Part 10

And here begins or began a great controversy, nor can the issues of it be said to have been wholly settled even to-day. What did Descartes understand when in this way he proved to himself the existence of God? Was only the God he seemed to have lost once more restored to him, and restored intact? Did he merely justify, and so return to its old place of authority, the traditional theology of his day? Was his doubt, as some would view it, not his own genuine experience, but simply the conceit and pretence of method? These questions need an answer, for their answer affects not only Descartes' regained religion, but also his regained real world in general. So many have been disposed almost to laugh outright at the simple-minded Descartes for his doubting everything from matter and mind to God, only in the end to get everything back. They have seen him as one chasing the verities out by one door only to welcome them with outstretched arms as they run in at another that had been left open for their return; and this view of him has been strengthened by the fact that conservatives in religion the world over have made Descartes their 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 [p.187] 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 relatively insignificant to us, since the people of the time and of later times, and we ourselves from the scepticism and mysticism of the seventeenth century, have learned to think of God with a fulness of meaning never attained before, as--what shall I say?--not a definite truth, but the living spirit of truth; not a passive perfection, but a perfect activity; and not even a divine person, in the sense of one more separate being of consciousness and will to inhabit the universe, but the moving and conserving power of all personality--the very active principle of reality present in the vicissitudes and conflicts of our existence. And, such being the outcome of history, we have to take it as really the meaning of the great Frenchman's formulæ. We put aside the controversy, then, with the simple reflection that results in history or anywhere else are at least very hard indeed to conceive if they are anything more or less than realized motives [p.188] perhaps the realized motives of a man or men building somewhat beyond their clearest knowledge. Whatever has come about must always be what more or less clearly men have been feeling after.

The God whom Descartes really proves to his time, and still more positively to us, must surely be the God not of a satisfied unquestioning believer, but of the universal doubter who loves truth and whose doubting and loving make him the always curious thinker; a God without visibly or even quasi-visibly fixed or specific character of any sort, since with his nature set to such a character, tethered like a beast to a stake or like the sun bound to an orbit, he would not be and could not be divine enough--which is to say, veracious or perfect enough--for a universal doubter's curiosity; a God, then, who 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 Descartes' proof; the God of just that world of movement and conflict, of poise and reality, to which the differences and above all the contradictions of experience, as examined by us in preceding chapters, have already borne witness. Let us recall how we were able to say that the very conflicts of human [p.189] experience were the wisdom of God. And if this all amounts to saying, as apparently it does, that only Descartes' universal doubter, who loves truth too much ever to claim its final possession, can believe in a real God, then we have reached something that will surely repay the most careful reflection.

Some have criticized Descartes for what they regard as a fallacy in his reasoning. He jumped, they claim, without any real warrant, from the idea of a thing as his premise to the actual existence of the thing as his conclusion, from the idea of veracity, so necessary in the consciousness of the doubter, to the substantial existence of a perfectly veracious being, as if, to use their time-worn analogy, the idea even of the very smallest sum of money would make the money itself materialize in somebody's pocket. But, whether or not Descartes fully understood his own thought, this criticism is very superficial, and it gets only a specious cogency from the same matter-of-fact history that we have already pushed aside. No idea, however clear, however necessary even to the consciousness of a doubter, 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 [p.190] 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 for what it affirms, for the complete universe of its discourse--does and must answer to existence; yes, and to substantial existence too. So, again, the God that Descartes by the doubter's idea of veracity proved to his time and to us, if not also as clearly to himself, can have been no mere substantial existence wholly outside the doubter's life and consciousness. In such case the universal doubting would indeed have been only the insincere verbal strategy of a conservative, the conceit of purely artful method, and the jump objected to would have been quite necessary. But Descartes' God answered to just the idea of truth which a universal doubter could honestly entertain; to truth realized only in and through doubt; a God, living in and with the seeking, struggling consciousness of the doubter.

