The will to doubt

by Alfred H. Lloyd

In rough outline we now have the times of Descartes before us, and with deepened meaning I may say again that Descartes came into European life at a crucial moment. Materialism was rife, not merely theoretically among a few scientists and philosophers, nor practically in some isolated class of dissipated human beings, but really and more or less openly everywhere in the whole life and feeling of society. Even the devout played into the hands of the worldly by their very purism. And an accompanying doubt, cropping out significantly, now in positive irreverence, now in mysticism, now in intellectual formalism, appears to have thoroughly possessed the minds of men.

There was, too, in Descartes' day a growing sensitiveness to the paradoxes of man's experience which have occupied so much of our attention. Nothing was what it seemed. One writer boldly declared—not much later—that France, nay, the whole world, could not be happy until all should turn atheists. The boast of Louis XIV, "I am the State," whether literally made or not, was hardly less startling. The sensualism of the Catholic Church or the Pharisaism of the Protestant was flagrantly paradoxical, and was keenly felt to be so on all sides. Men turned doubters perforce, and in the fact that with their scepticism rose also a movement at once of individualism and cosmopolitanism, we cannot fail to see how the course of history illustrates the conclusions of a previous chapter. The time was one in which through its humanism, or its cosmopolitan individualism, civilization was to reap the harvest from the medieval organization of society.

Descartes, in spite of, or perhaps because of, his training at a school of the Jesuits, seems to have caught the spirit, the real meaning of his time, getting behind the mere letter of their instruction and of their point of view. Only mathematics gave him any satisfaction, and he left the La Flêche school in the first place conscious that he had learned little or nothing, in the second place curious about the possibility of men ever knowing anything, and in the third place evidently through the influence of mathematics strongly prejudiced in favour of introspection, or of thought conducted independently of things, as the only possible way to certainty. This education, then, and its outcome, true as it was to the life of the day, fitted Descartes for his life work, which was nothing more or less than the erection of a system of philosophy on the basis of a thorough-going confession of doubt.

Descartes entered upon his great task by taking his day at its word. St. Paul, addressing the Athenians, reminding them of one of their own temples, and quoting their own poet Aratus, was not more tactful. Thus, as if speaking directly to the sceptics about him, Descartes doubted everything, because he found, not only in his own consciousness, become too reflective for implicit belief, but also in the wide experience of his race, that everything was dubitable. He doubted church and state, science and society; and he went even farther than this. Also he boldly doubted mathematics, so long his own support and the reliance of many others in his time. He did not know surely that there might not be an evil spirit in the universe, a spirit of deception, which even in mathematics was obscuring the mind's vision, making it see things not as they are, but as they are not. Deception was real enough and obvious enough in life at large to make such a suspicion as this at least plausible. Moreover, the notion of an agent of evil in the world had been a commonplace for centuries. It was just a part of that medieval training. So although nothing could be said with certainty either way, the plausible mischance had to be faced; mathematics went the way of all doubtful knowledge, and man was left with literally nothing but his doubt, his universal doubt. "Dubito," said Descartes; "to doubt is my inmost nature"; and speaking so he at once marked the first step in his reasoning, so important then and now, and in the simplicity and directness of real genius reported a great, deep fact of his own experience and of that of his time.

But universal doubt is a real experience, being real just because universal. Nothing ever is real that is not universal. What is always and everywhere is just the mark of something that really is substantial. A real experience, however, real because universal, be it of doubt or of anything else, means a real self, so that in the always doubting self Descartes found reality, or a real self; and this always doubting self he further characterized as a thinking self. In other words, the real thinker was for him the universal doubter, and, contrariwise, the universal doubter was real, a real thinker, a real self. Before Descartes' time, to speak generally, men had identified reality with fixed condition or possession, with specific knowledge or established power or definite prerogative, divine or human, and truth was an object of faith rather than thought, say an unchanging programme for life rather than a pure principle—there is such a wide difference between a principle and a programme! But Descartes, as we have seen, identified reality with loss or privation, with such an empty-handed thing as doubt; he recognized no self but the thinker, and no thinker but the doubter. We always feel the pathos of those who, suffering constant privation, find and often declare that life is very real, and yet the sense of reality that comes in this way—namely, in the way of a privation that denies reality all residence in positive experience—is especially strong, and the pathos we feel is certainly not all. Something else hard to name appeals to us, too, and changes the pathos into a nobler because a more positive feeling—good will, perhaps, or honour—since the persistent holding to reality commands a deep respect. Yet, putting this more positive feeling apart, only the pathos of Descartes' real self, real because a thinker and thinker because a universal doubter, can occupy us now. Enough if we see that the reality was as indubitable as the universal doubt, the self always being real up to the reality of its experience, and that the pathos is not more for him than for the sceptics and mystics and mathematicians of his time. But, again, in the Latin words, burdened, as so often the Latin has been, with the experience of all Christendom: Dubito, cogito; ergo sum. I doubt, I think; I as doubter and thinker am.

