Part 3

The general facts about doubt are now before us, and although much needs yet to be said in explanation, and a further fact is reserved for a [p.028] concluding chapter, still not so darkly as it began this first chapter in our confession of doubt has come, perhaps somewhat abruptly, to an end. We have next, entering more fully and critically into the conditions of our human experience, to scrutinize closely our ordinary habits of mind, those common-sense views of things that on the whole prevail among men. In these ideas, impulsive, unreasoning, above all often flatly contradictory, we shall find some of the strongest reasons for our doubting nature.

Mental Development of the Child and the Race. Methods and Processes. By James M. Baldwin. Macmillan, 1895.

Let me add, that if certain people, struggling in the present maze of educational theory, and objecting, with a zest and a combativeness that fairly belie their contentions, to the use of interest as the primal educational motive, if these people would only recognize change as always a part of interest, their greatest trouble would be removed. They refuse to have education easy or pleasant; interest, they insist, must make it so; and doubtless the advocates of interest are in part to blame for this view; but change, which to my mind is involved in all interest, includes resistance and struggle; change is ever a challenge to effort; and, such being the case, an education led by interest is not necessarily easy or idly pleasant. The real meaning of the interest theory, at least as I have to understand it, is simply (1) that the natural child or the natural man always has something to do, and (2) that education should promote that something. It is far from meaning that there should be no compulsion or discipline, no pain or self-denial. Whoever honestly over expected to do, or ever did any thing without these? The interest theory, then, would not eliminate hardship or discipline, but, to my understanding, by making education serve actual life, would substitute a natural for an artificial and externally imposed hardship. Not hardship, but real achievement makes the educated man.

III.

DIFFICULTIES IN OUR ORDINARY VIEWS OF THINGS.

If the doubter were brought into court under indictment for his offences against common sense, against ordinary experience and belief, and the jury of his peers sitting upon the case were composed, as of course it would be likely to be, of faithful believers chosen at random from the different walks of practical life, no better defence could possibly be offered than a simple statement of the incongruities which the consciousness 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. [p.030] "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 [p.031] 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 [p.032] 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.

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, [p.033] 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 [p.034] 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 [p.035] 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, are physical 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 [p.036] 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 [p.037] 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 [p.038] 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, [p.039] 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 [p.040] 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 [p.041] 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 it is; we know a real world, and we know it face to face. Yet, on the other hand, with all this simple confidence in our knowledge, what are we also given to saying, or assuming when we do not say it? Even in the moment of our confidence we humble ourselves with the cry of our utter foolishness, making our recognized foolishness only a counter-conceit. What but perfect folly is our knowledge before God's knowledge! "Illusion! The dream of a few hours or a few years!" is so often the best we can say of the whole fabric, past and present, of human consciousness. Not now, but only in the hereafter are we to see reality face to face; now we see only very darkly, if at all.

Some one here protests strenuously, raising an objection that might very properly have been raised [p.042] before. Thus, I am told that only different people, or only the same people at different times, ever hold two opposite views, whether about knowledge or any thing else; never one and the same person at the same time holds them both; and so the present arraignment can not be as serious as it is made to appear. Well, with this objection I can agree in part, for there is at least a half-truth in it, but by no means does it tell, either in general or in particular, that is, with regard to the special case of the conceits about knowledge, the whole story of double living or double thinking among men. Indeed the easy way, in which men make the distinctions of society or the distinctions of time bear the responsibility for what must always in the end be the conflicts of their personal lives, is but another illustration of the difficulties besetting their ordinary views of things. Duplicity of view, like anything else in experience, must always be more than a matter of different people or different times, for the simple reason that, whether directly personal or not, it is present in the environment of the individual person. So, even if those two positions, confidence in worldly knowledge and religious trust and humility, for the sake of argument be momentarily associated only with different persons or social classes or times, our present point will really be just exactly as pointed, for there is always a third person or class or time into whose direct single experience the duplicity or contradiction is bound to enter. Consider, for example, the case of a child. For a part of the week he is perhaps at school; on Sunday at church; and the life in which he thus takes part must [p.043] appear to him, there being in all probability little or no reservation on either side, to be hopelessly divided against itself. Now is knowledge power; now hindrance and greatest danger. Now he is to learn all he can; now, on the other hand, to forget what he may have learned. So is the conflict about him made his personal conflict, and exactly as in his case, so in all human experience the individual must share personally whatever the environment affords.

The individual and the environing society are the closest of blood relations, though we often allow ourselves, all too easily as has been said, to lose sight of the fact; they live under the same roof, and rely for sustenance on the same fare; and while to some the contradictions of life may be overlooked as personally impertinent and unimportant, being referred wholly to the environment, they are plainly the unavoidable heritage and the personal responsibility of every individual that counts himself a member of the human race. The objection, then, that was raised does not remove contradiction as a cause of doubt, but merely emphasizes what in a subsequent chapter must occupy us, the social aspect of experience. Thus, not only does experience, in ways now coming to our view, teem with contradictions, and is contradiction a cause of doubt, but also experience so conditioned is social as well as individual, a matter of personal relations between man and man as well as a matter of the single person's inner responsibility. Society in its manifold classes, in its conflicts and in its history, may help us to see the whole of experience, the unity [p.044] of experience on all sides and in all parts, but it never does, and it never can, relieve the individual, or deprive the individual, of any side or part of what makes up an experience-whole. Grown men and women may be more definitely set in their lives and their ideas to certain specific things than children, but in no one, young or old, can such specialism ever be wholly exclusive of any of the other things.

