One is led to suspect that carelessness is the right name for what looks like reasoned toleration, by such a line of consideration as the following. It is justly said that at the bottom of all the great discussions of modern society lie the two momentous questions, first whether there is a God, and second whether the soul is immortal. In other words, whether our fellow-creatures are the highest beings who take an interest in us, or in whom we need take an interest; and, then, whether life in this world is the only life of which we shall ever be conscious. It is true of most people that when they are talking of evolution, and the origin of species, and the experiential or intuitional source of ideas, and the utilitarian or transcendental basis of moral obligation, these are the questions which they really have in their minds. Now, in spite of the scientific activity of the day, nobody is likely to contend that men are pressed keenly in their souls by any poignant stress of spiritual tribulation in the face of the two supreme enigmas. Nobody will say that there is much of that striving and wrestling and bitter agonising, which whole societies of men have felt before now on questions of far less tremendous import. Ours, as has been truly said, is 'a time of loud disputes and weak convictions,' In a generation deeply impressed by a sense of intellectual responsibility this could not be. As it is, even superior men are better pleased to play about the height of these great arguments, to fly in busy intellectual sport from side to side, from aspect to aspect, than they are intent on resolving what it is, after all, that the discussion comes to and to which solution, when everything has been said and heard, the balance of truth really to incline. There are too many giggling epigrams; people are too willing to look on collections of mutually hostile opinions with the same kind of curiosity which they bestow on a collection of mutually hostile beasts in a menagerie. They have very faint predilections for one rather than another. If they were truly alive to the duty of conclusiveness, or to the inexpressible magnitude of the subjects which nominally occupy their minds, but really only exercise their tongues, this elegant Pyrrhonism would be impossible, and this light-hearted neutrality most unendurable.
Well has the illustrious Pascal said with reference to one of the two great issues of the modern controversy:—'The immortality of the soul is a thing that concerns us so closely and touches us so profoundly, that one must have lost all feeling to be indifferent as to knowing how the matter is. All our actions and all our thoughts must follow such different paths, according as there are eternal goods to hope for or are not, that it is impossible to take a step with sense and judgment, without regulating it in view of this point, which ought to be our first object.... I can have nothing but compassion for those who groan and travail in this doubt with all sincerity, who look on it as the worst of misfortunes, and who, sparing no pains to escape from it, make of this search their chief and most serious employment.... But he who doubts and searches not is at the same time a grievous wrongdoer, and a grievously unfortunate man. If along with this he is tranquil and self-satisfied, if he publishes his contentment to the world and plumes himself upon it, and if it is this very state of doubt which he makes the subject of his joy and vanity—I have no terms in which to describe so extravagant a creature.'[[15]] Who, except a member of the school of extravagant creatures themselves, would deny that Pascal's irritation is most wholesome and righteous?
Perhaps in reply to this, we may be confronted by our own doctrine of intellectual responsibility interpreted in a directly opposite sense. We may be reminded of the long array of difficulties that interfere between us and knowledge in that tremendous matter, and of objections that rise in such perplexing force to an answer either one way or the other. And finally we may be despatched with a eulogy of caution and a censure of too great heat after certainty. The answer is that there is a kind of Doubt not without search, but after and at the end of search, which is not open to Pascal's just reproaches against the more ignoble and frivolous kind. And this too has been described for us by a subtle doctor of Pascal's communion. 'Are there pleasures of Doubt, as well as of Inference and Assent? In one sense there are. Not indeed if doubt means ignorance, uncertainty, or hopeless suspense; but there is a certain grave acquiescence in ignorance, a recognition of our impotence to solve momentous and urgent questions, which has a satisfaction of its own. After high aspirations, after renewed endeavours, after bootless toil, after long wanderings, after hope, effort, weariness, failure, painfully alternating and recurring, it is an immense relief to the exhausted mind to be able to say, "At length I know that I can know nothing about anything." ... Ignorance remains the evil which it ever was, but something of the peace of certitude is gained in knowing the worst, and in having reconciled the mind to the endurance of it.'[[16]] Precisely, and what one would say of our own age is that it will not deliberately face this knowledge of the worst. So it misses the peace of certitude, and not only its peace, but the strength and coherency that follow strict acceptance of the worst, when the worst is after all the best within reach.