That "I am" seems a sort of epitome of the humanism, not to say of the pathos of the humanism of the time. Man had lost everything but his own self, his lacking, longing, always seeking self. Montaigne put the situation plainly when he said in so many words, that portrayal of self was the beginning and the end alike of physics, the science of outer reality, and metaphysics the science of all reality. Man had been left with his mere self, robbed of beliefs and traditions, and abandoned by everything but his doubts and the empty companionship which these afforded, but to that, an unshaped thing with an undefined activity, real only for what it did not have, he clung tenaciously and often enthusiastically. And Descartes spoke for him: Knowing that I have nothing, I am.

But in this self that was real only because always lacking, always doubting, Descartes found a priceless treasure. Every one is familiar with the principle of Christian theology, that the conviction of sin is a real promise because the actual beginning of salvation, and every one has some appreciation of this principle. It is a principle, too, that no priest ever made or could ever unmake, belonging as it does to the very nature of conscious creatures. In like manner, then, Descartes recognized in the consciousness of doubt, or say of intellectual error, the real promise, because the actual beginning or even the very presence of veracity in knowledge. The doubter, conscious of error as he must be, was never without and never by any possibility could be without a sense for truth, an idea of veracity. Doubting all things he must yet believe in truth. Plato said centuries before that mere opinion, however false, was nevertheless always in love with true knowledge, and this Platonic love Descartes found in the doubter's conviction of error. In Plato's spirit Descartes insisted that doubt was a constant yearning for truth, a persistent faith in it. Doubt was informed with truth, with the idea of truth, very much as one has the "idea" of a thing that one cannot master. Man might be a doubter of all things, then, but in spite of his doubt he must believe in the reality of things, not exactly in the individual reality of each and every thing, but in reality in and among all things. For him, doubting and self-conscious, there must dwell in the world a realizing nature or power, an agent of perfect veracity, checking any experience from being altogether deceptive. And, for the present, to narrow our attention to a single phase of the doubter's natural idea of veracity, as Descartes reasoned about it, truth and everything that goes with truth, perfection and absoluteness in all its phases, could not be solely human if to doubt was human. They must, in consequence, be divine. So God, a spirit of truth and righteousness, was real, as real as the real self of always doubting but ever truth-loving man. Dubito, cogito; ergo sum: etiam Deus est. I doubt, I think; as thinker and doubter I am: and what is more, God, veracity incarnate, is also.

And here begins or began a great controversy, nor can the issues of it be said to have been wholly settled even to-day. What did Descartes understand when in this way he proved to himself the existence of God? Was only the God he seemed to have lost once more restored to him, and restored intact? Did he merely justify, and so return to its old place of authority, the traditional theology of his day? Was his doubt, as some would view it, not his own genuine experience, but simply the conceit and pretence of method? These questions need an answer, for their answer affects not only Descartes' regained religion, but also his regained real world in general. So many have been disposed almost to laugh outright at the simple-minded Descartes for his doubting everything from matter and mind to God, only in the end to get everything back. They have seen him as one chasing the verities out by one door only to welcome them with outstretched arms as they run in at another that had been left open for their return; and this view of him has been strengthened by the fact that conservatives in religion the world over have made Descartes their victim by appealing to his proof, borrowing for themselves his philosopher's robes, as if these could be easily assumed and as easily put off. But as to the justice of such a view there is little if any good evidence. Matter-of-fact history is not our first concern here, as was said; yet, whatever may or may not have been uppermost in Descartes' mind, the doubt of his day was both general and very genuine, and the final worth and validity of his thinking lies wholly in that, not in his or any one's mere logical gymnastic or verbal strategy. Moreover, for reasons which hardly need to be given, the strong probability is that, notwithstanding his well-known lack of courage in openly living up to or even thinking up to all the consequences of his reasoning, he did feel in his philosophy not a mere recovery of what had seemed lost, nor a cunning apology for the old, but the birth of a new point of view; and, if this possibility should be verified, among other things the conservatives, who have been borrowing so much support, have been little if any better than parasites. Still, even the probabilities in the case are relatively insignificant to us, since the people of the time and of later times, and we ourselves from the scepticism and mysticism of the seventeenth century, have learned to think of God with a fulness of meaning never attained before, as—what shall I say?—not a definite truth, but the living spirit of truth; not a passive perfection, but a perfect activity; and not even a divine person, in the sense of one more separate being of consciousness and will to inhabit the universe, but the moving and conserving power of all personality—the very active principle of reality present in the vicissitudes and conflicts of our existence. And, such being the outcome of history, we have to take it as really the meaning of the great Frenchman's formulæ. We put aside the controversy, then, with the simple reflection that results in history or anywhere else are at least very hard indeed to conceive if they are anything more or less than realized motives perhaps the realized motives of a man or men building somewhat beyond their clearest knowledge. Whatever has come about must always be what more or less clearly men have been feeling after.

