The Will to Doubt

ng indeed universal, left him a belief in himself, although only in his always doubting self. Descartes' belief in himself has interest for us, for while his thinking follo

earlier Jesuits. He was educated at a school of the Jesuits in La Flêche, and in the course of his mature life he published works of importance not merely in p

lts, too, some moral and some intellectual, if the two are separate, and these faults we shall not consider, though the conscientious historian should never play to the sentimentalist by disregarding them. But with our present task we can afford to forget the faults; just as we cannot afford to lose the interpretations and corrections of the disciples. With interests as vital and personal as ours, we seek something more than matter of fact. Our interest is very near to that of the historical novel, but needless to say, this book i

rmation that set Protestant against Catholic, but in the reformation that appeared in every department of man's life-in art, literature, and science, in morals and in politics, as well as in religion. Man asserted his independe

spiritual enthusiasm-whether among those who were its great leaders or among those who, not less devoutly, were bent on summarily checking its progress-into a practical, thoroughly worldly s

simply met, or opposed, like with like. Reading the history of the time with its controversies and jealousies and intrigues and persecutions, one can only conclude that the honours were about even. If Catholicism felt justified in her acts of sensuous brutality, of almost hellish violence, which culminated in the massacre of St. Bartholomew, Protestantism was made the specious, yet not less welcome, excuse for worldliness, general

led, in the lives of all. Thus contemporary with Descartes, and from one side or another expressing the materialism of his day, there were at least three very significant movements, all of them endorsed by parties, of course under different names, from both of the contending churches, or from their outside echoes or re

ntly, not mere doubters, but satirical, often derisive, scoffing doubters of everything in human life. Conceit of knowledge, whenever asserted, in church or state, i

sects of many names, such as the "Friends of God," "Collegiants," and the "Brotherhood of the Christian Life," but with one ideal, the direct untrammelled worship of God. "God is," they proclaimed in so many words; "and God, just God, is all. Church and creeds and rites and priests are hindrances, not helps, to true religion." This attitude, commentary as of course it was on the conditions of the day, had almost more satire in it and more doubt than any of the words of the most a

tual atmosphere in which just such a purely logical, abstract science would develop was the natural product of medievalism; but Galilei's successes may be said to have precipitated the movement, and in any case for many mathematics became, both in its principles and in its method, an intellectual cure-all, and in consequence not only were remarkable advances made in the science itself, but men went to the extreme of applying the methods and the formul? of mathematics in every conceivable direction. Religion, morality, and politics, as well as natural science, were all subjected to mathematical treatment. Among the surviving monuments to this activity the Ethics, so called, of Benedict Spinoza (1632-77) is certainly the most noteworthy; a work of five books on God, mind, emotions, bondage, and freedom-each with its special quota of axioms, p

s and current issues; and accordingly in the seventeenth century, just by reason of this innocence, they were peculiarly timely. Doubt seemed quite unable to touch them; controversy was turned to agreement before them; and even a truth-loving God, so to speak, could appeal to them in support of his right to rule the minds and the lives of men. You and I might question the reality of the things we count or the justice of the ratio between our wealth and the wealth of certain others in the world, but we could not easily questi

ggested; and its being exact for this cause made it the only credible knowledge for Descartes' time, a time at once of scepticism and mysticism. With Vanini, then, and Charron, who were separately engaged, as was remarked, in a single activity, we may associa

scientists and philosophers, nor practically in some isolated class of dissipated human beings, but really and more or less openly everywhere in the whole life and feeling of society. Even the devout played into the hands

s XIV, "I am the State," whether literally made or not, was hardly less startling. The sensualism of the Catholic Church or the Pharisaism of the Protestant was flagrantly paradoxical, and was keenly felt to be so on all sides. Men turned doubters perforce, and in the fact that with their scepticism rose also a m

school in the first place conscious that he had learned little or nothing, in the second place curious about the possibility of men ever knowing anything, and in the third place evidently through the influence of mathematics strongly prejudiced in favour of introspection, or of thought conducted inde

this. Also he boldly doubted mathematics, so long his own support and the reliance of many others in his time. He did not know surely that there might not be an evil spirit in the universe, a spirit of deception, which even in mathematics was obscuring the mind's vision, making it see things not as they are, but as they are not. Deception was real enough and obvious enough in life at large to make such a suspicion as this at least plausible. Moreover, the notion of an agent of evil in the world had been a commonplace for centuries. It was

