Part 7

In what way? In making reply to this question I must resort to a distinction, which I have frequently found useful, between the dogmatic and the merely instrumental. Thus agnosticism may be dogmatic, as the conventional scientist would hold it, flatly declaring for an unknowable, or it may be instrumental, esteeming the unknowability in things, not merely as relative to the existing conditions of knowledge, but also as a constant demand upon science that it never rest in itself, that it for ever treat its results as only a means to some end. So viewed an instrumental agnosticism is also teleological, but not in any sense of a fixed and static telos. Telic character or purposiveness and fixity are like oil and water. Whatever the traditional theologian may think or say, they simply will not mix.

Of the two kinds of agnosticism, the first hardly calls for further treatment, for it is plainly that which has been recently examined and found to be more scientific, or at least more professionally scientific, than fully and personally honest, and the second is [p.122] very nearly akin to positivism, but must be scrutinized closely, for it certainly leads beyond the usual bounds of positivism. The positivist in science, as has been indicated above, accepts only actual positive experience and accepts that only tentatively. The working hypothesis is thus the master of his mind. What he knows, however well established in his actual, positive consciousness, is at best only relative and mediative. But--and just here appears the defect of his position, or just here we see him still only the professional scientist--the mediation which absorbs his interest is merely one of formal knowledge; what he knows always leads him just to more knowledge; his formulated hypotheses as they are tested are but aids to new formulations: whereas, besides this mediation, there always is another at least equally significant, for knowledge under the very conditions of its rise and formulation must for ever be a means to something besides mere knowledge. Recognition of this other mediation, accordingly, is all-important to any final appraisal of the meaning of agnosticism, to an appraisal that is justified just through being superior to the special interests of formal and professional science. Is it not one of the functions of the various negatives in our human life really to save life from the narrowness of its various professional abstractions, and is not the attitude of agnosticism but one of these negations?

And now, if for a paragraph or two I may be even offensively abstruse, the conditions of our positive experience, of our actual knowledge, are such, and are commonly recognized to be such, that there must always be an unknown. Every working hypothesis [p.123] by implication points to an unknown. It is equally true, however, that the conditions of positive experience are such that there is no fixity to this unknown; and the unknown changes in consequence, both in possible content and in possible quality or value, with every change in knowledge. But always an unknown which is never the same unknown must mean something more than merely a yet-to-be-known; yes, it must mean even more than an infinitely, eternally remote yet-to-be-known, for its being always, or its being infinitely distant, simply makes it something besides positive knowledge actual or possible. It must mean something which, though not knowledge, is nevertheless in knowledge, now and always; something served by all knowledge but itself other than any knowledge; something, then, which exceeds or transcends whatever the formal enabling conditions of knowledge are capable of presenting, but is itself intimately and vitally involved in the presentation; or, once more, something which is not at all in the character of a separate unknowable thing or sphere of things, nor even of a separate part in the things known or knowable, but is in the character rather of an unknowability, perhaps in a sense a relative unknowability, belonging to the very things and to every part of the very things that are known or, let me say, inhering in the bare possibility of all knowledge. Must there not be a sense in which just that which makes knowledge possible is itself quite impossible to knowledge? Who makes a law must be superior to the law, or "legally supreme," and what makes knowledge possible can hardly be fully and directly an object [p.124] of knowledge. Given actual, positive knowledge, then, and there must always be not merely an unknown, but also an unknowable; an unknowable, however, that is in and of the knowledge, not in place or in character a thing by itself.

