The Will to Doubt

gs has any ground to stand on, such must be the case. The sin or the defect cannot be unmixed; its very originality, its essentiality, must line i

with nature, man and God, but more than all-and this was the special interest of the last two chapters-because of the paradoxical and self-contradictory nature of all human experience. As regards the last point, our ordinary consciousness, the often-boasted consciousness of common sense, was found to harbour a widespread, very persistent duplicity towards such vital things as reality, wholeness or unity, space and time, the causal relation, knowledge, moral freedom and natural law; and science, to which many when dislodged from their ordinary standpoint have been accustomed to retreat with greatest confidence and hope, was examined with similar results. Science was found in its rise to involve abstraction of interest and disruption of life, and in its avowed point of view to be-suppose I say at this point-impossible but contradictory. So, in a word

bit of duplicity or contradiction we have again and again had suggestion of an agent of validity, a power for adequacy in experience, which would hold even a phenomenal, relative, partial experience to a real world. In short, really the strongest reason

n also of you or me, though we may not claim the same authority, the human mind has been wise and deep enough to see evil, representing all the negative things of life as an organic part of the best possible world, even of the world created by an infinite God. At least since Leibnitz's time, I say, optimism has generally justified itself, not by denial of evil in the world, but in and through evil. Not long ago a young man who was perhaps more profound and reflective in his habits of mind than wise in his manner of statement, said to me that the most spiritual truth as

ellow-being say, "that after all, in spite of myself, I did recognize the other side. You abused me and called me double; yet so doing you were double too. I see now that my duplicity saved me, not, however, for your view or for another's, but for the both-sided and true, which we both shared and served"; and exactly such a reflection on the inconsistencies of experiences, in their less or in their more fundamental manifestations, is the burden of the present chapter. Again, to one who complained that with every breath he took he had to contradict himself, respiration being as necessary to his breathing as inspiration, j

ts testimony to the intimacy of doubt and belief. Subjectivity, relativity, phenomenality, artificiality, partiality, and instability-certainly an imposing and appalling list, though logically I must suspect it of being at least a cross-division-are all noteworthy defects; but supposing the list exact and

bit of self-contradiction, and they seem worth saying because so effectively and so comprehensively they w

ogician, for whom reality was essentially dynamic, would demand manifest opposition, for in no other way could his art, limited to conditions of rest,[1] be equal to its subject. Where experience is contradictory, then, there is movement, whether for that which is known or for him that has the knowledge. In your character or mine, so like a lover's unselfish selfishness in its apparent inconsistencies, in our double views about reality or unity or law, in a subjective-objective science, in an

erful mountains, plainly impossible of ascent, have often been reached from the other side, and that difficulties of breathing are often due to a needless exhaustion. To take a first step, then, contradiction is only difference, or contrast, at its limit. Naturally there is some opposition, some mutual resistance, in all difference, in that, for example, between one man and another, or one thing and another, between religion and art, red and green, or warm and hot, and often the difference or the opposition seems very slight; but contradiction, so called, is only this difference abstracted and unrestrained-it is difference at its worst or best, difference as only opposition, or, once more, difference where any possible unity of the things opposed has lost all material ground or

e aspects as actually enriching and deepening the unity, but they still fail fully to appreciate how the real unity is immanent and immediate in the differences. Again, in all their thinking they contrast, and may consciously observe that they contrast, only objects or people that really have something in common, comparing, on the other hand, only such as in some way

ago-have found the same life worth living. The Roman Law and the Roman Holiday, working together, like the right and the left hand, different yet in sympathy, made the great empire. Two men, furthermore, in active, open conflict are in truth at serious difference with each other; but, as they might even say, if their conflict were in the form of a debate, where words instead of fists or pistols were the weapons, in the bare, unapplied principle involved, or say in the abstract, in the final success of whichever is the "best man," they do and they must agree. Simply throughout this life of ours there has been and there can be no idealism without conflict and no conflict, whatev

human society, as a whole, solidarity. Against the material it sets the spiritual; against [p.141] the particular, the general; against the subjective, the objective; against the living, the dead; against the lawful, the lawless; against the caused, the uncaused; and to all these, the sp

theologian, whenever life takes a residence, death must ensue sooner or later. Life and death, then, as opposites, become the medium of real life. But not only have we here a helpful illustration, also we have a suggestion that should prevent an easy misunderstanding. In general, as so plainly in this special case, the opposition, so necessary to reality in experience, to a real life or to any real unity, can itself be complete and effective, not through any single instance of extreme difference, not through the opposition of just two distinct things, but only through an accumulation or summation of all possible instances, so to speak, from difference at zero to difference at infinity. In fact, a real opposition or rather a truly infinite difference, could be only in such a sum. Not the single climax of death, but the constant dying, to which it is only a climax, is what makes real the opposition of life and death and makes this the medium, as was said, of the real life. Death must constantly condition all the movements and processes of life: it must have all possible degrees. And, in like manner, extreme difference at large, just to be real itself and to make for real unity, must be in and through all possible degrees of difference. In other words, the perfect opposition, or contradict

