The Will to Doubt. Alfred H. Lloyd
or of the substance of matter; the one is ideal or of the substance of mind or spirit. The many persons are merely human, the One is divine. Strange, indeed, that men should ever take one more as the unity of all the rest, but if possible it is at least, at first sight, stranger that this one more should be relegated to a sphere wholly apart and peculiar. In the madness of such compounded contradiction there may lurk real method, but of the contradiction and of the compounding there can be no question.
Even the soul, a something, an entity, that each one of us has been in the habit of claiming for himself and of holding very sacred and inviolate too, has been subjected to the same way of thinking. Doubtless, since God has not been spared, we should hardly expect the soul to escape. We view the soul so materialistically, even while we insist that it is not material. We say, we think, that it is something in the body; yet, of course, we are at our wit's end to tell just what particular place it occupies there. Similarly, God is supposed to be somewhere in the Universe, yet in no assignable place, and the chemist's universal atom is somewhere also, though surely not in the same place, and, wherever it be, waiting with its own, yet certainly a divine patience that ought to be inspiring, for experimental discovery. But with regard to the soul, although the life and unity of the body, although one of the things in the body, the soul itself is not bodily at all; it can enter the body and is important—who dares say how important?—to the body, and it can, as at death, leave the body, but though for a time in, it never is of the body. A strange standpoint certainly, but men insist that it is quite as true as it is strange. It seems very much like saying that when you build a house, in order to ensure it real solidarity, to give it real permanence and integrity, you should make a special point of putting your bricks or your lumber together, not with clinging, well-set mortar, or strong pins and straight-driven nails, but so much more sensibly, because so much further from what would be like the material bricks or lumber, or like the equally material mortar or nails, with those real and really compact things, absolutely continuous or indivisible, or at least indestructible even when disintegrated, empty space and pure uneventful time. With such space and time there would be union indeed I But, again, strange as such a procedure in building a house would be, men insist or at least I can readily imagine their insistence, that houses are built in that way, and built successfully. The method may seem absurd, but they insist that it is not madness. Are not abstract plans and such seemingly unsubstantial things as mathematical formulæ, which are very near to being made of empty space and time, the real strength and integrity of all our great modern structures? And the soul, whatever be said of its being an immaterial thing, is nevertheless, even for being both immaterial and thing, the very sinew of the body.
Here may be method, then, and sanity, but there is always contradiction, obstinate contradiction, compounded contradiction! The soul, unity of the body, is only another thing or part in the body, and at the same time, though in the body, it is after all not really of the body. Possibly, perhaps necessarily, such patent contradiction, and, more than all, such compounding of contradiction, like doubling a negative, make for what is without contradiction, but this wholesome result is not consciously intended, and in the face of all, whatever our hopes or our beliefs, we must feel grave doubts and confess our doubting. Those who do build better than they know, if enlightened, would not again build in the same way. Two contradictions may be better than one, but even two make us wonder.
Closely connected with the contradictions in our customary ideas of reality, and ideas of wholeness or unity, there is the way in which we calmly take opposite sides in our notions about space and time, and about that very fundamental factor of our experience—causation. These are, all of them, so general and fundamental as possibly to seem too abstruse even for mention in this place, since throughout these chapters we are courting simplicity, but of space, and time, and causation, only what is very simple needs to be said. Thus to the ordinary consciousness how fatally things are separated from each other by conditions of space and time. Then is not now. Here is not there. Space and time are only physical and as brutal as all things physical, separating this from that with a finality that knows no degree. Lovers, continents apart, despair over the cruel distance. Time tears us ruthlessly from those dear to us. What is to be, as well as what was, though in the next moment, is absolutely beyond our grasp. Could anything be freer from dispute than the reality and the separating brutally of space and time? Yet, almost at a whisper, all distance and all duration become as nothing. Do not the lovers write to each other, flatly and passionately denying that they are far apart? Do we not constantly forestall the future and retain the past? Indeed, when all is said, a thousand years are as one day, and all the places of the earth are one. So real, and so vast, and so physical to us but a moment ago, space and time have now passed into mere phantoms of the imagination. We live, then, not only in a world that is brutally spatial and temporal, but also, and at the same time, in a world that is not spatial and not temporal at all; and living here—or there?—we have again to wonder and to doubt even in our belief. To our own constant amazement we find that we make our life a bridge over what would seem to be an absolutely impassable chasm.
As for causation our temerity is not less surprising. Wet and dry moons, unlucky Fridays, holy and unholy numbers, haunted houses, so-called providences, free in the sense of indifferently, irresponsibly free wills and fiat deities with their suddenly made worlds may not be generally in vogue at the present time, at least among the better educated, the enlightened and not infrequently conceited classes, but even among the wise and the consciously informed they have their natural offspring, and I am not so sure that many of them might not be found almost intact, at least in the more retired parts of the consciousness of my readers. To illustrate, for some if not for all of us, this is a world of many free and independent causes, yet also it is the single effect of one cause; it is again, our mood having changed, the single effect of two absolutely unlike beings or natures, each of them an all-powerful cause; it is a sphere here and now of causal, creative, productive activity, but it was itself created once for all long ago, at a date which the exegete hopes—in the equally distant future!—to determine for us; it contains some things that are only causes and some that are only effects, or some, or all, that are both causes and effects; it has parts that are the accepted causes of other parts; it has causes, those acting now and the one original cause, that are temporally antecedent to their effects; and, not to make the list longer, it is variously a world of one last effect, of one first and only cause, of an infinite series of causes and effects, and in whole, or in part, it constantly shows something made out of nothing or nothing resulting from something. A wondrous world most assuredly; and yet at first statement this record of our various notions of causation may not appear as a very serious arraignment of the consciousness which it exposes. Moreover some people actually glory in such a wonder as it presents. But, to be plain, though also monotonous, the uncaused cause or the effect that is only a part of the whole, or the cause or the effect that refuses to share in the other's nature, or finally the causation that is now so individual and so manifold and so effective, and that was once so single and so complete, is something that must give any thinker pause. Can a moving body move an immobile body? Can some things in the universe be mobile; others not? Can the moving body and the moved body belong to different moments of time? Can motion lead to rest or rest to motion? But our ordinary ideas of causation would allow, or even require, an affirmative answer to every one of these questions.
Alas! Shall this labour proceed? Can we afford to continue it? The defence of the doubter is getting almost too successful; it is becoming too personal to be pleasant. The task of picking up the room of our ordinary life grows harder, not easier, as it moves forward. Every thing that we touch tells of a spirit of violence in our nature. Even the small boy can not have been more lawless, for his toys were all battered perhaps, but not, like ours, all broken. Can we afford to go on? Afford it or not, we simply can not help ourselves, for our self-confidence is already shattered; our attention to the disorder is already beyond our control; each one of us is the doubter we would defend.
Here close at hand, where we have to see it, is another contradiction common in all human experience. It inheres in our conceits about knowledge. For us, on the one hand, the world we know not only really is, the tree out yonder or the planet miles and miles away being really and actually there, but also is just the world which our knowledge reports to us. What we have knowledge of is in our belief a real thing in and by itself, and we know it literally and directly, not figuratively, not afar off through symbols; we know it as