The will to doubt

by Alfred H. Lloyd

We believe in the very things we doubt. Doubt, this is to say, can destroy nothing. It only calls for closer scrutiny, for wider and deeper view, for greater achievement. Its effect is only to make over, renew, or fulfil what has already been and must ever remain an object of faith, and so doing it keeps the old faith alive. It questions all things, but properly, consistently it raises, not questions of mere existence or reality, but questions of meaning and worth, and whatever it truly questions it always quickens. Have we not found that with its inborn and insatiable passion for truth doubt must believe in everything, and that to satisfy this passion, since all things must work together for what is real and true, it must reject nothing but seek even the universe in everything? All things, from the momentary sensation in your little finger, or the tree yonder on the lawn, to the personality of God or the divinity of Christ as an idea in the consciousness of millions of people, all things are; they are in experience; they are unassailable realities of experience; but—and just this is as far as the truth-loving doubter, the doubter who is honest with his own self-consciousness, can go—what really are they? What are they? is such an honest question. In this question, too, there is more reality for the things inquired about even than in any man's assertion that they are this or that they are that. But the question Are they? would be downright treachery. We doubters, then, believe, but would ever know what we believe; we have, yet would realize every possibility that what we have affords.

Doubt, I repeat, destroys nothing. From time to time certain doubting people have called their prophets impostors, and have imagined themselves able to put the impostors out of the way, but, as history has always shown, only with the result of reviving among themselves and often of awakening in the minds and hearts of others the sense and conviction of just that for which the offensive impostors may have suffered violent death. Even history's petty impostors, too, as well as those who have proved heroes and great leaders, have always had their justification. An absolute impostor has never been. Again, certain people have cried illusion and unreality at things political or moral or even at things physical, but only in the end to feel, and to make others feel, first, their evident narrowness, if not their actual dishonesty, and then their need of a more hospitable idea of what is valid and real. Nothing can be, or ever has been, unreal. And, in general, doubt of a thing or a person or a God only needs its own conscious assertion to turn actually into an appeal from its particular object to the ideal or spirit or principle for which the object had stood, and upon this appeal even the object that has been for a moment condemned is justified and glorified. Thus, doubt may deny or depose or put to death, but as it is honest it also realizes or restores or revives. Through doubt the sensuous, which is the particular and visible, is ever becoming spiritualized; even this corruptible puts on incorruption and this mortal puts on immortality. Or, in these words, if we doubt we may reject the object, the letter, but we cannot reject the letter without accepting and asserting the spirit, and we cannot assert the spirit without recalling and exalting and even worshipping the letter. The rejection makes for universality by casting down the barriers of the particular experience of time or place, of person or nation, of the Greek perhaps, if again I may look to history, or of the Jew or of the Christian, while the recall and the worship make for definiteness. Without the previous rejection the worship could be only idolatry. So, as Descartes will be remembered virtually to have said, doubt is innately loyal to reality in everything, and just through this loyalty the world it spurns, the world of God and man and nature, is for ever called back, a real world once more, because a realized, a spiritually realized world. Why forget, as so many seem to, that reality is an achievement; achieved it may be, as with the brook, even by a great fall?

But have you ever climbed a mountain up and up and up, through thick woods, over rough, almost impassable trails, into clouds dense and chilling, stormy and angry, over treacherous snows and frightful cliffs, and come out at last on the very top to see both earth and heaven, yourself between, the clouds dispersed, the hardships and dangers all forgotten, the whole world real and yours? Well, that is doubt become achievement. Have you worked at some problem of everyday life, or a problem of science or philosophy, patiently or impatiently applying all the rules and precepts at your command, trying every resort known to you, and in final desperation many you only guess at, and then, when failure seems almost certain, caught a glimpse of the real meaning and the real way, attaining to an insight that reveals a new world to you? That, too, is doubt rewarded. Have you ever visited, perhaps more curiously than reverently, some great Catholic cathedral, or, better still, some temple of the far Orient, and watching the worshippers there, suddenly had a vision of religion as greater and deeper than any Protestantism or even than Christianity? That, again, is doubt's achievement. Have you ever suffered a great heartrending disappointment, let me say a great personal loss, and found it seemingly impossible to return to the routine of your former life, but nevertheless, almost imperceptibly, come into a sense of presence and gain from the very thing that seemed taken from you? That, once more, is doubt without its sting, robbed of its victory. Doubt means sacrifice, often enormous sacrifice, but always a more than equal gain. The light that casts the shadows of doubt, when one can face it, and really does face it, as, for another example, in this book we have been trying to face it, is so splendid and so uplifting.

So, a third time, doubt destroys nothing; it only makes reality forever an achievement and belief a constantly active life. The fact, now no stranger to us, that doubt is social, also shows this. Doubt is social, as has been said, since by its isolation it makes the longing for company, and by its greater freedom the larger opportunity for company; and since also the very contradictions or controversies which arouse it are never merely individual, being always social also, and social relationship means effort and sacrifice, and is accordingly a peculiarly interesting witness to the losses that doubt must suffer for its greater gains. Doubt, in short, shows belief, working not merely for the reality of all things, but also for the love of all men. As social, then, as working for the love of all men, doubt involves sympathy. Yet not an easy, passive sympathy. A restless, labouring, always growing sympathy is the sympathy of the doubter; a sympathy that makes all it covers labour and grow also. Does it hurt your business to doubt it sufficiently to make you able to sympathize with the interests of another? To this question Adam Smith gave a timely answer when at a critical moment in industrial history he found in sympathy a condition of successful competition. Does it hurt your politics, if you can lose enough of the partisan's conceit or the jingo's bombast to sympathize with the other parties or the other nations? The value of real independence in politics is one answer, and the idea of federation among competing states, or of international polity as a basis of successful national life, is another. Does it hurt your understanding to outgrow your own profoundest ideas and see some validity in the doctrines and formulæ of others? Does it hurt your Christianity to make concessions to another's Christianity or to the worship of any land or any time? The reading of the last great book, or the visit to the pagan temple, is an answer. Simply the doubter the world over, social being that he is by nature, imbued as he is with a living sympathy, must recognize, and must labour to maintain or achieve, the unity of humanity. For him just this is God, or truth, and it is worth far more than anybody's religion or than anybody's rational formulæ. It must stand, too, both as the universal authority which both religion and reason have over the lives of men and as the motive or living principle, or spirit, by which particular religions and particular formulæ, however serviceable, are forever unstable.