Those who are in earnest when they blame too great haste after certainty, do in reality mean us to embrace certainty, but in favour of the vulgar opinions. They only see the prodigious difficulties of the controversy when you do not incline to their own side in it. They only panegyrise caution and the strictly provisional when they suspect that intrepidity and love of the conclusive would lead them to unwelcome shores. These persons, however, whether fortunately or unfortunately, have no longer much influence over the most active part of the national intelligence. Whether permanently or not, resolute orthodoxy, however prosperous it may seem among many of the uncultivated rich, has lost its hold upon thought. For thought has become dispersive, and the centrifugal forces of the human mind, among those who think seriously, have for the time become dominant and supreme. No one, I suppose, imagines that the singular ecclesiastical revival which is now going on, is accompanied by any revival of real and reasoned belief; or that the opulent manufacturers who subscribe so generously for restored cathedral fabrics and the like, have been moved by the apologetics of Aids to Faith and the Christian Evidence Society.
Obviously only three ways of dealing with the great problems of which we have spoken are compatible with a strong and well-bottomed character. We may affirm that there is a deity with definable attributes; and that there is a conscious state and continued personality after the dissolution of the body. Or we may deny. Or we may assure ourselves that we have no faculties enabling us on good evidence either to deny or affirm. Intellectual self-respect and all the qualities that are derived from that, may well go with any one of these three courses, decisively followed and consistently applied in framing a rule of life and a settled scheme of its aims and motives. Why do we say that intellectual self-respect is not vigorous, nor the sense of intellectual responsibility and truthfulness and coherency quick and wakeful among us? Because so many people, even among those who might be expected to know better, insist on the futile attempt to reconcile all those courses, instead of fixing on one and steadily abiding in it. They speak as if they affirmed, and they act as if they denied, and in their hearts they cherish a slovenly sort of suspicion that we can neither deny nor affirm. It may be said that this comes to much the same thing as if they had formally decided in the last or neutral sense. It is not so. This illegitimate union of three contradictories fritters character away, breaks it up into discordant parts, and dissolves into mercurial fluidity that leavening sincerity and free and cheerful boldness, which come of harmonious principles of faith and action, and without which men can never walk as confident lovers of justice and truth.
Ambrose's famous saying, that 'it hath not pleased the Lord to give his people salvation in dialectic,' has a profound meaning far beyond its application to theology. It is deeply true that our ruling convictions are less the product of ratiocination than of sympathy, imagination, usage, tradition. But from this it does not follow that the reasoning faculties are to be further discouraged. On the contrary, just because the other elements are so strong that they can be trusted to take care of themselves, it is expedient to give special countenance to the intellectual habits, which alone can check and rectify the constantly aberrating tendencies of sentiment on the one side, and custom on the other. This remark brings us to another type, of whom it is not irrelevant to speak shortly in this place. The consequences of the strength of the political spirit are not all direct, nor does its strength by any means spring solely from its indulgence to the less respectable elements of character, such as languor, extreme pliableness, superficiality. On the contrary, it has an indirect influence in removing the only effective restraint on the excesses of some qualities which, when duly directed and limited, are among the most precious parts of our mental constitution. The political spirit is the great force in throwing love of truth and accurate reasoning into a secondary place. The evil does not stop here. This achievement has indirectly countenanced the postponement of intellectual methods, and the diminution of the sense of intellectual responsibility, by a school that is anything rather than political.