ite prerogative, divine or human, and truth was an object of faith rather than thought, say an unchanging programme for life rather than a pure principle-there is such a wide difference between a principle and a programme! But Descartes, as we have seen, identified reality with loss or privation, with such an empty-handed thing as doubt; he recognized no self but the thinker, and no thinker but the doubter. We always feel the pathos of those who, suffering constant privation, find and often declare that life is very real, and yet the sense of reality that comes in this way-namely, in the way of a privation that denies reality all residence in positive experience-is especially strong, and the pathos we feel is certainly not all. Something else hard to name appeals to

that portrayal of self was the beginning and the end alike of physics, the science of outer reality, and metaphysics the science of all reality. Man had been left with his mere self, robbed of beliefs and traditions, and abandoned by everything but his doub

ould be without a sense for truth, an idea of veracity. Doubting all things he must yet believe in truth. Plato said centuries before that mere opinion, however false, was nevertheless always in love with true knowledge, and this Platonic love Descartes found in the doubter's conviction of error. In Plato's spirit Descartes insisted that doubt was a constant yearning for truth, a persistent faith in it. Doubt was informed with truth, with the idea of truth, very much as one has the "idea" of a thing that one cannot master. Man might be a doubter of all things, then, but in spite of his doubt he must believe in the reality of things, not exactly in the individual reality of each and every thing, but in reality in and among all things. For him, do

heir victim by appealing to his proof, borrowing for themselves his philosopher's robes, as if these could be easily assumed and as easily put off. But as to the justice of such a view there is little if any good evidence. Matter-of-fact history is not our first concern here, as was said; yet, whatever may or may not have been uppermost in Descartes' mind, the doubt of his day was both general and very genuine, and the final worth and validity of his thinking lies wholly in that, not in his or any one's mere logical gymnastic or verbal strategy. Moreover, for reasons which hardly need to be given, the strong probability is that, notwithstanding his well-known lack of courage in openly living up to or even thinking up to all the consequences of his reasoning, he did feel in his philosophy not a mere recovery of what had seemed lost, nor a cunning apology for the old, but the birth of a new point of view; and, if this possibility should be verified, among other things the conservatives, who have been borrowing so much support, have been little if any better than parasites. Still, even the probabilities in the case are rela

ho has the divine character of true infinity, who is, too, a spirit in fact as well as in word. Infinity certainly cannot belong to a being that is apart; such a being would at once belie his nature; and "spirits," divine or human, must not be supposed to be, like Elijah, the merely translated beings of this visible and tangible world, for they can belong only to the invisible and the intangible, which is in this world and of it, in its knowledge, in its love and strife, in its changes of all kinds, in its work and in its suffering. Yes, a truly living God, living here and now, is the God of Desca

of perfect truth could ever conjure into existence the unworldly, independently existing, spiritually and intellectually isolated God of the Middle Ages; and for that matter one might say, I think quite pertinently, that money not in the pocket is something less than real money, or-which comes to the same end-that the idea of money, if the pocket be indeed empty, must imply some sense of the emptiness as well as of the money; and with such an implication the idea taken for its full meaning is no such conjurer as Descartes' critics have chosen to imagine it. After all the "mere" ideas, or the "mere" things in general, that appear in controversies, are only ingenious ways of packing the jury. An adequate idea-that is to say, an idea taken just for its full meaning, for what it denies as well as f

ut an including and developing nature, and no transcendent God, but an indwelling, ever uplifting, forward-bearing God. Exactly such a being was Descartes' real self, the self of his I am-"I as thinker and doubter am"-and this self had need neither of struggling with nature nor of wrestling with God in order to get one or the other on its side, for in its doubt, in its constant confession of incompleteness, even-though this is a flagrant paradox-of its own reality as in a sense always outside or beyond itself, it had wo

st, the sanction of another world; it hopelessly divides human nature as personally embodied or as socially organized; it makes life and its sphere irrational and so dependent on a blind faith: but a principle, enthroned, draws all things into itself, using to its own constant realization even the changes and differences of life,

old verities at large, yet nevertheless the verities, or not the old reality, yet nevertheless reality, remained also. Man, after all his doubting, even because of it all, was enabled to return to the world of all those "isms," the all-pervading materialism, the sco

re the doubting and despairing world over, would do well to imagine

an Historical Review, January, 1904, "Ethica