I said I should be abstruse, and I have not yet finished. In fully appraising agnosticism we need to consider at close range another idea of the positivist. Thus for the positivist knowledge is not a having, but a getting--on the principle that unto him that hath shall be given; not a knowing, but a questioning and seeking; not a being, but a becoming--that has its ground in a being so real as to be without fixity of form. And this is plainly equivalent to making movement and action essential to the very nature of the knowing mind or to making knowledge dynamic instead of static, and infinitely plastic--even like life itself, that is always greater than its cross-sections or specific forms. But in general to an active nature nothing can ever be quite external; to a truly active nature there can be no essential impossibility. For reflect. The mere existence of anything external or of anything impossible would in just so far remove and deny the intrinsic character of the activity; in just so far it would set the supposedly active being in fixity of life and definiteness of form. For an essentially active nature, therefore, all things--all things in heaven and earth--are both present and possible, and so, specifically, if that active nature be the knowing mind there can be no unknowable that is at the same time alien and altogether impossible to the knower. Even the very forms of the knower's knowledge must for ever compass [p.125] pass more than they may visibly present. The knowing itself in its own right and nature must be more than formal knowing, or than the "objective," "special" science, in which the formal knowing has its professional realization. And the knower, as he knows, in and through his knowledge must always be compassing just that which is not impossible to him, but only unknowable--that is, impossible merely to his direct, formal knowledge. Is the inedible or the invisible or the impenetrable or the unbearable or the illegible or even the unintelligible ever wholly impossible? Such negatives, and in fact all negatives, besides saving life from the narrowness of its various forms, do this positive thing: they open the door of life's wider, nay, of life's infinite opportunity or possibility, and at the same time they render those various definite forms really mediative or instrumental, making them parts in an essentially purposive existence. With just this meaning, then, a meaning larger and deeper than that usual to positivism, the attitude of the agnostic is instrumental and teleological. Agnosticism simply endows the knower--must we not even put our conclusion so?--with a wider freedom than that of knowledge, and yet also makes his knowledge both share and serve the wider freedom that is given.

Instead, then, of pointing to a known "unknowable," before which either some non-human creature or some human vice-regent of such a creature is not obliged to be so knowingly humble, instead of establishing the conceit that knowledge or science is wholly for its own sake and so of divorcing knowledge and real life, instead of making castes out of the social [p.126] classes of those who look and those who do, the unknowable must be taken to point to the necessary unity of knowledge and life, of theory and practice, to the fact that all looking is incident to a running and before a leaping, that all knowledge is responsible to life, and that only life, however directly unknowable, can ever inform knowledge. It even suggests I think with Carlyle that "the end of man is action, not thought, though it were the noblest." Yet, in truth, though its own emphasis may thus exalt action, it cannot mean any depreciation of thought or knowledge, only their enlistment in the service of life.

* * * * *

At this point it would be interesting to show in detail how action--that is, volition or application to life as central to the meaning of agnosticism--is not only the logically appropriate nor yet only the sentimentally ideal, but also the inevitable, the inner and actually real motive, the natural outcome of the scientific standpoint in each one of its three attitudes. Such a showing might follow historical and sociological lines, or it might appeal to psychology or it might be abstrusely logical, but I can ask attention only to a few suggestions of so general a character as not to be easily classified.