Furthermore, for a being, call him doubter or thinker or what you will, whose very nature in deed and in word is awake to a sense of lack and is in consequence making a continued outcry: "Never this, but always something else, something fuller and realer, something including and using this, something maintained by the very conflicts of this,"--for such a being very plainly there never can be anything that is wholly and hopelessly beyond, that is not potentially and so actively real in him; there can be no outer nature, but an including and developing nature, and no transcendent God, but an indwelling, ever uplifting, [p.191] 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 won the supreme victory at the start. Negatives are always such very sweeping, comprehensive things; and to be, so to speak, one's own negative, to be real and lacking, is somehow to include all things within one's own life and interest. If I may apply an ordinary phrase in an extraordinary way, to be always "beside oneself," always doubting, always wanting, always striving, or to be, in the words of earlier pages, ever and always divided against oneself, is to have enlisted man and nature and God for ever in one's service.

There is truly such a difference between programme and principle 1 It is the difference between medievalism and modernism, between supposed finality and recognized and asserted movement, between supernatural authority and the authority of natural growth. Enthrone a programme, and it is arbitrary and exclusive; it claims, as it must, 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, making faith [p.192] and reason lie down together, and transfiguring both a brutal nature and an inhuman God by revealing them as not indeed formally but vitally rational, and not indeed mortally yet humanly alive. In Descartes' proof of God we see the birth of modernism; the programme deposed; the principle set in the place of authority.

Finally, then, Descartes did not simply restore what had been lost. Though we have been regarding only the religious aspect of his philosophy, we can see in general that, just as not the old God, but nevertheless God, remained to the doubter's life, so also not the 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 scoffing scepticism, the dogmatic mysticism, and the intellectual formalism, with a new spirit, a spirit of real confidence, a spirit of hope, a spirit of life, that just by reason of its wants and conflicts believes itself not only very real but also fully worth while.

And travellers to-day visiting the streets of Paris or going anywhere the doubting and despairing world over, would do well to imagine Descartes, as the modern doubter, travelling and thinking with them.

See an article by H.C. Lea in the American Historical Review, January, 1904, "Ethical Values in History," especially p. 238 seq.

IX.

THE DOUBTER'S WORLD.

The doubter's world is a world in which, as we journey, we shall discover four features that are especially noteworthy and that accord fully with the principles of Descartes as well as with the findings of our own confession of doubt. Thus, in the order, or suppose I say in the itinerary, here to be followed: (1) Reality, without finality, in all things; (2) perfect sympathy between the spiritual and the material; (3) genuine individuality; and (4) for whatever is indeed real, immortality.

I. REALITY, WITHOUT FINALITY, IN ALL THINGS.

Doubt is only a particular state, or phase, of consciousness, and it is worth while to observe that any state of consciousness whatsoever, any attitude of mind, must assume or postulate something real. Indeed, this assumption of reality is so positive that no consciousness is ever without some will to believe, while no will to believe is ever without some real object believed in. Can there be smoke without some fire, or a seeming without some being? Were either of these things possible, then by the same token there could also be a willing without some doing or a wanting without some having. To be conscious of something, [p.194] then, means not only that something is assumed and, if assumed, willed to be, but also that something really and truly is. Of course, the consciousness is; but, however subjective, the consciousness must have more than its mere subjectivity, than its mere seeming or wanting or willing, being in some way genuinely objective or grounded in reality. In a word, all consciousness implies and demands, postulates and possesses, a real world; possibly not just the world formally presented to it, but nevertheless reality, and reality, too, in which somehow the presented world has a place and part.