Theology has borrowed, and coloured for her own use, the principles which were first brought into vogue in politics. If in the one field it is the fashion to consider convenience first and truth second, in the other there is a corresponding fashion of placing truth second and emotional comfort first. If there are some who compromise their real opinions, or the chance of reaching truth, for the sake of gain, there are far more who shrink from giving their intelligence free play, for the sake of keeping undisturbed certain luxurious spiritual sensibilities. This choice of emotional gratification before truth and upright dealing with one's own understanding, creates a character that is certainly far less unlovely than those who sacrifice their intellectual integrity to more material convenience. The moral flaw is less palpable and less gross. Yet here too there is the stain of intellectual improbity, and it is perhaps all the more mischievous for being partly hidden under the mien of spiritual exaltation.
There is in literature no more seductive illustration of this seductive type than Rousseau's renowned character of the Savoyard Vicar—penetrated with scepticism as to the attributes of the deity, the meaning of the holy rites, the authenticity of the sacred documents; yet full of reverence, and ever respecting in silence what he could neither reject nor understand. 'The essential worship,' he says, 'is the worship of the heart. God never rejects this homage, under whatever form it be offered to him. In old days I used to say mass with the levity which in time infects even the gravest things when we do them too often. Since acquiring my new principles [of reverential scepticism] I celebrate it with more veneration: I am overcome by the majesty of the Supreme Being, by his presence, by the insufficiency of the human mind, which conceives so ill what pertains to its author. When I approach the moment of consecration, I collect myself for performing the act with all the feelings required by the church and the majesty of the sacrament. I strive to annihilate my reason before the Supreme Intelligence, saying, Who art thou that thou shouldst measure infinite power?'[[17]]
The Savoyard Vicar is not imaginary. The acquiescence in indefinite ideas for the sake of comforted emotions, and the abnegation of strong convictions in order to make room for free and plenteous effusion, have for us all the marks of a too familiar reality. Such a doctrine is an everyday plea for self-deception, and a current justification for illusion even among some of the finer spirits. They have persuaded themselves not only that the life of the religious emotions is the highest life, but that it is independent of the intellectual forms with which history happens to have associated it. And so they refine and sophisticate and make havoc with plain and honest interpretation, in order to preserve a soft serenity of soul unperturbed.
Now, we are not at all concerned to dispute such positions as that Feeling is the right starting-point of moral education; that in forming character appeal should be to the heart rather than to the understanding; that the only basis on which our faculties can be harmoniously ordered is the preponderance of affection over reason. These propositions open much grave and complex discussion, and they are not to our present purpose. We only desire to state the evil of the notion that a man is warranted in comforting himself with dogmas and formularies, which he has first to empty of all definite, precise, and clearly determinable significance, before he can get them out of the way of his religious sensibilities. Whether Reason or Affection is to have the empire in the society of the future, when Reason may possibly have no more to discover for us in the region of morals and religion, and so will have become emeritus and taken a lower place, as of a tutor whose services the human family, being now grown up, no longer requires,—however this may be, it is at least certain that in the meantime the spiritual life of man needs direction quite as much as it needs impulse, and light quite as much as force. This direction and light can only be safely procured by the free and vigorous use of the intelligence. But the intelligence is not free in the presence of a mortal fear lest its conclusions should trouble soft tranquillity of spirit. There is always hope of a man so long as he dwells in the region of the direct categorical proposition and the unambiguous term; so long as he does not deny the rightly drawn conclusion after accepting the major and minor premisses. This may seem a scanty virtue and very easy grace. Yet experience shows it to be too hard of attainment for those who tamper with disinterestedness of conviction, for the sake of luxuriating in the softness of spiritual transport without interruption from a syllogism. It is true that there are now and then in life as in history noble and fair natures, that by the silent teaching and unconscious example of their inborn purity, star-like constancy, and great devotion, do carry the world about them to further heights of living than can be attained by ratiocination. But these, the blameless and loved saints of the earth, rise too rarely on our dull horizons to make a rule for the world. The law of things is that they who tamper with veracity, from whatever motive, are tampering with the vital force of human progress. Our comfort and the delight of the religious imagination are no better than forms of self-indulgence, when they are secured at the cost of that love of truth on which, more than on anything else, the increase of light and happiness among men must depend. We have to fight and do lifelong battle against the forces of darkness, and anything that turns the edge of reason blunts the surest and most potent of our weapons.