The Will to Doubt

ialism, which is at once not less earnestly cherished

objective world apart from a subject is like a workshop without a workman-a collection of unused and so unconnected tools and materials each one of which may have an infinite number of uses; and the objective scientist views it very much as a stranger, perhaps a savage-may I be forgiven that mark-might view the lifeless shop, seeing now this thing, now that, but never the living unity of all the things. So, to repeat, as soon as the self or subject is removed

onscious or unconscious, have often helped discovery, but nevertheless his situation, not to say that of his patient, is full of humour, and always among other troubles he is under the error of partiality or one-sidedness. And in science generally the specialist always does and always must dream. His dreams may be waking dreams, but he is always transgressing his own proper bounds without ever clearly comprehending that he has transgressed. Nor, be it admitted, can this necessity of dreaming be a wholly unmixed evil to science. However unfavourably it may reflect on the final, literal validity of any special science, it only shows nature, or reality, preserving her unity against the attempted violence of specialism. It shows that in spite of the specialist being all eyes for his own peculiar object, the mind that is within him and that is above all e

eracious has no choice but to be also voracious, and when, for example, a physical scientist insists on seeing his world only physically, while in reality it is of course, to say no more, a world of chemical process also, and even of vital and mental character, he is sooner or later constrained to admit to his thinking what above were called abstractions or logical constructions, but what also pass under the name of "working hypotheses." These are formally true to his physical standpoint, but any outsider in order to explain why they are hypotheses that work must call them compensating or conserving conceptions-in short, logical constructions that are, or that in part involve, substitutes for the neglected points of view, being, as it were, the secret agents of a univer

logy only biology and psychology only psychology, and while also all illustrations must come from the field of their special studies, and may therefore only set them more firmly in the wilful blindness of their specialism, still the principle of a conserving mind, or an eternally conserved truth or an indivisible reality, is a disturbing influence which they cannot evade. Then, too, I am forgetting and allowing them to forget a very important fact in scientific work to-day. In these times the running together or merging of different sciences, as if through something of the nature of a chemical reaction, is a very familiar phenomenon. It is as familiar, although not so loudly heralded, as that of the railroads and industrial companies; and it has been taking place with such persistence and confidence as actually to suggest a natural affinity, each of the sciences involved havin

d by some one that just because sciences, whether in clearly related or in widely separated fields, are useful to each other, just because they can serve, as they do, in the r?le of methods of each other, they are not necessarily in any real and natural affinity. May not their association be purely one of utility, involving no surrender of special individuality and requiring in any case only temporary relationship? The question is absurd. Any means that really serves an end must have something in common with t

y and constancy or even immobility, in motion too as inclining to vibration, which suggests poise or tension, or to rotation, in which we see rest as well as motion, and finally, not to extend what might be a long list, in the infinity of space and time or of quantity, the physical sciences have hidden entrances for the silent, usually unnoticed admission of what is psychical. But I may seem to be jumping too far, to be presuming too much. Then put the case in this way-not quite so direct, but to the same goal. All of these conceptions, so necessary to a "working" physical science, need very little examination to be seen to be treacherous to the physical standpoint and its peculiar categories. One might as well try to make water unsupported assume definiteness of form as to c

elf shown that it cannot be, merely and exclusively physical. By virtue of its working hypotheses, which are as secret doorways, it is psychical also. Though darkly and indirectly it is our human self-consciousness. Perhaps i

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nces, for those very physical things quantity and matter. The devil will have his due; even an optimistic theology has to recognize him. And psychology has a sensuous self, the self of the purely sensuous consciousness, which has alwa

ual participation still holds. By a sort of projection or reproduction mind and matter both appear, the one openly, the other in disguise, in each kind of science. However unawares, the physical entertains mi