This may or may not be axiomatic, but at the very least it is very near to being axiomatic, and, near or far, it quite agrees with the conclusions to which, although along somewhat more specific lines, our own thinking and Descartes' thinking have been constantly pointing. As Descartes might have said, there is no consciousness without a thoroughly warranted "I am," and no "I am" without an also thoroughly warranted "The world of my consciousness is and is objectively real." But in implications about reality the doubter's consciousness differs from the believer's consciousness; not by any mere denial, for unqualified denial must be wholly alien to honest doubting, and the doubter is himself a believer, but by a peculiar assumption as to what the reality is. Simply doubter and believer, so far as they may be taken as independent characters, do not live in the same real world. Thus, for the distinct believer--that is to say, for the specifically dogmatic believer, for him who is, or who for the moment may be supposed to be, [p.195] tenaciously and immovably loyal to some specific body of doctrine and to some specific manner of life--reality is always tethered to some stake; while for the doubter it is too real and too free to suffer any such bondage, being infinite and all-inclusive. For our doubter, at once fully self-conscious and honest, no possible experience can ever be in itself real and final, nor, on the other hand, can any possible experience ever be altogether unreal and illusory. His reality, I say, must be at once free and all-inclusive. Indeed, it could not be either of these without being the other. For him nothing is the reality, just because all things must belong to reality. For him, again, the world's reality is nowhere, just because everywhere; in no defined thing fixedly and completely, just because in all things--in them not merely distributively, it is true, but as they work together; and invisible and intangible, indeed generally unknowable, just because any consciousness is necessarily limited to the definite and inadequate mediums, or forms, of positive knowledge.

So the doubter has a real world, but his own real world. Moreover, in the great freedom of its reality we see how all things taken individually or distributively, must be, as the word is used, only "relative"; and in the perfect inclusiveness, how nothing, however "relative," can ever be unreal. Relativism and scepticism have been perenially associated, but relativism is not a nihilistic, but a deeply realistic philosophy; it is just the sceptic's natural realism. All things are "relative," but only because reality is at once free from anything, and yet inclusive of all things. What is relative is [p.196] thus not flatly unreal, as is often supposed, but significantly both real and unreal or neither real--not real to itself alone--nor unreal--not without its part and place in whatever is real. The sceptic, though always a relativist, is thus also a most profound realist, and the nature of his realism must help us greatly to our view of the doubter's world.

Moreover, Descartes and his followers were also nativists or intuitionists, and, at least for the freer interpretation here permitted, their nativism was of a peculiar order, and it involved, accordingly, a world which was real in a peculiar way. Usually nativism has stood for the assertion of certain inborn and so necessarily valid and unchangeable ideas or characters or powers; as when men contend that particular ideas of God are unassailable because immediately intuited as a part of man's very being, or again when men declare a particular genius to be born, not made, or insist that a voice of conscience born, not bred, in them, tells them explicitly to do and even to make others do this or that specific thing, to live and make others live in this or that specific way, to accept and make others accept this or that specific programme of politics, morals, or religion. Furthermore, nativism of this prevalent type not only has claimed final validity for what is thus inborn--or given independently of the changing conditions of experience--but also has commonly punctuated this claim by viewing the inborn, or the intuited--for example, the dictates of conscience--as direct, immediate, unequivocal signs and mandates of God himself. Genius has been not human, but divine. The intuition at large has [p.197] passed for nothing more or less than a supernatural revelation. But such an understanding of the innate, though serviceable beyond measure to the "specifically dogmatic believer," and though implying too, as of course it should, the natural, appropriate world of such a believer, does not agree with the principles of Descartes.

