The Will to Doubt

s sitting upon the case were composed, as of course it would be likely to be, of faithful believers chosen at random from the different walks of practical life

e prisoner; judges or jurymen are not in the habit of taking a rebuff in that way; but in course of time the prisoner will be justified, and his justification,

o many things; I can't tell which to take first." Poor little fellow! If he halts now, what will he do when the littered room-I had almost said the littered playroom-of his later life confron

cal are only so many ideas, real only as states of mind, of God's mind possibly, in some way coming to consciousness in the senses of men? The practical man knows a thing or two about that. He kicks a stone, or strikes his fist loudly upon a table, and so ends the matter, laughing the mad idealist away. And yet, prestissimo change! What do we hear him

dly affairs. The "real self" never does the things that are really done. Only this, just this is where the duplicity lies. Again, from some one else, a practical man presumably and an accuser of the doubter, we hear the following: "Only the spiritual life is real; look to it that you fear, as I fear, deeply and constantly the material world hanging like a sword over us all." Can it be, as would certainly appear, that superstition is still among us, that so readily we can give reality to unreality, that belief in ghosts still holds our human minds? Once upon a time-at least once-the Christian Church rose in bitter resentment because a certain man, by merely quest

ourtesy also unreal at the slightest motion from the other; each now supreme, and now wholly subject; each now the whole life of man, and now the very opposite, the antipodes of all that is human; and eac

art man, defying an equally powerful agent of chaos or dissipation, has put at least for a time a certain kind of order, an order that might be said to be good enough for all practical purposes. Yet with all its indiscriminate manifoldness, and with the irregular, uncertain conflict between chaos and order, it is nevertheless a single world, in short, just one more individual thing, one more example, perhaps outd

the certain uncertainty about these agents being in the world or out of it, of it or not of it; and the readiness with which the whole universe, the all-inclusive thing,

at is finite or incomplete; or again, in good old philosophical terms, the One as if it were another and so in effect, but one of the Many. Now some there are, and their number may be large, who never have thought of the contradiction and consequent confusion

hey have had followers. Electricity has been taken as the one force of all other forces. Our chemists, some of them, have been hunting down the one element among the rest. Statesmen and churchmen have often dreamt of one man as somehow in his single person expressing the unity of all human life, and more than once they have even imagined him present in the flesh. God, although the Being in whom we, as ourselves persons, live and move and have our being, has Himself been another person. Society and it

of this one more thing, or person as sui generis, as altogether different in nature and substance. So do we mingle our duplicity about reality with that about the unity of things. The many, for example, are physical or of the substance of matter; the one is ideal or of the substance of mind or spirit. The many persons are merely human, the One is divine. Stra

soul, although the life and unity of the body, although one of the things in the body, the soul itself is not bodily at all; it can enter the body and is important-who dares say how important?-to the body, and it can, as at death, leave the body, but though for a time in, it never is of the body. A strange standpoint certainly, but men insist that it is quite as true as it is strange. It seems very much like saying that when you build a house, in order to ensure it real solidarity, to give it real permanence and integrity, you should make a special point of putting your bricks or your lumber together, not with clinging, well-set mortar, or strong pins and straight-driven nails, but so much more sensibly, because so much further from what would be like the material bricks or lumber, or like the equally material mortar or nails, with t

y of the body. Possibly, perhaps necessarily, such patent contradiction, and, more than all, such compounding of contradiction, like doubling a negative, make for what is without contradiction, but this wholesome result is not consciously intended, and in the fac

s not now. Here is not there. Space and time are only physical and as brutal as all things physical, separating this from that with a finality that knows no degree. Lovers, continents apart, despair over the cruel distance. Time tears us ruthlessly from those dear to us. What is to be, as well as what was, though in the next moment, is absolutely beyond our grasp. Could anything be freer from dispute than the reality and the separating brutally of space and time? Yet, almost at a whisper, all distance and all duration become as nothing. Do not the lovers write to each other, flatly and passionately denying that they are far apart? Do we not con

res, each of them an all-powerful cause; it is a sphere here and now of causal, creative, productive activity, but it was itself created once for all long ago, at a date which the exegete hopes-in the equally distant future!-to determine for us; it contains some things that are only causes and some that are only effects, or some, or all, that are both causes and effects; it has parts that are the accepted causes of other parts; it has causes, those acting now and the one original cause, that are temporally antecedent to their effects; and, not to make the list longer, it is variously a world of one last effect, of one first and only cause, of an infinite series of causes and effects, and in whole, or in part, it constantly shows something made out of nothing or nothing resulting from something. A wondrous world most assuredly; and yet at first statement this record of

der, not easier, as it moves forward. Every thing that we touch tells of a spirit of violence in our nature. Even the small boy can not have been more lawless, for his toys were all battered perhaps, but not, like ours, all broken

real thing in and by itself, and we know it literally and directly, not figuratively, not afar off through symbols; we know it as it is; we know a real world, and we know it face to face. Yet, on the other hand, with all this simple confidence in our knowledge, what are we also given to saying, or assuming when we do not say it? Even in the moment of our confidence we humble ourselves with the cry o

ctions of society or the distinctions of time bear the responsibility for what must always in the end be the conflicts of their personal lives, is but another illustration of the difficulties besetting their ordinary views of things. Duplicity of view, like anything else in experience, must always be more than a matter of different people or different times, for the simple reason that, whether directly personal or not, it is present in the environment of the individual person. So, even if those two positions, confidence in worldly knowledge and religious trust and humility, for the sake of argument be momentarily associated only with different persons or social classes or times, our present point will really be just exactly as pointed, for t

