The Will to Doubt. Alfred H. Lloyd
a working standpoint, the literal truth of most, or even all of them, disappeared long ago. Miracles, like laws, come and go; only the miraculous, like the law, goes on forever.
And this leads to something else, to something also very common, perhaps the reverse of the foregoing. With what an unaccountable delight many of us have accepted naturalistic explanations, for example, of the sun standing still, or of the retreat of the waters of the Red Sea, or of the Immaculate Conception, or of any of the many other marvels in either the Old or the New Testament, 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, positively irreverent, is as blind religiously as it is ignorant scientifically. Cannot such men appreciate, and cannot all others who do as they do also appreciate the fact that naturalistic explanation of any miracle, if really a genuine explanation, may prove the fact, but must in just so far destroy, I do not say the miraculous, which is indestructible, but the particular miracle?
The lawful miracle, then—lawful, of course, so soon as explained—is one more contradiction in our prevalent notions about law. That it exemplifies, too, a habit of mind which is exercised by us in many directions besides that of interpretation of the arbitrary things 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 down the law as to what men are by nature, and sometimes to "human" law, as when the conservatives in government or business with their vested rights, be these coal mines, oil fields, or political privileges, appeal for "justice" to the courts or to the military.
But, to say no more, with the lawful miracle, with law the strange support of what is arbitrary, with this as a very good example of the duplicity which in general we are all of us wont to allow in our practical life, the present exposure of our ordinary consciousness must come to an end. With regard to the real substance of things, or to their unity, 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 led at least to suspect that the disorder which we have found is inherent and essential, having the nature of an original human defect. Such a defect, however, is cause for doubt; so that man, above all "practical" man, having inconsistency or duplicity as almost, if not quite, an uncontrollable habit with him, should be himself a prince of sceptics.
And yet, although we have indeed found man spending at least his waking hours in a room that seems disorder incarnate, and although before the court of practical life the doubter seems thus to have been thoroughly justified, while his too hasty judges are in turn condemned, nevertheless the case for doubt is not of such a character as to leave absolutely no hope for belief. 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 into bases of belief, that an experience essentially paradoxical may not be as hopeless as at first sight it may appear, that in all the madness there is at least a chance of some method? The view of science, however, must be examined before our attention can be turned definitely upon such a possibility. Enough if in our present doubting we are still left with a little hope.
[1] In the rise of Christian Science, against which I have no special grudge, although I have already taken exceptions to its claims, there is a special case, special because affecting a single, relatively small class, of the popular hospitality to contradiction. Thus, the Christian 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 infectious or contagious diseases," yet not because such diseases have any reality, but because the illusion of them is so real as to make the "Christian" treatment of them both imprudent and impractical. Philosophies and religions of illusion are certainly weird, uncanny things!
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