The natural consequence of objectivism is something like that attributed by many to modern militarism, since it ends by inducing the very thing it claims to prevent. An objective science discloses the mechanical nature of man's environment, besides making man himself also a good deal of a machine. But a machine, whether environment or personal being, is always a [p.127] tool whose fine, accurate adjustments are just so much presented opportunity that by a sort of hypnotism turns the scientist's consciousness into that of an effective agent in the world. Somehow a real machine must move, and in the case before us with the movement the asserted distinction between looking subject and seen object collapses hopelessly. Witness such a collapse, as the runner, who has been studying the stream before him, takes his leap, or in history as an age of self-consciousness, conventionalism, and utilitarianism, is followed by the rise of Napoleon. So does objectivism pass over into action. As for the special Science, it may be impractical, because partial, but we have seen how at least formally it loses its partiality, becoming even all-inclusive, indirectly compensating for its narrowness of view and so becoming virtually co-extensive with all its associates in science. The dividing partitions may still stand, but only as unsubstantial forms wholly transparent and ineffective, so that the undivided universe is really present to consciousness. The undivided universe, however, as present to consciousness, is a call for will, since it cannot be fully realized in any formal consciousness. The natural decline of an asserted specialism, then, or the development of specialism into a mere form without substance, into a virtual universalism, makes science applicable. It makes science applicable, for in the first place it gives freedom from the bondage of mere special technique, just as, for example, the decline of religious--or irreligious?--sectarianism, a form of specialism certainly, is sure to free religion from the bondage of ritual, and in the second place, as was the [p.128] fate of objectivism, it makes the distinction between self and not-self, subject and object, man and nature, only a formal one, since the real unity of the objective world is exactly that in which the self has its true realization. In like manner a religion turned non-sectarian shows man truly living and moving and having his being, not aloof from God, but in God. Thirdly, whether because of the freedom from technique or ritual or because, as the waters of science become quiet with the union of its many streams, the objective world does clearly mirror the image of the self, the decline of specialism, like the decline of sectarianism, brings what some are pleased to call the liberation of the human spirit. The psychologist would call it the development of knowledge into will--in a word, the application of science, and the historian would record it as the dawn of a new era. Psychologically and historically the human spirit is liberated and nature is let loose at the same time. Details can always be observed objectively and specially or separately; the whole, on the other hand, is bound to draw the observer into itself and so to change the observation into motive and will. And, lastly, as for agnosticism, suffice it to say, in addition to what has been said, that the suppressed passion for reality to which agnosticism must always testify ensures in good time the assertion of the volitional as distinct from the merely scientific point of view. Whatever this may mean psychologically, historically and sociologically it means that a time of agnosticism leads to all sorts of applications of science, such as those, for example, in legislation and in industry. In morals [p.129] and religion, too, the same wish and will to use the results of science shows itself, as in the social settlements, in scientific charity, in the "institutional" church, and in the university extension movement. Agnosticism, marking, as it always does, dissatisfaction both with the uninformed and with the conventionally informed life, and also rendering mere formal knowledge, however logically correct and thinkable, unreal or artificial, calls for a larger freedom of life through the mediation of knowledge.

But interesting as such reflections as the foregoing are, and interesting also as it would be to undertake an account of will in general in its relation to a consciousness which in so far as scientific is always artificial and symbolic, and is in particular, as we have found, always a poise between opposing points of view, I must bring to an end this rather lengthy examination of the standpoint of science. If I have not already tarried too long, the special task of this volume certainly does not warrant further attention even to so important a department of human experience.

In conclusion, then, it is now quite apparent that science is a fruitful field for the doubter. Science lacks self-sufficiency. Socially it means the rise of a caste, and logically it involves abstraction and consequent division against itself. Its most cherished ideals, as shown in its attitudes and methods, are chimerical, or impossible. In general and in particular it has a [p.130] paradoxical standpoint, being not less given to contradictions than ordinary consciousness.

But, as must be added, the case for the doubter of science has led also toward a belief in science. Not infrequently in the course of the foregoing discussion it must have seemed even as if belief rather than doubt were the controlling motive. A little child has said that faith consists in "believing what you know to be untrue," and our present state of mind cannot be far from such a faith. Actually the science which we may believe in is the science of which we are also confirmed doubters. We doubt the formal attitude and the formal doctrines just because they are abstract, phenomenal, paradoxical, but at the same time we have to believe in the spirit--there seems to be no other word available--as an ever-present agent of validity, because, in spite of all, the very incongruities save these formal doctrines from their apparent artificiality and abstraction, and put them in touch with what is whole and real. And if, as was suggested, the scientific consciousness is only the specially developed consciousness of ordinary life, then we have gained also a new confidence even in the unreflective paradoxical consciousness of everyday life. Yet, that we may more fully comprehend what this means, we shall next consider at some length the possible value of the defects in experience which have now been observed. Ideas, which have appeared heretofore as little better than hints or suggestions, can then be presented in clearer form.