infer from the idea that all sciences seek law? Certainly law is not special as science has seemed to be. Somehow law is not many, but one. Many laws can only be different phases or cases of one law. The very essence of law is to be one and single and all-embracing. To put the case theologically, could any one suppose that God made the laws of chemistry and sociology and psychology as so many separate and independent enactments? On such a supposition he had been a strange God indeed, lacking the very thing, unity of being and character, which men have come to associate with divinity, and what theology demands of God, science, even against its own specialism, must demand of its object. Again, the way in which by implication, when not openly, one science is given to handing over its hardest problems to another is very instructive as well as amusing. Not many years ago I was present at a joint meeting, a good-natured and doubtless honestly ambitious conference of biologists, physiologists, and psychologists, and the addresses then made have often reminded me of one of Thomas Nast's famous cartoons: A closed ring of political grafters, none other than the notorious Tweed and his followers, each pointing to his neighbour and putting on him the responsibility of a very embarrassing situation. "Find the rogue" was the artist's inscription; but wit

nes either into direct paradoxes or into tenets that oppose and contradict each other. Thus, as has been shown, specialism in science is itself a paradox, and, as now asserted, every special science assuming precise form and real validity becomes a home of paradoxical or contradictory doctrines. Indeed, these doctrines just through their opposition appear be the most effective agents of that compensation for neglected points of view, or conservation of all points of view, which we are insisting is for ever forced upon the scientific specialist. In the cases of physical epi

e you, gentle reader, never held and held and held to some particular notion about things, modifying the details perhaps little by little, but always imagining yourself strictly loyal to the old, old view, and then suddenly discovered your consciousness alive with contradictions? If you have, you know, possibly too well, the natural history of every special science, and also you can sympathize deeply with the hen and her cherished chicks that proved ugly ducklings. The special science, I repeat, must be hospitable, however grudgingly, to strangers, though at the expense of becoming thoroughly divided against itself. Such hospitality is an obligation-call it logical if you will, or moral or metaphysical, for the name matters not if it only suggests coercion-which is not less binding upon the scientific spirit than upon the spirit of racial unity, always urgently present in you and me. You and I may be so special

mere negation, is at least an important factor in the case; perhaps, again, the very hopelessness of the dualism, which a flat, unequivocal negation plainly involves, is also to the point; but, beyond all peradventure, we do accept the direct negative with a patience, even an indifference, that may greatly assist our natural conservatism, whether of thought or life, but that on being recognized certainly does arouse our wonder. Good and its opposite evil, true and false, real and unreal, unity and plurality, life and death, the

bration, too, already referred to here as motion in poise or at rest; infinity as one more quantity that is significant because not quantitative; the sensation, a component element of consciousness that cannot possibly be composite; the plenal physical medium, which can be physical only if displaceable by other material things, and so plenal only if not physical, and which has served besides as an immobile yet infinitely elastic basis of motion or its transmission; and, to give just one more instance, in moral and political science the person, a self-existent, actively free being or entity whose every deed as well as whose every thought is responsible to something, being adaptive and therefore social, social with other persons and with nature, and whose every virtue implies depe

n a devil, even nowadays more or less personal, is clearly a blood relation to science, and it is besides by no means so unnatural or irrational as is often declared, particularly by the scientists. Its two errors, just because opposed, conserve what is real, and no science can claim more than that. Indeed, a science, notably a special science, like a theology, might well be described as a system of mutually corrective errors, of abstractions that, because abstract, di

destructive, seemed after all to be the promise, so to speak, of a new dawn for the very things denied. And now in what has been said of the specialism of science, the same turning of the edge of attack is all but manifest. Every special science is narrow and relative-it is in the form of an unreal dream; but reality somehow gives form to the dream, for there are always the compensating conceptions. The contradictions by which the compensation has been effected are, then, interpretable not more as causes of doubting science than as reasons for confidence in it. Thus, to be tedious again, the special science is relative and formal; it is a peculiar system of ingenious abstractions that in so far are also errors; but its formal character includes also contradiction; its errors are so related as to correct and balance each other; so that, even in the face of our necessary scepticism about it, science has been evident to us, as also was the consciousness of ordinary life, as somehow always building better than it knows or than its methods or ideals and doctrines viewed only from without would lead one to expect. Moving in it we have certainly felt the presence of, something, not yet called by name, which is very like a principle or power of validity, preserving the r

oubt before our very eyes have turned, or are in process of turning, into possible bases of belief, and our confession of doubt