Furthermore, for a being, call him doubter or thinker or what you will, whose very nature in deed and in word is awake to a sense of lack and is in consequence making a continued outcry: "Never this, but always something else, something fuller and realer, something including and using this, something maintained by the very conflicts of this,"—for such a being very plainly there never can be anything that is wholly and hopelessly beyond, that is not potentially and so actively real in him; there can be no outer nature, but an including and developing nature, and no transcendent God, but an indwelling, ever uplifting, forward-bearing God. Exactly such a being was Descartes' real self, the self of his I am—"I as thinker and doubter am"—and this self had need neither of struggling with nature nor of wrestling with God in order to get one or the other on its side, for in its doubt, in its constant confession of incompleteness, even—though this is a flagrant paradox—of its own reality as in a sense always outside or beyond itself, it had won the supreme victory at the start. Negatives are always such very sweeping, comprehensive things; and to be, so to speak, one's own negative, to be real and lacking, is somehow to include all things within one's own life and interest. If I may apply an ordinary phrase in an extraordinary way, to be always "beside oneself," always doubting, always wanting, always striving, or to be, in the words of earlier pages, ever and always divided against oneself, is to have enlisted man and nature and God for ever in one's service.
There is truly such a difference between programme and principle 1 It is the difference between medievalism and modernism, between supposed finality and recognized and asserted movement, between supernatural authority and the authority of natural growth. Enthrone a programme, and it is arbitrary and exclusive; it claims, as it must, the sanction of another world; it hopelessly divides human nature as personally embodied or as socially organized; it makes life and its sphere irrational and so dependent on a blind faith: but a principle, enthroned, draws all things into itself, using to its own constant realization even the changes and differences of life, making faith and reason lie down together, and transfiguring both a brutal nature and an inhuman God by revealing them as not indeed formally but vitally rational, and not indeed mortally yet humanly alive. In Descartes' proof of God we see the birth of modernism; the programme deposed; the principle set in the place of authority.
Finally, then, Descartes did not simply restore what had been lost. Though we have been regarding only the religious aspect of his philosophy, we can see in general that, just as not the old God, but nevertheless God, remained to the doubter's life, so also not the old verities at large, yet nevertheless the verities, or not the old reality, yet nevertheless reality, remained also. Man, after all his doubting, even because of it all, was enabled to return to the world of all those "isms," the all-pervading materialism, the scoffing scepticism, the dogmatic mysticism, and the intellectual formalism, with a new spirit, a spirit of real confidence, a spirit of hope, a spirit of life, that just by reason of its wants and conflicts believes itself not only very real but also fully worth while.
And travellers to-day visiting the streets of Paris or going anywhere the doubting and despairing world over, would do well to imagine Descartes, as the modern doubter, travelling and thinking with them.
[1] See an article by H.C. Lea in the American Historical Review, January, 1904, "Ethical Values in History," especially p. 238 seq.
IX.
THE DOUBTER'S WORLD.
The doubter's world is a world in which, as we journey, we shall discover four features that are especially noteworthy and that accord fully with the principles of Descartes as well as with the findings of our own confession of doubt. Thus, in the order, or suppose I say in the itinerary, here to be followed: (1) Reality, without finality, in all things; (2) perfect sympathy between the spiritual and the material; (3) genuine individuality; and (4) for whatever is indeed real, immortality.