See an article: "Epistemology and Physical Science--A Fatal Parallelism," in the Philosophical Review, Vol. VII, No. 4, July, 1896.

See articles: "Pluralism: Empedocles and Democritus," in the Philosophical Review, Vol. X, No. 3, May, 1901; "A Study in the Logic of the Early Greek Philosophy--Being, not-Being, and Becoming," in the Monist, Vol. XII, No. 3, April, 1902; and "The Poetry of Anaxagoras's Metaphysics," in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Method, Vol. IV, No 4.

See Münsterberg's Psychology and Life, p. 267. Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1899.

For an interesting account, mainly psychological in standpoint, of will as involving such a poise, see Münsterberg's Grundzüge der Psychologie, Vol. I, chap. xv., Leipzig, 1900.

VI.

POSSIBLE VALUE IN THESE ESSENTIAL DEFECTS OF EXPERIENCE.

An original sin, or an essential defect, must somehow be for some good purpose. At least, if a general faith in the ultimate propriety of all things has any ground to stand on, such must be the case. The sin or the defect cannot be unmixed; its very originality, its essentiality, must line it, though it be the blackest of clouds, with some silver. Theology has sometimes forgotten this, but an honest doubter cannot afford such a lapse.

Yet before examining the possible worth of the original defects of experience, or, as some might regard the present enterprise, before attempting to give the devil himself a "character," we must recall the various steps of our general undertaking as it has progressed so far. We have been, in the first place, occupied with a thorough-going confession of doubt, with the greatest possible candour hunting down all the reasons for the attitude of doubt which experience affords, and so far, in the second place, we have found doubt justified, whether for good or for ill, because of its potential when not actual universality among men, of its character as a condition of all conscious life, of [p.132] its importance to real active life and deep experience, of its intimacy even with habit, and of its natural sense of dependence and consequent impulse to companionship with nature, man and God, but more than all--and this was the special interest of the last two chapters--because of the paradoxical and self-contradictory nature of all human experience. As regards the last point, our ordinary consciousness, the often-boasted consciousness of common sense, was found to harbour a widespread, very persistent duplicity towards such vital things as reality, wholeness or unity, space and time, the causal relation, knowledge, moral freedom and natural law; and science, to which many when dislodged from their ordinary standpoint have been accustomed to retreat with greatest confidence and hope, was examined with similar results. Science was found in its rise to involve abstraction of interest and disruption of life, and in its avowed point of view to be--suppose I say at this point--impossible but contradictory. So, in a word, as a clinching argument for doubt, as an argument that at least on the surface has less of hope in it than any of the others, we are face to face with the bare, hard fact that in the very nature of human experience, besides the relativity and instability and subjectivity, there dwells a spirit of positive violence. Contradiction is just one phase of the error to which all men are said to be addicted. As a background for the inconsistent theologian, the fickle woman, the shifting politician and other equally double-faced monsters, we see both-sidedness, individually and to a certain extent socially, to be a basal habit of human nature, [p.133] and if the doctrine of original sin is tenable at all, in just this fact it would appear to have its strongest support. Humanum est errare may be translated: Man is most human when hopelessly divided against himself.

But just here our confession of doubt has reached a critical stage; since in experience apparently at its very worst, as if in a medley of discords we have caught a promise of real harmony, and so something from which to get genuine hope. In the very habit of duplicity or contradiction we have again and again had suggestion of an agent of validity, a power for adequacy in experience, which would hold even a phenomenal, relative, partial experience to a real world. In short, really the strongest reason for doubt is possibly a ground of belief; or, as was said in substance at the close of the foregoing chapter, the very experience of which we are already confirmed doubters is, after all, just the experience which we seem to see our way to believing in.