man race. The objection, then, that was raised does not remove contradiction as a cause of doubt, but merely emphasizes what in a subsequent chapter must occupy us, the social aspect of experience.[2] Thus, not only does experience, in ways now coming to our view, teem with contradictions, and is contradiction a cause of doubt, but also experience so conditioned is social as well as individual, a matter of personal relations between man and man as well as a matter of the single person's inner responsibility. Society in

r formal and illusory; about causality, so actual and positive now, and yet so complete yesterday, or ever and ever so long ago; and about knowledge, so perfectly wise and so thoroughly vain and foolish; if, I say, men are double in all these

ed attitude towards causation, human persons or wills being the causes specially involved. In general the causes of the universe are of three sorts, those of natural force, those of supernatural agency, and those of human agenc

se three ideas of the two powers, the two selves and the two classes, cannot be made really to accord with each other, although they possess an outward agreement, is it not clear that any attempt to take the good and the evil as two mutually exclusive things, be they spirits or selves or classes, is to destroy at once the real substance of virtue and the real value of the consciousness of evil? In practical life this means, what everybody knows so well, that an isolated, unduly holy righteousness, a sort of touch-me-not goodness, is bound to be empty, to be only ritualistic and aristocratic or pharisaical, and in any one of these respects it appears decidedly unrighteous; wh

d deeds to environment, our good deeds to ourselves, while for others we are prompted to do just the reverse, referring their good deeds to environment, their bad deeds to themselves. Such is human nature-not, to be sure, at its best, but common human nature; and even when we escape the foregoing personally invidious distinctions, we still-and this is the main point-treat self and environment as two naturally conflicting, altogether independent sources of conduct. Two different and independent sources of anything, however, can only make for conflict and contradiction. If only ou

to do all that I ought to do," or, "I am free to carry out certain necessities of my true life." A startling paradox; and, above all, a strange way of escaping the necessities of environment, unless, forsooth, it really opens the door, or supplies a secret door, by which the necessities of environment and the necessities of one's true life can come together? If freedom demands law, why should it hold aloof from the natural law, the law of environment so definitely present? Possibly, then, as once before suggested, one contradiction in experience may be the corrective of another, the paradox of freedom and duty only correcting the contradiction of two sources of conduct, personal will and environment. In the case, for example, of

uty to the moral law, while their freedom, unless a hopeless lawlessness, is bound by the environment and its law. Again, good and evil are each unmixed, and moral ac

ing but freedom? Certainly no law can ever be known unless the sphere of its operation accords with the nature of those who have the knowledge. Simply to know is to share in and be at one with whatsoever is known, and the clearer and more cogent or rational the knowledge, the truer and realer is this participation or union. The law we know, then, must have all the meaning and the natural authority of a law of our own en

ly reasoning beyond our premises-the very essence of superstition-for the routine we know can never answer substantially, or even formally, to nature as she really is. Our positive knowledge, our knowledge that arrives at specific formul?, even though these formul? reach the noble dignity of mathematics, is bound to be in terms of some particular experience, personal or national or racial; it is relative and special; it is partial knowledge; and he is superstitious,

breaking has not some sanction; there can be no lawfulness which does not warrant some lawlessness. This truth, perhaps as nothing else could, must show the error in the notion of mechanical routine as affording an adequate description of the ultimate nature of things. Where the whole always gives point to the negation of any of its parts, where the law always sanctions some breaking of any law, to think of the whole in terms of its parts may be human, but it is of the human which is prone to err. Those

ast: the loss of freedom or the death of God, for which any law that man has had knowledge of has been responsible, has always been only the forerunner of a larger and fuller freedom and of his God's resurrection and glorification. This or that law may rob and may kill, but this or that law, let me reiterate, never is the law, and why common opinion has to judge all things in heaven and earth, as if it were, is hard to comprehend. Neither nature nor God, if these two need to be thought of as two, is law-bound; each rather, with a meaning which I must hope now to have made clear, is law-free. The law in whi

r, to the great satisfaction of thousands have used the infinity of nature's or God's lawfulness, which is to say the only partial and tentative character of all human knowledge of law, as a clinching proof of all the miracles in the Bible. Can they not see that like what is lawless in general, the miraculous must be in the premises only relative to the experience of the time? Even chance is

estament, and have thought that so our old beliefs are to be preserved. I have myself heard honest and earnest men, even members of an academic community, appeal to parthenogenesis as a fact in nature which would at least make the miracle of Christ's birth scientifically plausible as well as spiritually significant; but such an appeal, besides being, in my opinion, positivel

hings of the Bible can hardly need be said. In life generally the arbitrary is peculiarly fond of going to law, sometimes to what is called nature's law, as when revolutionists of all sorts-strikers and radical reformers-raise the cry of "natural rights," laying

y, or to the nature of space and time and causation, with regard to the worth of knowledge, with regard to our human conduct, to its freedom and responsibility, or finally with regard to the place of law in nature and in the life of man, our ordinary consciousness is manifestly inconsistent and vacillating-nay, is grossly contradictory; and we are l

Now and again in the evidence, as it has been disclosed, have we not felt the presence of something, not yet given its due weight, that would make man more than a mere doubter and unbeliever? Have we not been led to suspect that somehow, without loss of their reality and validity, the most cogent reasons for doubt, even the contradictions in our views of things, might turn

istian Scientists would reduce all reality to mind, but at the same time they busily deny reality to a large group of mind facts, namely and notably, the ideas of disease. Recently, it is true, according to the newspapers, their healers have been told to "decline to doctor inf

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