ncealed a reassertion, but with fuller and deeper meaning, of the intimacy of unity with reality. What makes for real unity or wholeness, then, must impart realistic character, giving actual contact and intimacy with just that of which, so to speak, the world is made. Now individual things or ideas always show life suffering in some measure under tangential digressions from the circle of its real wholeness, and only opposition can save them or can preserve the reality to which they both belong and contribute. Has not Emerson, among many others, declared with a cogency and a depth of meaning which quite defy the superficiality and levity attractive to a few, that mere consistency is narrow and confining? Any particular view-point or idea or ideal, any particular thing or activity, simply needs an opposite to balance the abstraction or digression which being particular must always involve. Particularity, specific individuality, is certainly a necessary condition of real worth in life, but with an equal necessity there co

uly practical leadership, any leadership that is all along the lines of life, be it of things, ideas, persons, or social classes or parties, can never be confined to a single individual representative, but must be instead a leadership of many. No thoroughly practical leadership, I say, can ever be on one side or the other, but instead of being one-sided it must be both-sided, or rather, infinitely many-sided; it must be between or among all the different and opposed individuals; it must lie, perhaps in a sense sleep, in rivalry and competition. There can be no visible leader, whose leadership is wholly practical, whether of things or realities-for the metaphysician-or of ideas or categories-for the logician-or of persons or classes-for the statesman or the moralist or the theologian. Metaphysical reality, the truly practical and real

d anti-vitalism or that between atomism and energism; or in philosophy, between dualism and monism; or in theology, between naturalism and supernaturalism, would also be most illuminating; while, also perhaps appealing only to the few, in the logic of the negative, as it has developed from the earliest times, or in psychological theory-for example, in the dispute of the advocates of the innervation theory and the afferent theory, or in Hering's theory of visi

er chapter, it will be readily recalled, an impulse to social life was found to be intimately connected with the attitude of doubt, and here clearly we are confronted with only another view of the same fact, since contradiction has become our most cogent reason for doubt and is now seen to require the social relations. An individual whose experience is ever divided against itself is, ipso facto, a social character, his social environment, whether in its narrowest or broadest manifestation, adding nothing to his nature or to the struggles of that nature, but only making the division against himself constantly and manifestly

the sentiment of a really searching optimism, called once before a sacrificial and heroic optimism, may find some assurance-never an unmixed hate, never a wholly idle destruction, never an unmeaning error. Can anything, indeed, that has another thing against it-that has, in short, an opposite-ever be itself unmixed? The good or the evil in society, being always opposed, is always also shared. So few people recognize, or appreciate, what a great mixer opposition is. Death is the passing only of inadequate or unworthy life. Hate witnesses only a false love; sin, a pharisaical righteousness. Destruction marks an imperfect construction. And in all its forms, evil is not so much something in and by itself as an exposure and reproach of what is supposed to be unmixedly good. Public crime, for example, is not so local as

judged evil, and through the conflicts, in which the division is expressed, what is true and good and vital is being forever kept real. Or, to repeat, society is the natural medium through which movement, unity or integrity, poise and reality, and pra

question been a means of social development, being all-important to the awakening of the social consciousness and conscience, all men should at once take thought and find it their duty to turn criminals; or, again, that because death has a fundamental part in the order of nature and is, moreover, of greatest spiritual worth and significance, we should all morbidly seek it, being successfully righteous only by being suicides. True, we do need to recognize the positive function of crime in the progress of civilization, or in the history of law, and also to be aware of crime as a possibility in our own lives, and we need to be ready to die and to feel besides that dying we are far from losing all that is wort

ost if not quite hopeless reason for doubt, has truly become all but transfigured, seeming now a source of real assurance. With Heraclitus of old, only perhaps seein

ruth is not a creed, but a spirit. Reality is not a thing, but a life. And for being a spirit truth is only the more realistic? For being a life, reality is only the more substantial. Perfection, too, even the Perfect One, with whom we associate the true and the real, is no particul

hat agent or principle of validity which has been found to hold our experience, naturally so faulty, to contact and intimacy with the real world. A spirit of truth, a principle of validity there is, to which the very faults of experience give witness, and in view of this we who doubt, who doubt

wn, for example, in the lo

evertheless, a word or two expressing the nature of the difference between his view and the view advocated here can hardly be impertinent. Thus, if I read him rightly, Mr. Bradley has argued from the paradoxes of experience to the complete, hopeless phenomenality of experience, while in this study of doubt the argument has been from the paradoxes of experience to a thoroughly realistic experience. Again, Mr. Bradley's Absolute is able to include the phenomenal, the relative and contradictory, only because this is s