Such an understanding of the innate can imply only a world not merely of definite, substantial reality, but also of definite, substantial unreality. How real to some people, how definite and substantial the "unreal" is; how brutally fixed and yet how alien to what they are given to finding real. They are nativists of the conventional type, and for them the negatives of all things are as fixed and as really or as substantially not this or that as the positives to which what is innate for them bears its special witness. Their world, in short, is a world of tethered error as well as tethered truth, of hopeless, unmixed evil as well as a wholly untainted, unassailable--and why not say also hopeless?--virtue, of absolute and effective lawlessness as well as an unswerving law, of a free and omnipotent devil as well as a free and omnipotent God; for, in simplest language, the rule is a very poor one that does not work both ways. A world, however, which is so constituted, calls emphatically for revision of the view that imparts its character to it. Where the unreal is as real as the real, the evil as effective as the good, the false as conclusive as the true, there is certainly need of some second thinking. As some good Irish philosopher might put the case, if just this is wholly good or true or real, and just that is wholly [p.198] evil or false or unreal, then the good or the true or the real cannot be exclusively just this, the evil or the false or the unreal cannot be exclusively just that, and the innate, responsible for a world so made, cannot be just in terms of certain fixed ideas or characters or powers. When, forsooth, has the manifest existence of evil in any form, of intellectual or moral error, of political anarchy, of religious heresy, or even of natural violence, not shaken man's conceits about what is and what is right? The very conceits--and this the more as they are definite and assertive--help to make the manifest evil, very much as a definite law has its part in making a particular crime, and the evil so arising, as it is distinctly manifested, cannot fail to assail and unsettle the conceits.

According to the Cartesian nativism, on the other hand, particularly as it was developed by such men as Malebranche and Spinoza, the innate, which is always at once the final appeal of man's conceits and the conclusive witness to what is absolutely real, was indeed one with the divine or supernatural, but it was perhaps just by reason of its truly divine or supernatural character and origin untethered. How could the universal doubter be born with a specific knowledge or a specific programme of anything, when the definite or fixed, the specific in any quarter whatsoever, must always be a possible object of doubt? Only the purest principle, or spirit, is impregnable against the attacks of the sceptic. To doubt such a principle is indeed only to enhance its importance. The sceptic, then, the universal doubter, is born only with, and what is more he cannot be born without, a real [p.199] interest and constant faith in truth, in true knowledge and right action, but no special experience can ever compass the length and the breadth, the depth and the height of this interest or this faith. He has a native love for truth and righteousness, a belief in them, as real and as inviolable, as universal and as necessary, as his doubt; but the very doubting in him forever saves both the truth and the righteousness from being destroyed by satisfaction or crucified by any final embodiment. He loves and he trusts with all his heart, and he lives in a world that forever serves the truth and the righteousness of his love and faith.

So, taken at least for what he promised, or for what he said between the lines, Descartes was a nativist without the nativist's disastrous bondage to form and creed, to fixed character and specific programme. He was a nativist, but for him the innate lacked its self-destructive definiteness; it was just a spirit or principle, or what I have also called a life or power, ever present not in some, but in all experience, and so at once sanctioning all things, and, because able to find perfection in none alone, each single thing being relative, sanctioning also a constant conflict between things as good or true or real, and things as bad or false or unreal. Whatever is relative is necessarily, so to speak, both-sided or divided against itself. The relativity is such conflict. Before the judgment-seat of the innate, in short, all things, being relative, must be parties to conflict both individually and collectively, nor is their conflict anything but an old story to us. All the paradoxes of experience have been evidences of it. The conflict apart for the present, however, the meaning [p.200] of Descartes' nativism is just this: truth in all experience, reality in all things, and reality, or truth, a principle, not a programme. Just this, too, discloses to us the nature of the doubter's real world.

In the last chapter we saw in particular the idea of God which the universal doubter would naturally and consistently entertain and cherish. We saw how in the proof of God Descartes, deposing the programme, set the principle in the place of authority, and how in consequence God became identified with all that was human, with all the seeking and striving, the hoping and despairing, the erring and the suffering, of man's life. God's nature just drew all things into itself; the very conflicts of life were his perfection; the incongruities of experience were his infinite wisdom. But the doubter has a metaphysics, or cosmology, as well as a theology; Descartes lost and regained a world as well as a God; and the doubter's metaphysics, or cosmology, proceeds from this simple creed: Reality in all things. So runs the creed's supreme article, and its two important clauses are these, equally familiar to us: Reality without form or residence--real as a spirit, not a programme, and: Nothing finally and fixedly real in itself, yet all things working together for what is real. With this creed clearly in mind, moreover, we may look out upon the world and see things that possibly we have never seen at all, or not seen so clearly before.

