The Will to Doubt. Alfred H. Lloyd
well as a necessity. We are creatures of habit, but we have, and we cherish, no habit stronger or more essential than the habit at once of adaptation and variation.[2]
A fourth general fact, very closely related to the foregoing, is this: Doubt is necessary to life, to real life, to deep experience. Doubt is but one of the phases of the resistance which a real life demands. Real life implies a constant challenge, and doubt is a form under which the challenge finds expression. The doubter is a questioner, a seeker; he has, then, something to overcome; he fears, too, as well as hopes.
Were all things settled once for all, were all things clearly known and freely executed, or were the consequences of the things to be done always capable of being accurately foretold, there would be no real living, there would be nothing really to do. In such case life in general, or in any of its different expressions, religion, or politics, or art, or science, or industry, or morals, if one may suppose for a moment that any of these differences could ever develop, would consist in a purely passive condition, a mere fixed status; it would be a wholly static thing falsely called life; its movement, if movement there were, could be only the rest or routine of strictly mechanical motion.
To a real life, then, doubt, as an evidence of challenge and resistance, is absolutely necessary, and appreciation of just this necessity is certainly an important part of our present confession, and the confession is important, because it is sure somewhat to brighten what heretofore may have seemed a dark horizon. Confession often changes night to dawn, and here the association of doubt with real living, with a world in which there is always something to do, awakens emotions that such words as relativity, and instability, and change, and even game, have discouraged, or even wholly suppressed. Leasing, perhaps better than any one else, has given expression to these emotions, and has at the same time reflected what in his day had certainly begun to be, and what in our own time very widely and very deeply is, the ideal spirit. Thus, as he wrote:—
"Not the truth that any one may have or may think he has, but the honest effort which has been exerted to compass it, makes what is really worthy in human life. For not in having, but in seeking truth, are those powers developed, in which alone man's ever-increasing perfection consists. Possession makes us inert, lazy, proud. If God held in his right hand the perfect truth, and in his left the ever-restless struggle after truth, and bade me choose, although I were bound to be ever and always in the wrong, I should humbly select the left, saying: 'Father, give; surely the pure truth is for Thee alone.'"
This is a splendid utterance, and it has touched a responsive chord in human nature the civilized world over, not so much, however, for the humility of the choice as for the zeal in a life of seeking and striving, or for the idea that knowledge is itself a dynamic thing, a living, moving function, not a passive possession. The knower is made also a doubter, and the doubter appears as having, in a sense, forgotten, without for a moment betraying, the constant doubting within him. If I may so speak, he has, even while he lacks; such is the condition of his seeking; such is the way in which doubting is necessary to real living. Doubt saves from the possession that makes "inert, lazy, proud," yet does not take away. Doubt makes experience always deep, even putting consciousness in touch with reality, and it makes life for ever living.
Still others may be quoted in the same vein. Socrates made life, particularly mental life, if this may be supposed distinct, essentially active or dynamic when he identified true wisdom with self-conscious ignorance, with a power in one of always finding oneself in error, and in modern times Hegel has done the same thing as effectually, though perhaps not in general so intelligibly, by finding a principle of negativity or contradiction the very mainspring of all consciousness, of all thinking. Known truth is at once imperfect or even false, being necessarily partial, relative, and at best only tentative, very much, let us say, recalling something already remarked, as an established form of life is no longer the real life, but merely the developed means to a revolution, a life that is passing even as soon as it has come.
For the rest, the positive value of doubt to real life can hardly need further emphasis. In one form or another the idea, as important as many may find it commonplace, must constantly recur in these pages. We turn, therefore, to our fifth, and for the present, last general fact, with which we shall find ourselves still in sight, perhaps even in clearer sight of the brighter horizon. We are all universal doubters; doubt underlies all consciousness; even habit has gloomy doubt, as Horace would say, sitting up behind; like pain or want, like ignorance or contradiction, doubt is a dynamic principle, making experience deeper and ever deepening, and life real and alive; and fifthly: As man is dependent and feels dependent, he is a doubter. His widespread, or rather his universal, sense of dependence begets doubt. Witness the fact that doubt shows man a seeker after company; the company of nature, the company of his fellows, the company of God.
Of course the social impulse, thus to be associated with doubt, is only one of the phases of its dynamic and life-giving character, for a social life, a life of dependence on what is without, of real relations beyond self, must be a life of real and constant movement. Nothing so much as such relations gives vitality. This special phase, however, of the place of doubt in real life is a very interesting one, and it suggests, besides, so much that is of positive value as almost to transform what so far has been in large part a sceptic's confession into a sceptic's boast.
Thus, in the first place, doubt seeks the company of nature. "Return to nature!" has time and again in human history been the cry of the human heart. Has civilization lost its hold, seeming unreal, artificial, formal? Has morality become hollow? Has a lover suffered the shattering of his dearest hopes? Has a creed lost its credibility? Have you and I wearied of our study or our labour, whatever it be, and come to wonder if it, or anything, is worth while after all? Have friends, ideals, and God Himself deserted us? We turn, and all people turn to nature. Exactly so the homesick traveller takes himself homeward, or the prodigal arises and goes to his father. And your experience and mine, and the poetry of all literatures, which tells so deeply the experiences of all men of all times, are a constant witness to the comfort, and forgiveness, and renewed confidence in self that nature imparts. Nature is our infancy, in which all things are possible; she is our untrammelled will; she is infinitely hopeful for us and infinitely kind; her necessity is so wide and so open that its very law, so different from any human law, is our greatest opportunity. True, our resort to nature is sometimes, perhaps in greater or less degree always, by the way of moral dissipation, or political anarchy, or intellectual suicide, or religious profanity; but even these dark ways to the home and the great mother-heart of us all have never been hopelessly misleading. If history and literature and personal experience can be trusted, even they have led to a kind nature. Have you never failed in anything and become reckless, and then profited from the very knowledge of yourself which the recklessness uncovered? Personally and socially recklessness, return to nature that it is, is always a helpful assistant to nature's great teacher, experience. Great is the pathos, but also, as it is understood, great is the inspiration of Rousseau's passionate outcry that his will was perfectly good. He was incapable of a single wholesome relation in life, yet, so he said, no man was better than he! Rousseau, philosopher of revolution, spoke for nature. Out of her great love, nature always takes the will for the deed—and perhaps she alone should have the privilege of doing that; for she knows that the deed, however violent, however bad, is sure to leave at least the will good.
But intellectually, as well as morally or politically, or as well as in any of the departments of the practical, emotional life, when trouble comes we turn to nature. Nature has a mind as well as a heart, and when state, and church, and social tradition have lost their validity and infallibility, their various formulæ being no longer reasonable to us, when we have to depose them from their position as our accepted teachers, then we become scientists, which is to say, intellectual prodigals. Science, the open-minded study of nature, is only a homesickness for truth seeking relief. Does the scientist doubt? He is one of the princes of doubters. He doubts, as in due time we shall more fully appreciate, even to the extreme position of agnosticism. He doubts all things human that always he may be learning of nature.
So the companionship of nature for the comfort and pardon which she is sure to give, and for the deeper knowledge which she is certain to impart, is a passion of the doubter. True, no passion is