There is thus a case for personality hidden in that historical analogy of the individual to its group-divided environment, whether society or nature, and there is also an equally strong case for society as something distinct, as something that has its own peculiar work to do. The rôles, too, that belong to personality and society are as distinct and as real, besides being as organic to each other, as in general are whole and part. But the person, at once a corrector of partiality and a leader, a distributor of special development, holds a conspicuous place and moreover takes a part that just because of his essential superiority to the definite and formal is of the greatest moment to our conclusions as to the nature of all positive experience. All positive, formal experience we found defective even to the extent of paradox or contradiction, but personality, characteristically, must be superior to this defect. Personality must bridge all the divisions of experience, all the gaps in society, all the chasms of history. It must be, though perhaps one may not safely use the word, the very incarnation of that spirit of truth, that principle of validity and power for adequacy, which has already come to our notice more than once. Factionally experience is relative, phenomenal, divided against itself; factionally, too, it is at once formal and contradictory; but personally it reaches beyond the forms and contradictions, and is directly in touch with what is true and real. So the contrast between the personal and the social, the vital and the formal, shows itself quite parallel to that between the real and the phenomenal, the true and the paradoxical.
A business man says to a friend: "Personally, as you know perfectly well, I should prefer to do what you ask, but professionally I simply cannot, for you know also that business is business." A preacher declares: "Personally I should just like to speak out clearly and without restraint, but my church will not let me." Personally the soldiers in opposite camps exchange many courtesies, but factionally, professionally, they meet with rifle and sword on the battlefield. The father punishing his offending child says: "This hurts me more than you." And, in general, personally there are no divisions of life—all are all things together, and restraints that separate man and man are lacking; but factionally there is always restraint, and open conflict and inner inconsistency are unavoidable. The person is thus the medium, not of an abstract universality, but concretely, through his factional training and his leadership, of the universal life.
And, finally, the life of the person is gifted with a great faith, for it is in touch with an untethered reality; but, factionally, life is a constant doubting, for it is constantly narrow and it is a constant contending. So are faith and doubt as close to each other, as inseparable, as whole and part, as person and class, and with this conclusion we seem to have won for the doubter the right to say confidently: "My doubts cannot destroy me; I am; even in me there dwells the power that makes for reality; even in me, in spite of the very defects that the conditions of my social life impose, there lives the spirit of truth. Nay, even the social life itself, when mine as well as social, is also real and true."
[1] This paragraph, and many of the paragraphs that follow it, except for considerable revision and adaptation, were published some time ago. See an article, "The Personal and the Factional in Society," in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. II, No. 13, 1906.
[2] Chap. Iv., p. 72.
VIII
AN EARLY MODERN DOUBTER.
I referred in an earlier chapter to the great Frenchman who boldly declared that his doubting was all that he could be certain about, but that this, being so very real, being indeed universal, left him a belief in himself, although only in his always doubting self. Descartes' belief in himself has interest for us, for while his thinking followed lines somewhat different from our own, he seems to have reached nearly, if not quite, the same very personal conclusion, namely, the right of the doubter to say: "I am."
Descartes was born in Touraine in 1596, and for the larger part of his life he was at least nominally a resident in the Paris of Louis XIV, Montaigne, and the earlier Jesuits. He was educated at a school of the Jesuits in La Flêche, and in the course of his mature life he published works of importance not merely in philosophy, but also in science and mathematics. His Meditations and Search after Truth are easily first among his contributions to philosophy. He died in 1650.