To return to our immediate interest, if men are given to being doubters in their views about reality, spiritual and material; about unity or wholeness; about space and time, on the one hand fatally vast and independently real, and on the other formal and illusory; about causality, so actual and positive now, and yet so complete yesterday, or ever and ever so long ago; and about knowledge, so perfectly wise and so thoroughly vain and foolish; if, I say, men are double in all these different ways, in their moral judgments they seem, if possible, even more confused, and the confusion, the division against themselves, is the more serious for being with regard to what so directly concerns personal life and human fellowship.

To begin with, as will indeed readily appear, the offences of our moral judgments, which often, if not always, are largely influenced by religious or rather theological conceptions, are only a peculiar expression of the two-faced attitude towards causation, human persons or wills being the causes specially involved. In general the causes of the universe are of three sorts, those of natural force, those of supernatural agency, and those of human agency, and although toward them all essentially the same attitude is [p.045] assumed, it is worth our while to consider particularly the causation that is commonly adjudged to belong to the human will and the moral ideas that spring from it.

For the purposes of the moral consciousness we translate the two conflicting powers of our world, or the spiritual reality and the material, into two agents of good and evil respectively, each having a power of doing whatever, true to its peculiar character, it may will to do, and then, as if in accord with this way of thinking, we find two distinct selves, a good self and an evil self, within each one of us, and we also divide the body social into two exclusive classes, the class of those who are identified with the righteous life and the class of those given to the unrighteous life, the sheep and the goats, the elect and the damned. But, to say nothing of the fact that these three ideas of the two powers, the two selves and the two classes, cannot be made really to accord with each other, although they possess an outward agreement, is it not clear that any attempt to take the good and the evil as two mutually exclusive things, be they spirits or selves or classes, is to destroy at once the real substance of virtue and the real value of the consciousness of evil? In practical life this means, what everybody knows so well, that an isolated, unduly holy righteousness, a sort of touch-me-not goodness, is bound to be empty, to be only ritualistic and aristocratic or pharisaical, and in any one of these respects it appears decidedly unrighteous; while an isolated unrighteousness, besides having at least the moral worth of a protest against its counterpart, is in itself exactly like the original [p.046] sinfulness of the theologian; being unavoidable, it is wholly without any warranted opprobrium. Indeed, it all but comes to this, that righteousness as a fixed thing, fixed to a part of the universe or to a part of the individual self or to a part of society, is really in just so far evil, and the direct opposite of such righteousness is proportionately good. Good and evil, then, may not mix well, but certain it is that contradiction results from the common attempt of men to regard either as untainted or untempered by the other.

Still, not upon this real difficulty in our moral judgments would I now lay greatest stress, although it is real enough and important. In yet another way our moral consciousness is at war with itself. In estimating the worth of human conduct, so far as this is determined by its initiation, we are in an almost hopeless tangle. We are more than likely to think of other people as influenced by their environment in what they do, of ourselves as quite original and responsible, as independent of any such influences; or, more fully and more exactly, we are given to referring our own bad deeds to environment, our good deeds to ourselves, while for others we are prompted to do just the reverse, referring their good deeds to environment, their bad deeds to themselves. Such is human nature--not, to be sure, at its best, but common human nature; and even when we escape the foregoing personally invidious distinctions, we still--and this is the main point--treat self and environment as two naturally conflicting, altogether independent sources of conduct. Two different and independent sources of anything, [p.047] however, can only make for conflict and contradiction. If only our courts of law could judge responsibility either wholly from the determinations of environment or wholly from those of personal will, or again, if only the will and the environment could be seen as not so radically opposed, what a simplification would ensue, and how much freer and more certain justice would be. To venture on a variation of an aphorism, where there's another way there is always a loophole; where there's environment there is always a shifted responsibility; where there's a "free will" there is always a will taken for some unperformed or imperfectly performed deed.

So the double origin of conduct offers a very serious difficulty, which, when it is understood, is not unlike that of the two powers or selves or classes, but even more is to be said in exposure of our moral judgments. Thus we have the confident conceit of freedom, of our own freedom in good or our neighbour's freedom in evil, or in general of man's freedom to act without regard to the determinations from environment, but we have also a strange though possibly a fortunate way of qualifying the very freedom that we claim. We claim freedom only to avow, almost in the same breath, duties and responsibilities. We have the freedom, but only the duties make it worth anything. A startling paradox this, so familiar to us all: "I am free to do all that I ought to do," or, "I am free to carry out certain necessities of my true life." A startling paradox; and, above all, a strange way of escaping the necessities of environment, unless, forsooth, it really opens the door, or supplies a secret door, by which the [p.048] necessities of environment and the necessities of one's true life can come together? If freedom demands law, why should it hold aloof from the natural law, the law of environment so definitely present? Possibly, then, as once before suggested, one contradiction in experience may be the corrective of another, the paradox of freedom and duty only correcting the contradiction of two sources of conduct, personal will and environment. In the case, for example, of the disposition to distinguish between one's own acts and another's, with respect to their initiation by will or by environment, to mingle duty and necessity with one's own supposed freedom is equivalent in effect to denying one's neighbour's freedom because of the restraints of his environment. But such considerations, however promising for future reflection upon the conflicts in our moral consciousness, are not of immediate interest. Our doubts may once more find hope in the reflection that the faults of experience may balance themselves, but we have no occasion to abandon our doubting as idle or meaningless. Contradictions that balance each other, errors that are mutually corrective, are still contradictions, are still errors.