of man's environment, besides making man himself also a good deal of a machine. But a machine, whether environment or personal being, is always a tool whose fine, accurate adjustments are just so much presented opportunity that by a sort of hypnotism turns the scientist's consciousness into that of an effective agent in the world. Somehow a real machine must move, and in the case before us with the movement the asserted distinction between looking subject and seen object collapses hopelessly. Witness such a collapse, as the runner, who has been studying the stream before him, takes his leap, or in history as an age of self-consciousness, conventionalism, and utilitarianism, is followed by the rise of Napoleon. So does objectivism pass over into action. As for the special Science, it may be impractical, because partial, but we have seen how at least formally it loses its partiality, becoming even all-inclusive, indirectly compensating for its narrowness of view and so becoming virtually co-extensive with all its associates in science. The dividing partitions may still stand, but only as unsubstantial forms wholly transparent and ineffective, so that the undivided universe is really present to consciousness. The undivided universe, however, as present to consciousness, is a call for will, since it cannot be fully realized in any formal consciousness. The natural decline of an asserted specialism, then, or the development of specialism into a mere form without substance, into a virtual universalism, makes science applicable. It makes science applicable, for in the first place it gives freedom from the bondage of mere special technique, just as, for example, the decline of religious—or irreligious?—sectarianism, a form of specialism certainly, is sure to free religion from the bondage of ritual, and in the second place, as was the fate of objectivism, it makes the distinction between self and not-self, subject and object, man and nature, only a formal one, since the real unity of the objective world is exactly that in which the self has its true realization. In like manner a religion turned non-sectarian shows man truly living and moving and having his being, not aloof from God, but in God. Thirdly, whether because of the freedom from technique or ritual or because, as the waters of science become quiet with the union of its many streams, the objective world does clearly mirror the image of the self, the decline of specialism, like the decline of sectarianism, brings what some are pleased to call the liberation of the human spirit. The psychologist would call it the development of knowledge into will—in a word, the application of science, and the historian would record it as the dawn of a new era. Psychologically and historically the human spirit is liberated and nature is let loose at the same time. Details can always be observed objectively and specially or separately; the whole, on the other hand, is bound to draw the observer into itself and so to change the observation into motive and will. And, lastly, as for agnosticism, suffice it to say, in addition to what has been said, that the suppressed passion for reality to which agnosticism must always testify ensures in good time the assertion of the volitional as distinct from the merely scientific point of view. Whatever this may mean psychologically, historically and sociologically it means that a time of agnosticism leads to all sorts of applications of science, such as those, for example, in legislation and in industry. In morals and religion, too, the same wish and will to use the results of science shows itself, as in the social settlements, in scientific charity, in the "institutional" church, and in the university extension movement. Agnosticism, marking, as it always does, dissatisfaction both with the uninformed and with the conventionally informed life, and also rendering mere formal knowledge, however logically correct and thinkable, unreal or artificial, calls for a larger freedom of life through the mediation of knowledge.
But interesting as such reflections as the foregoing are, and interesting also as it would be to undertake an account of will in general in its relation to a consciousness which in so far as scientific is always artificial and symbolic, and is in particular, as we have found, always a poise between opposing points of view,[4] I must bring to an end this rather lengthy examination of the standpoint of science. If I have not already tarried too long, the special task of this volume certainly does not warrant further attention even to so important a department of human experience.
In conclusion, then, it is now quite apparent that science is a fruitful field for the doubter. Science lacks self-sufficiency. Socially it means the rise of a caste, and logically it involves abstraction and consequent division against itself. Its most cherished ideals, as shown in its attitudes and methods, are chimerical, or impossible. In general and in particular it has a paradoxical standpoint, being not less given to contradictions than ordinary consciousness.
But, as must be added, the case for the doubter of science has led also toward a belief in science. Not infrequently in the course of the foregoing discussion it must have seemed even as if belief rather than doubt were the controlling motive. A little child has said that faith consists in "believing what you know to be untrue," and our present state of mind cannot be far from such a faith. Actually the science which we may believe in is the science of which we are also confirmed doubters. We doubt the formal attitude and the formal doctrines just because they are abstract, phenomenal, paradoxical, but at the same time we have to believe in the spirit—there seems to be no other word available—as an ever-present agent of validity, because, in spite of all, the very incongruities save these formal doctrines from their apparent artificiality and abstraction, and put them in touch with what is whole and real. And if, as was suggested, the scientific consciousness is only the specially developed consciousness of ordinary life, then we have gained also a new confidence even in the unreflective paradoxical consciousness of everyday life. Yet, that we may more fully comprehend what this means, we shall next consider at some length the possible value of the defects in experience which have now been observed. Ideas, which have appeared heretofore as little better than hints or suggestions, can then be presented in clearer form.
[1] See an article: "Epistemology and Physical Science—A Fatal Parallelism," in the Philosophical Review, Vol. VII, No. 4, July, 1896.