The will to doubt

by Alfred H. Lloyd

All things, serving reality, are whatever they are together; yet could not be that, were there not a constant conflict in and among all things. All men serving God are whatever they are together; yet, in like manner, could not be that were human society not a sphere of conflict harsh and unceasing.

So we find ourselves well upon our way in the world of the doubter—and what a world it is! No finality, because so much reality. Conflict, forever necessary to its effective realization. Relativity, that is to say finiteness, of all things, of all things in it, just for the sake of its own true absoluteness, just to conserve its own actual infinity.

And, also, in such a world human life, individually and socially, gets new interest and vitality. There is given to human life so much fellowship, and yet, at the same time, so much hostility and competition. Society and the individual, though neither loses its own peculiar importance, are so vitally intimate with each other. We cannot, however, enlarge now upon this point. Another consequence of the peculiar realism of the sceptic has a more pressing interest.

Is our universal doubter naturally and honestly an evolutionist or a creationalist? Of course, he may be neither, or he may be one or the other with a meaning different from that usually recognized. Terms like these are so very hard to control. Conceivably the doubter, a very versatile character always, might even be both evolutionist and creationalist. But, as the terms are commonly used, he must be said at least to have his face towards an evolutional and away from a creational view. The difference, again, is seen in that between principle and programme. An evolutional world is the working out of a principle; a created world, of a programme—the fixed design of some specified being. True, one may speak with much significance of persistent, continuous creation, of a creation active at all times and in all things, and it is to the point that the Cartesians made much of a doctrine that was very near to such a notion; but a truly continuous creation could be only an orthodox substitute, or disguise, for evolution. A truly continuous creation could be bound by no programme; by definition it could have neither date in time nor location in space. And, what is of even greater moment, a continuous creator, ever present and ever active, could never be more or less than the persistent reality of the world itself. How could he be aloof or different? So have we come, once more, to the immanence of God as a necessary idea of the sceptic.

The doubter's world, then, is the scene, as realistic as you will and perhaps we may say, too, without unwarranted enthusiasm, as bright beneath the morning sun, of the ever present, ever active life of God or—with the same meaning—of an evolution which we may call God or nature as we please. From this thought, too, if only we remember that nothing is unreal and no experience is without some contact with reality, there is but a step to the idea that God and man are actively parties to one and the same life. To repeat from above, the conflicts of human life are the perfection, the perfect living of God. God is, nay, God's life is, not what some, but what all men do, and the doubter's world is just the world, the world of things always relative, the world of constant conflict, in which alone this can be true.

II. THE PERFECT SYMPATHY BETWEEN THE SPIRITUAL AND THE MATERIAL.

But we pass to the second feature of this world in which we are journeying, namely, to the sympathy of the spiritual and the physical.

As a matter of course the sceptic, by his peculiar attitude of mind, must imply something with reference to the relation of the two worlds, or the worlds commonly supposed to be two, the spiritual and the material, and because for him the reality cannot be exclusively one definite thing or any number, small or large, of definite things, all of them independent and exclusive, he must imply in the world of things, be these two or as many as you please, that they always work together for whatever is real. Such an implication at first hearing may or may not appear to be a pregnant one, but at least it suggests that in some genuine way there must be sympathy between the two things, the two worlds—spirit and matter, mind and body. These two must work together for whatever is real.

But by this necessary sympathy between the spiritual and the material is not meant a mere parallelism so called. Thinkers, present and past, have tried to be satisfied with such a meaning. To be quite real, however, sympathy must be substantial even to the point of unity, not formal. Some friends, and even some married people, are parallel, life matching life at each and every point, but not positively and vitally sympathetic. Still, in parallelism, the very name for which is fairly indicative of its import, there is a convenient approach to the meaning here intended. Moreover, our Cartesian philosophers were much given to a theory of parallelism in their views of the relation of the two spheres of mind and matter; their specific doctrine of continuous creation, already referred to, was parallelistic; and they found the human mind and the human body, though distinctly two, still "parallel." Then, too, in more recent times, parallelism has been in evidence, figuring conspicuously at least as a working standpoint in the psychological laboratory, and figuring also, I venture to add, as an important assumption in philanthropic work. Accordingly, although the term itself does convey a good deal of its meaning, I shall try, in words as simple as possible, to show exactly what the theory of parallelism is. This done, we shall be able to see, or think through parallelism to sympathy of a more genuine and a more vital sort.

As was said, the doctrine of continuous creation, holding as it does that the mental and spiritual life of God and the constant changes in the natural world, the world said to be of his creation, are always in accord, God in his relation to the world being, so to speak, always up to date and having his attention on every place and part, is distinctly a parallelistic doctrine; but, quite apart from any theological reference, parallelism asserts that all states, or events, in the two spheres of body and mind, of spirit and matter, are (1) equally real and substantial, and (2) perfectly harmonious and consistent, in just the sense that always in connection with any condition or change in one realm there is an accompanying condition or change in the other, although (3) between the two there exists and can exist no causal connection whatever. Obviously to make either, whether by what is known as causation or in any other way, the producing and wholly determining condition of the other, or of anything in the other, would be at once to unsettle the equivalence or balance of their reality, and equally real they must be. Thus, in more detail, mind is denied any independent part in the production or determination of anything in the material realm, and matter is in no way the source of what transpires in mind. Each is, so far as the other is concerned, quite its own master. Each is absolutely without any arbitrary influence, any influence not natural or sympathetic or co-operative, upon the other. So to speak, neither imposes on the other a "must" that is not at the same time already the other's "would." In other words, any state in one is always the occasion, but, so far as an independent causation goes, the wholly passive occasion of something quite pertinent occurring in the other. Is there an idea, a state of consciousness; then, corresponding, there is some real thing, some physical object adequate to the idea. Is there an act of will; then, corresponding to it, some movement in the material world. Were the relation different from this, were mind and matter ever independent causes, not merely coincidents or perhaps co-operative causes, of each other, then, as is worth adding, besides the disturbance of the equivalence of reality, already referred to, there would be implied a fixity of plan, or manner of action, and a definiteness of possessed power in the nature of the supposed causes, and these implications would also give offence.