The God whom Descartes really proves to his time, and still more positively to us, must surely be the God not of a satisfied unquestioning believer, but of the universal doubter who loves truth and whose doubting and loving make him the always curious thinker; a God without visibly or even quasi-visibly fixed or specific character of any sort, since with his nature set to such a character, tethered like a beast to a stake or like the sun bound to an orbit, he would not be and could not be divine enough—which is to say, veracious or perfect enough—for a universal doubter's curiosity; a God, then, who has the divine character of true infinity, who is, too, a spirit in fact as well as in word. Infinity certainly cannot belong to a being that is apart; such a being would at once belie his nature; and "spirits," divine or human, must not be supposed to be, like Elijah, the merely translated beings of this visible and tangible world, for they can belong only to the invisible and the intangible, which is in this world and of it, in its knowledge, in its love and strife, in its changes of all kinds, in its work and in its suffering. Yes, a truly living God, living here and now, is the God of Descartes' proof; the God of just that world of movement and conflict, of poise and reality, to which the differences and above all the contradictions of experience, as examined by us in preceding chapters, have already borne witness. Let us recall how we were able to say that the very conflicts of human experience were the wisdom of God. And if this all amounts to saying, as apparently it does, that only Descartes' universal doubter, who loves truth too much ever to claim its final possession, can believe in a real God, then we have reached something that will surely repay the most careful reflection.

Some have criticized Descartes for what they regard as a fallacy in his reasoning. He jumped, they claim, without any real warrant, from the idea of a thing as his premise to the actual existence of the thing as his conclusion, from the idea of veracity, so necessary in the consciousness of the doubter, to the substantial existence of a perfectly veracious being, as if, to use their time-worn analogy, the idea even of the very smallest sum of money would make the money itself materialize in somebody's pocket. But, whether or not Descartes fully understood his own thought, this criticism is very superficial, and it gets only a specious cogency from the same matter-of-fact history that we have already pushed aside. No idea, however clear, however necessary even to the consciousness of a doubter, of perfect truth could ever conjure into existence the unworldly, independently existing, spiritually and intellectually isolated God of the Middle Ages; and for that matter one might say, I think quite pertinently, that money not in the pocket is something less than real money, or—which comes to the same end—that the idea of money, if the pocket be indeed empty, must imply some sense of the emptiness as well as of the money; and with such an implication the idea taken for its full meaning is no such conjurer as Descartes' critics have chosen to imagine it. After all the "mere" ideas, or the "mere" things in general, that appear in controversies, are only ingenious ways of packing the jury. An adequate idea—that is to say, an idea taken just for its full meaning, for what it denies as well as for what it affirms, for the complete universe of its discourse—does and must answer to existence; yes, and to substantial existence too. So, again, the God that Descartes by the doubter's idea of veracity proved to his time and to us, if not also as clearly to himself, can have been no mere substantial existence wholly outside the doubter's life and consciousness. In such case the universal doubting would indeed have been only the insincere verbal strategy of a conservative, the conceit of purely artful method, and the jump objected to would have been quite necessary. But Descartes' God answered to just the idea of truth which a universal doubter could honestly entertain; to truth realized only in and through doubt; a God, living in and with the seeking, struggling consciousness of the doubter.