The Will to Doubt. Alfred H. Lloyd
of ordinary life is constantly addicted to. True, for some reason lying deep in human nature, a defence that ends by convicting the jury of error, is hardly likely to lead to the immediate discharge of the prisoner; judges or jurymen are not in the habit of taking a rebuff in that way; but in course of time the prisoner will be justified, and his justification, however tardy, is all that now concerns us. To his defence, therefore, and the discomfiture of his judges, but to the latter without any malice, we turn at once.
And where shall we begin? Our predicament in this defence is something like that of the small boy, bewildered over the task of "picking up" his nursery. "I can't do it," he says. "There are so many things; I can't tell which to take first." Poor little fellow! If he halts now, what will he do when the littered room—I had almost said the littered playroom—of his later life confronts him? Contradictions under foot everywhere are certainly not less confusing than blocks, horses, papers, trains, marbles, picture-books, and the like—or unlike—scattered over a nursery floor.
Here, for example, in practical life is the natural, physical world. How real, brutally real, it is; its very law is fate; its forces are no respecters of persons, inexorably ruling and compelling all alike, giving life and taking it, full of the grimmest humour, raising hopes only to cast them down. Is some one rash enough to suggest that things physical are only so many ideas, real only as states of mind, of God's mind possibly, in some way coming to consciousness in the senses of men? The practical man knows a thing or two about that. He kicks a stone, or strikes his fist loudly upon a table, and so ends the matter, laughing the mad idealist away. And yet, prestissimo change! What do we hear him saying now? This brutally real world of physical things and powers is but a fleeting show; a thing only of space and time. What is really real and abiding is the spiritual that is everywhere and always. Another world there is, not to be spoken of in the same breath with this present world, a world compared with which this is but a mist before the eyes.
In so many familiar ways this duplicity towards what is real is manifest. People go to church to do such a wonderfully strange thing; nothing more nor less than to save their real souls from an unreal world, or sometimes to hide a real worldliness under unreal rites or symbols. "You may think me worldly, selfish, sensuous," says some one, "and I can not deny that often I do seem so, but this life of mine is ever only a yearning after the things that are spiritual, for which, as you see, I pray so earnestly, and which have nothing at all to do with one's worldly life." Yes, we do see, and particularly we see that things spiritual are often an impertinence in worldly affairs. The "real self" never does the things that are really done. Only this, just this is where the duplicity lies. Again, from some one else, a practical man presumably and an accuser of the doubter, we hear the following: "Only the spiritual life is real; look to it that you fear, as I fear, deeply and constantly the material world hanging like a sword over us all." Can it be, as would certainly appear, that superstition is still among us, that so readily we can give reality to unreality, that belief in ghosts still holds our human minds? Once upon a time—at least once—the Christian Church rose in bitter resentment because a certain man, by merely questioning the separate reality of the physical world, threatened to deprive the holy priesthood, with all its time-honoured prerogatives, of its heaven-appointed labour. Yet what is to be said of a church that prefers to think of an independent physical world, by which man is bound and damned, in order to save for itself the task, either hopeless or useless, of rescuing him? Labelling a man "rescued" or "Christian" does not make another-world creature of him. In political history, too, what a paradox it is that kingship by divine right has always been also kingship by physical might. The practices of an avowed supernaturalism have always been strangely materialistic.
So, in high places and in low, in the affairs of men now and in the past, the physical and the spiritual have ever been in a most remarkable relation; each real in and by itself, but with a most unusual courtesy also unreal at the slightest motion from the other; each now supreme, and now wholly subject; each now the whole life of man, and now the very opposite, the antipodes of all that is human; and each self-existent and independent, yet never without its real need of the other. Here surely is contradiction, or vacillation, in experience that is, to say the least, very confusing to him who reflects.[1]
But, to take up something else certainly not less confusing to the ordinary mind, "practical," and unaccustomed to reflection, this is a world of separate, individual things, of chairs, hands, atoms, eyes, stars, men, stones, books, leaves, rivers, lives, mountains, relations, notions, distances, days or years, and so on, indefinitely and above all indiscriminately; a world, moreover, into which in part God, in part man, defying an equally powerful agent of chaos or dissipation, has put at least for a time a certain kind of order, an order that might be said to be good enough for all practical purposes. Yet with all its indiscriminate manifoldness, and with the irregular, uncertain conflict between chaos and order, it is nevertheless a single world, in short, just one more individual thing, one more example, perhaps outdoing all others, of the marvellous license with which human beings are wont to speak and think of a "thing." Chairs, hands, mountains, men, stars, and the whole universe, are all "things," and in this world of things, that is itself another thing, or, should I rather say, apart from this world of things, that is another thing, there are two, at least two, discordant powers taking turns at making order and disorder.
Confusion indeed! Nor have I exaggerated it. The loose association of chairs, distances, and days; the easy assumption of two supreme agents working against each other; the certain uncertainty about these agents being in the world or out of it, of it or not of it; and the readiness with which the whole universe, the all-inclusive thing, is treated as only one more thing to be included: these habits of the ordinary mind show a confusion that seems like insanity. Can we even face them safely and soberly?
For special regard I select just one, perhaps the central one; the habit of treating the universe, the unity of all things, as but one additional thing, the whole, as if it were only another part, the complete and infinite as if distinct from or outside of what is finite or incomplete; or again, in good old philosophical terms, the One as if it were another and so in effect, but one of the Many. Now some there are, and their number may be large, who never have thought of the contradiction and consequent confusion in the notion of a single world made up of many single things, yet itself another thing, or of the Infinite as external to the Finite, or of the One as not in and of the Many, but the contradiction is there, and can scarcely need more than mention to be seen.
Even in theory, scientific or philosophical, the wholeness or unity of the many things of the world has sometimes been taken for just one more thing, as when Anaximander taught that it was "that thing which is no one of the world's things," or for one of the many things supposed by it to be unified, as when Thales so naïvely declared all things to be water. Anaximander and Thales were only ancient Greeks, albeit very wise and enlightened Greeks, living as early as 600 B.C., but in very recent times they have had followers. Electricity has been taken as the one force of all other forces. Our chemists, some of them, have been hunting down the one element among the rest. Statesmen and churchmen have often dreamt of one man as somehow in his single person expressing the unity of all human life, and more than once they have even imagined him present in the flesh. God, although the Being in whom we, as ourselves persons, live and move and have our being, has Himself been another person. Society and its supposed component individuals have made two orders of existence. Life and living creatures; history and its many events; the solar system and its planets: nature and all her various kingdoms: these have also been held apart, making amazing dualisms. But, simply to repeat from above, taking the whole or the unity of all things as itself an independent thing, as itself one more thing, is a contradiction that needs only to be stated clearly to be appreciated. Let me hope that I have stated it clearly.
Nor is this particular conflict in our ordinary ideas yet before us in all its fatefulness, for—as if to defy the principle of consistency to the very last degree of its forbearance—we are often, if not usually, given not only to unifying our world of things in terms of just one more thing, or of persons in terms of just one more person, but also to thinking of this one more thing, or person as sui generis, as altogether different in nature and substance. So do we mingle our duplicity about reality with that about the unity of things. The many, for example,