We see that just because reality is so profound, so spiritual, and so inclusive, just because nothing can be absolutely real in itself, all things must be "relative"--this we saw before, but have we ever quite understood [p.201] stood the meaning of relativity?--and must be relatively at once real and unreal. Perhaps I am still adding little, if anything, to what has been said already, but distinctly and emphatically the real world can comprise only things that individually are relative, relatively real or good or true, and that being thus relative secure their place and part in absolute reality only by being also relatively unreal or evil or false. The very conflict of the relative ipso facto puts it in perfect unity with the absolute. And so, seeing this, we see not only a world of relativity and consequent conflict, but also a world whose universal relativity makes for a genuine absoluteness, and whose conflict can never be in vain, but instead is always realizing and effective. Thus, all things relative, that is to say all things at once real and unreal, good and bad, true and false, are in the constant service of the absolute; and then, only employing again the language of religion and, if not exactly interpreting, at least adapting some well-known lines:

All service ranks the same with God-- Whose puppets, best and worst, Are we; there is no last or first.

All things, serving reality, are whatever they are together; yet could not be that, were there not a constant conflict in and among all things. All men serving God are whatever they are together; yet, in like manner, could not be that were human society not a sphere of conflict harsh and unceasing.

So we find ourselves well upon our way in the world of the doubter--and what a world it is! No [p.202] finality, because so much reality. Conflict, forever necessary to its effective realization. Relativity, that is to say finiteness, of all things, of all things in it, just for the sake of its own true absoluteness, just to conserve its own actual infinity.

And, also, in such a world human life, individually and socially, gets new interest and vitality. There is given to human life so much fellowship, and yet, at the same time, so much hostility and competition. Society and the individual, though neither loses its own peculiar importance, are so vitally intimate with each other. We cannot, however, enlarge now upon this point. Another consequence of the peculiar realism of the sceptic has a more pressing interest.

Is our universal doubter naturally and honestly an evolutionist or a creationalist? Of course, he may be neither, or he may be one or the other with a meaning different from that usually recognized. Terms like these are so very hard to control. Conceivably the doubter, a very versatile character always, might even be both evolutionist and creationalist. But, as the terms are commonly used, he must be said at least to have his face towards an evolutional and away from a creational view. The difference, again, is seen in that between principle and programme. An evolutional world is the working out of a principle; a created world, of a programme--the fixed design of some specified being. True, one may speak with much significance of persistent, continuous creation, of a creation active at all times and in all things, and it is to the point that the Cartesians made much of a doctrine that was very near to such a notion; but a truly continuous creation [p.203] could be only an orthodox substitute, or disguise, for evolution. A truly continuous creation could be bound by no programme; by definition it could have neither date in time nor location in space. And, what is of even greater moment, a continuous creator, ever present and ever active, could never be more or less than the persistent reality of the world itself. How could he be aloof or different? So have we come, once more, to the immanence of God as a necessary idea of the sceptic.

The doubter's world, then, is the scene, as realistic as you will and perhaps we may say, too, without unwarranted enthusiasm, as bright beneath the morning sun, of the ever present, ever active life of God or--with the same meaning--of an evolution which we may call God or nature as we please. From this thought, too, if only we remember that nothing is unreal and no experience is without some contact with reality, there is but a step to the idea that God and man are actively parties to one and the same life. To repeat from above, the conflicts of human life are the perfection, the perfect living of God. God is, nay, God's life is, not what some, but what all men do, and the doubter's world is just the world, the world of things always relative, the world of constant conflict, in which alone this can be true.

II. THE PERFECT SYMPATHY BETWEEN THE SPIRITUAL AND THE MATERIAL.