[6] Except for a few changes, the next few paragraphs are taken from my article, "Evolution and Immortality," in the Monist, April, 1900.
[7] In a small book, Citizenship and Salvation, or Greek and Jew, published some years ago, I have tried to show this of Socrates and Christ.
X.
DOUBT AND BELIEF.
There was once a brook that ran, at times slowly, at times more rapidly, through fields and woods, under trees and over rocks. At every chance, whatever the obstacles in its course, it fell, much or little, as it could; but impatience and uncertainty filled its life as the minutes and the hours passed. Had life nothing more in store for its troubled waters? Was this groping downward all? Were the memory and the accompanying hope, which haunted every thwarted move, of no avail? Would true fulness of life never be attained?
But a great moment for the brook came, rewarding it at last, bringing assurance in place of threatened despair. A precipice intervened, and the waters fell hundreds of feet; a glorious fall —spray, sunlight, colour, eloquence.
"Now," spoke the brook from the deep, smooth pool below, "now I have lived; now I know that my life was real and that my life was good, for I have found myself, I have found my world; and I have found them where I thought them not. And, speaking so, the brook flowed on contented.
The confession of doubt, which we set out to make with all possible candour, is now nearly concluded even to the harvesting of the promised fruit. The confession began, as will be remembered, with recognition of certain general and easily demonstrated facts, of which there were five, as follows: (1) We are all universal doubters. (2) Doubt is essential to all consciousness. (3) Even habit, though confidence be the horse, has doubt sitting up behind. (4) Like pain or ignorance, doubt is a condition of real life. (5) And the sense of dependence, so general to human nature, gives rise to doubt, although also, like misery, it always seeks company—the company of nature, of man, of God. Then, after this beginning, which left us by no means so hopeless as might have been expected, we proceeded to try the doubter, nay, to try ourselves, first before the court of ordinary life with its ordinary views of things, and secondly, before the court of science, and, in both trials, we found the doubting justified. Alike in ordinary life and in science, even in science where such a result was perhaps hardly to be expected, we found what at least seemed like illusion and what certainly was paradox, and almost against our will we had to conclude that a spirit of contradiction and duplicity and vacillation dwelt at the very centre and the very heart of our human experience. This spirit of violence, too, as the evidence of its presence accumulated, bade fair to dispel whatever hope our confession had left us. Yet out of the evidence there gradually did appear a reason for deepest assurance, and in the end our fear, not our hope, was dispelled. Contradiction was seen in its very nature to possess positive value. It was seen to protect experience, even while experience was specific and concrete, definite and individual, against any fatal digression or partiality of view. It was deeply conservative, corrective, and compensative in its effect, but it was all this without ever being merely negative or destructive towards anything, since its own efficiency required persistent individual differences. To experience it gave movement, constant unity or wholeness, realistic value and poise, practicality, and, lastly, social expression. And we were able, accordingly, to conclude, in so many words, that both ordinary life and science, so given to duplicity in their standpoint and in their ideas, were really building well, far better, indeed, than they seemed or than they clearly knew. Contradiction, in short, as we came to see it, meant unity, but not an empty, abstract unity; it meant unity rich and real with an infinity of differences; and so what had at first appeared an uncompromising reason for doubt turned, right before our doubter's eyes, into an unassailable ground of belief, making the very world which we had been so uncertain about a world for an inviolable faith. But truth, we saw at once, could no longer be identified with a formal idea, known or unknown or unknowable; reality could no longer have the character of a fixedly constituted thing, whether such a thing were present in experience or not; and perfection, even the perfection of God, could no longer be a mere status, a passive possession of certain characters, attributes, or prerogatives. Truth became, as was said, in want of a better word, a spirit; reality was a life; perfection was a power. And thereupon, with the new view thus afforded us, coupled as it was especially with the sense in which personally a man could claim reality for himself and yet be party to the factional life of society, we were able to turn to Descartes, an early modern doubter, a father confessor of many doubters, and, overlooking some of his shortcomings in thought and character, to appreciate both the use that he made of doubt, the intimacy that he, too, found between doubt and faith, and the world of reality, of most vital sympathy between the material and the spiritual, of genuine, personal individuality, and of immortality, through which he led us, doubter, universal doubter though he was. That great Frenchman, as we were enabled to understand him, got back the world, the self and the God which he seemed to have lost, but he got them all back transfigured. He got them back, not by denying and excluding what appeared negative and treacherous in their nature, but by facing this and using it, by accepting it and turning it even against itself. The very Paris to which he returned as believer was the same Paris, the Paris of doubt and of evil in all its forms, that earlier, hopeless and despairing, he had put behind him. And, once more, his experience was ours, and so helped us to interpret and deepen ours, quickening the value of our own previous discovery that within the very sources of doubt lay the real bases of belief. Our own doubted world of what was relative and artificial, and above all contradictory, had already turned, without loss of anything that was in it, into a world of reality and belief.
And so, for this concluding chapter, as but a sort of focussing of what almost from the beginning has been borne in upon us, but especially at the close has been rich in reality and meaning, we have a sixth general fact, which may now be added to the original five. We believe through our doubts; we believe, not in something apart, but in the very things we doubt. To this fact really inclusive of all the others, or if not to this fact at least to this conviction which we have achieved here, we shall now turn, and in our concluding chapter we may even forget, or retain only as the appropriate background, many of those more special or more technical details that from time to time have occupied us. After so much, that to some, if not to all, who have followed me to this place, may have appeared open to the charge of being mere theory, certain simple, very practical considerations, appealing quite as much to the emotions as to the reason, can hardly be out of place. Those who are already satisfied, who foresee only repetition, who are themselves without emotion, or who consider anything like the drawing of a moral to be as useless as it is inartistic, need read no further.
I.