The Will to Doubt

ecessary formalism, so far as it acts upon a merely external world. With regard, for example, to the last point, just so far as the ideal of objectivism is realized, science becomes merely so much t

r technique all these things, as well as the more familiar matters of method and apparatus and material, are here included. Physicians, we are told, and not infrequently also their patients, suffer from a professional ritual and etiquette, but they are far from being alone in their misery. Scientists, would-be objective scientists, and all who appeal to them, are a close second. Technique must have its real uses, but plainly it has its limitations. It is one of the enabling conditions, a sine qua non of science, if science is to b

s in social evolution, in spite of, nay, even because of its abstraction by a distinct class and the assumption of a professional garb, is witness to this relationship. Again, fruitful science is practical invention, not abstract discovery, and the real life of a person or a society or a race is as important to it, as much a warrant of its conclusions, as any object, however mathematically described or describable, with which science was ever concerned. As for the thing invented, the tool or the machine, in gener

in some other departments in life, so in science, death is a condition of success. Science must die to its objective self before it is saved; it must lose its whole world to gain its own soul. Or, to put the same idea differently, if the assertion be not too much like verbal play, a subjective

fe, perhaps a sudden result without in any way being also a condition of development, to suppose science to be solely objective and for its own sake, is nothing more or less than simply to stultify oneself completely. Even for the historian, whether avowed evolutionist or not, whose great business is to remind us that what is here or what is now is not all, the devotion to science for its own sake, which also in other times has possessed the minds and hearts of certain men, can be at best only a local and a passing phenomenon. Finally, apart from the standpoint of evolution or history, it is to be said that human society at large is sure to resent what may be styled the aristocratic

made formal and empty, but also, as perhaps only the other side of the same truth, a would-be objective science materially-that is, for its scientific doctrines-and formally-that is, for its motives and methods-is always in practice dependent upon the demands and sanctions of real life, and so not purely, or not dualistically

he social, which is always narrow, and the personal. The whole must be always "objective" to the part, the possible to the actual, the personal to the social; or, conversely, the "objective," natural world can be only the convincing witness to the part or to the actual or to the social, not that there is an independent, wholly external world, but that there is a whole or a possible or a personal.

cience can give only a new material content, or a new arrangement perhaps of an old content, to existing and time-worn forms of thought; it cannot possibly do that in which real progress must always consist, namely, develop, recognize, and adopt new forms of thought, new categories; it cannot do that without betraying its own ideal of mere objectivism. Objective science-to give a commonplace example-has said relatively to a certain doctrine of creation that spirit did not precede matter, but instead matter preceded spirit, and-except for the excitement of the drawn battle which such a startling declaration has precipitated-this can hardly be said to have involved any great advance. Cause and effect have indeed been made to change places by the new deal, and perhaps in common fairness it was high time that a change be made, but no new conception of causation itself has been recognized. The new creationalis

of what above all else it is important to see. Are mind and matter, cause and effect, purpose, society, brain-processes and consciousness such well-established conceptions, are they such independent constants in the scientist's formul?, that wholly uncritical questions of fact are all that one needs to ask about them? Why, when one really thinks about it, to assume, as the questions of fact of an objective science are made to assume, that anything either is or is not something else, is about as blinding and ill-advised as could well be. It has the pleasing form of open-mindedness, but only the form. It is very much as if some earnest, yearning truth-seeker should exclaim: "I would see clearly; therefore I will not open my eyes." No doubt it keeps the scientist busy, eternally busy, dealing and redealing his facts or data, as busy indeed as the playful cat that so hotly pursues her own tail, but it does not contribute much that is po

at their presence or absence can be established by an experiment or two or ten thousand conducted on strictly objective principles? No conceptions are fixed, and instead of questions of fact we should have, what a strictly obj

ed, for this question of God's existence and for any other question of objective fact a negative answer is almost, if not quite, a foregone conclusion, since the very putting of the question is, ipso facto, evidence that a new idea of the thing inquired about-of God, perhaps, or purpose or society-is at least just below the horizon of man's consciousness, and so that the old idea has already lost its validity. Nothing ever is where you seek it, or what you seek in it

e in the form of its question can make it substantially as well as formally progressive. Only a tempering of its negative answers to a merely relative meaning can make it honest. It is looking at wh