[2] See articles: "Pluralism: Empedocles and Democritus," in the Philosophical Review, Vol. X, No. 3, May, 1901; "A Study in the Logic of the Early Greek Philosophy—Being, not-Being, and Becoming," in the Monist, Vol. XII, No. 3, April, 1902; and "The Poetry of Anaxagoras's Metaphysics," in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Method, Vol. IV, No 4.
[3] See Münsterberg's Psychology and Life, p. 267. Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1899.
[4] For an interesting account, mainly psychological in standpoint, of will as involving such a poise, see Münsterberg's Grundzüge der Psychologie, Vol. I, chap. xv., Leipzig, 1900.
VI.
POSSIBLE VALUE IN THESE ESSENTIAL DEFECTS OF EXPERIENCE.
An original sin, or an essential defect, must somehow be for some good purpose. At least, if a general faith in the ultimate propriety of all things has any ground to stand on, such must be the case. The sin or the defect cannot be unmixed; its very originality, its essentiality, must line it, though it be the blackest of clouds, with some silver. Theology has sometimes forgotten this, but an honest doubter cannot afford such a lapse.
Yet before examining the possible worth of the original defects of experience, or, as some might regard the present enterprise, before attempting to give the devil himself a "character," we must recall the various steps of our general undertaking as it has progressed so far. We have been, in the first place, occupied with a thorough-going confession of doubt, with the greatest possible candour hunting down all the reasons for the attitude of doubt which experience affords, and so far, in the second place, we have found doubt justified, whether for good or for ill, because of its potential when not actual universality among men, of its character as a condition of all conscious life, of its importance to real active life and deep experience, of its intimacy even with habit, and of its natural sense of dependence and consequent impulse to companionship with nature, man and God, but more than all—and this was the special interest of the last two chapters—because of the paradoxical and self-contradictory nature of all human experience. As regards the last point, our ordinary consciousness, the often-boasted consciousness of common sense, was found to harbour a widespread, very persistent duplicity towards such vital things as reality, wholeness or unity, space and time, the causal relation, knowledge, moral freedom and natural law; and science, to which many when dislodged from their ordinary standpoint have been accustomed to retreat with greatest confidence and hope, was examined with similar results. Science was found in its rise to involve abstraction of interest and disruption of life, and in its avowed point of view to be—suppose I say at this point—impossible but contradictory. So, in a word, as a clinching argument for doubt, as an argument that at least on the surface has less of hope in it than any of the others, we are face to face with the bare, hard fact that in the very nature of human experience, besides the relativity and instability and subjectivity, there dwells a spirit of positive violence. Contradiction is just one phase of the error to which all men are said to be addicted. As a background for the inconsistent theologian, the fickle woman, the shifting politician and other equally double-faced monsters, we see both-sidedness, individually and to a certain extent socially, to be a basal habit of human nature, and if the doctrine of original sin is tenable at all, in just this fact it would appear to have its strongest support. Humanum est errare may be translated: Man is most human when hopelessly divided against himself.
But just here our confession of doubt has reached a critical stage; since in experience apparently at its very worst, as if in a medley of discords we have caught a promise of real harmony, and so something from which to get genuine hope. In the very habit of duplicity or contradiction we have again and again had suggestion of an agent of validity, a power for adequacy in experience, which would hold even a phenomenal, relative, partial experience to a real world. In short, really the strongest reason for doubt is possibly a ground of belief; or, as was said in substance at the close of the foregoing chapter, the very experience of which we are already confirmed doubters is, after all, just the experience which we seem to see our way to believing in.
Since the time of the great Leibnitz, and probably since the time self-conscious man drew his first breath, all genuine optimism has caught its most assuring vision of what was good, not in something quite apart from what was evil, but in and through evil itself, as if what is evil must be ever building better than it seems or than it knows. Very much as mathematics has viewed the negative quantity as an integral part of the whole system of quantities, so in the person of Leibnitz—statesman, historian, scientist, mathematician, and philosopher—and I imagine in the person also of you or me, though we may not claim the same authority, the human mind has been wise and deep enough to see evil, representing all the negative things of life as an organic part of the best possible world, even of the world created by an infinite God. At least since Leibnitz's time, I say, optimism has generally justified itself, not by denial of evil in the world, but in and through evil. Not long ago a young man who was perhaps more profound and reflective in his habits of mind than wise in his manner of statement, said to me that the most spiritual truth as yet disclosed to him was the identity of God with the devil. A shocking declaration, of course; yet, to say the least, not very far from the very spiritual idea, welcome to most, if not to all, that the conviction of sin is the beginning of salvation, or that the consciousness of ignorance is the very ground of wisdom. And here, similarly, belief within doubt, not belief apart from doubt, or validity and reality only in a contradictory experience, not aloof from a contradictory experience, is the sum and substance of what our confession has certainly been leading towards.