But doubt, which is thus social and imbued with a living sympathy, and which though requiring sacrifice does not destroy belief, but only makes belief active and reality an achievement, may be viewed here in still another way. It shows mankind using or spending instead of either hoarding or throwing away any of the resources of knowledge and faith, of developed habit and personal association, which life accumulates. Some doubters, as men say in the business world, invest what they have; some speculate. Some are conservative, even timorous; some are very rash. Yet doubt as expenditure is necessary to all who would enjoy the proper, natural increase of their possessions, and while the rash, be they transgressors or reformers, sensualists or materialists, or equally impractical idealists, at a throw may win or lose great riches of mind or spirit, the timorous and ultra-conservative, the "practical" and conventional, are not less dependent on chance. There are the new rich, too, and the aristocratic poor, and both remind us strongly that the real use of what we have is not only a duty, but also a very sober duty. To hoard blindly or spend rashly is to risk unwisely, perhaps to lose all, or, if to win, to win idly; while to use well, to doubt clearly and honestly, to doubt even in one's belief, to doubt only for fuller meaning, for broader and deeper life, for richer companionship, is personally to earn lasting spiritual treasure.

Modern science, whose knowledge comprises merely working hypotheses, the means to truth, not truth itself, or if truth, then only a living, growing truth, affords one of the best examples of this. Modern science is a great faith, a great belief, but only because it is a life, not a status or possession, only because it is a constant spending, a constant using of knowledge, that earns interest, even compound interest, as regularly as the years go by. And experience in general, as well as science, is also a great belief, and also only because always doubting and so always using and always earning.

Doubt, in a word, is more than a necessity of experience; it is distinctly a duty. Experience itself is but another name for that hard master who says to every unprofitable servant: "Thou wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I did not scatter; thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the bankers, and at my coming I should have received back my own with interest. Take ye away therefore the talent from him and give it unto him that hath the ten talents."

II.

That doubt is only the expenditure of the treasures of life for future gain human history bears witness in a striking way. Times of a general scepticism among any people have always been also times of conventionalism and utilitarianism towards all things great and small. To employ again a word used before, this means that life has come to regard its establishments of all sorts as only "instrumental," not final. Of course, conventionalism and utilitarianism are commonly decried, just as the accompanying attitude of doubt is commonly decried; but the fears, though not altogether idle, are usually short-sighted, for there is gain ahead. In a certain community, for example, patriotism, morality, and piety, long identified with specific forms and customs and doctrines, have come at last to seem quite unsubstantial. A rising cosmopolitanism perhaps has undone the first, sensationalism or naturalism the second, and mingled ritualism and secularism the third. But however unsubstantial all three may appear in consequence, they are nevertheless retained as still useful, as means to some end, being at least good things to wear or to assume in any way, and from the change, though it appear so like decline, the community in the end is most decidedly enriched.

How can this be? In answer, let us beard the very king of the race of the conventionalists and utilitarians in his forbidding den. Machiavelli, with his teaching that the end always justifies the means, and his open advice to the leader who would be successful, to make a point of at least seeming loyal and good and pious, shows a typical mingling of the sceptic and the utilitarian in sacred things. Moreover, what Machiavelli taught was also common practice in his time, and soon became a principle of brilliant statesmanship all over Europe. And to add meaning to his case by associating it with others, conspicuously in Descartes' time, as we have observed, and also in Athens at the time of the Sophists, and in Jerusalem when the Pharisees flourished, the same standpoint was much in vogue; while in our own times we do not need to look far to find it. Education, social life, politics, religion abound in it, for the tribe of the Machiavellists is no more a lost tribe than it is one that began with him whose name it bears. If the name is too offensive to some by reason of its connection with a particular character and a particular period in Italian history, for Machiavellism they may substitute institutionalism, certainly a more innocent term at first sight; but the offensiveness, though hidden, or half-hidden, still remains a part of the fact with which we have to deal. The meaning of institutionalism is just that of some asserted end justifying any available means, and so under cover of its peculiar conceits sanctioning violence. Watch any institution and see how one or another of life's objects of devotion is become, or fast becoming, a mere utility. The institution makes life mechanical, and doing this it is as treacherous as it seems loyal to the treasured things of life, the developed ideas and established customs; it is even as sceptical towards them as it seems faithful; and in the spirit, if not in the letter, of Machiavellism it shows them no longer implicitly worshipped, but in use, which is to say, "put to the bankers," and so robbed of their character of sacred treasures. And as for Machiavelli himself, it may be worth while to remember that with all his offensiveness he has undoubtedly been very much maligned, and that to any student of history he seems only a very apt though an unpleasantly outspoken pupil of the most powerful institution of his time—the Roman Church—for which things moral and religious had certainly become effective instruments of very worldly ambitions. So in Machiavellism or in institutionalism, the name now being indifferent to us, we see worship passing into use; we see sacred things become secular, or things supposed final becoming only instrumental; and we see, therefore, what appears like loss or decline.[1]