Since the time of the great Leibnitz, and probably since the time self-conscious man drew his first breath, all genuine optimism has caught its most assuring vision of what was good, not in something quite apart from what was evil, but in and through evil itself, as if what is evil must be ever building better than it seems or than it knows. Very much as mathematics has viewed the negative quantity as an integral part of the whole system of quantities, so in the person of Leibnitz--statesman, historian, scientist, mathematician, and philosopher--and I imagine in the person also of you or me, though we may not claim the same [p.134] authority, the human mind has been wise and deep enough to see evil, representing all the negative things of life as an organic part of the best possible world, even of the world created by an infinite God. At least since Leibnitz's time, I say, optimism has generally justified itself, not by denial of evil in the world, but in and through evil. Not long ago a young man who was perhaps more profound and reflective in his habits of mind than wise in his manner of statement, said to me that the most spiritual truth as yet disclosed to him was the identity of God with the devil. A shocking declaration, of course; yet, to say the least, not very far from the very spiritual idea, welcome to most, if not to all, that the conviction of sin is the beginning of salvation, or that the consciousness of ignorance is the very ground of wisdom. And here, similarly, belief within doubt, not belief apart from doubt, or validity and reality only in a contradictory experience, not aloof from a contradictory experience, is the sum and substance of what our confession has certainly been leading towards.

Nothing, it is indeed true, so blasts a man's assurance as to have his ideas and arguments on a certain matter, or on matters in general, exposed as defective, and worst of all as positively inconsistent, and with his discomfiture human nature must always entertain the warmest kind of sympathy. In fact, upon just this sympathy I have been depending in the development of the argument of this book. But human nature, however sympathetic, is really superior to any momentary discomfiture, and most if not all men sooner or later come to value highly [p.135] even their once discomfiting inconsistencies. "I am glad," we seem to hear a fellow-being say, "that after all, in spite of myself, I did recognize the other side. You abused me and called me double; yet so doing you were double too. I see now that my duplicity saved me, not, however, for your view or for another's, but for the both-sided and true, which we both shared and served"; and exactly such a reflection on the inconsistencies of experiences, in their less or in their more fundamental manifestations, is the burden of the present chapter. Again, to one who complained that with every breath he took he had to contradict himself, respiration being as necessary to his breathing as inspiration, just as in walking falling is as necessary as rising, we might properly and satisfactorily reply: "You are really alive, sir," and just this answer is also quite pertinent to any who might be disposed in their doubting to despair over the essential duplicity of human experience. Is not experience more than any one idea or any one ideal? Being really alive, is it not infinitely more than this or that thing, than this or that place or time, than this or that power or will, than this or that point of view? And, if more, what so surely as universal duplicity and self-opposition can ensure at once its vitality and its integrity?

I am not forgetting or wishing my readers to forget that there are other defects in experience besides this of self-opposition, besides experience's habit of never failing to induce its own conflicts; but no defect seems to me so central or so conclusive as this, and none is at the same time so clear in its testimony to the intimacy of doubt and belief. [p.136] Subjectivity, relativity, phenomenality, artificiality, partiality, and instability--certainly an imposing and appalling list, though logically I must suspect it of being at least a cross-division--are all noteworthy defects; but supposing the list exact and complete, we must recognize that all these either beget contradiction or are begotten by it. Contradiction is just the life or the heart of the interesting family to which they belong, and so in applying our thinker's stethoscope to that heart we shall have determined the hold upon life of the whole race.

Now, there are five things, some of them already foreseen, that seem worth saying here of the essential habit of self-contradiction, and they seem worth saying because so effectively and so comprehensively they warrant the conclusion that even upon our strongest reason for doubt we may rest a genuine case for belief.

Thus, for the first of the five, contradiction incites and even in itself implies movement; it requires, or positively it is, action. As a mode of thinking, as a logical form, it is the way, perhaps the only possible way, in which the mind can, so to speak, make a cross-section or take a picture of activity or give the semblance of fixity, the formal appearance of static nature, to what is dynamic. The photographer trying for a portrait of reality might ask it only to look pleasant, but the logician, for whom reality was essentially dynamic, would demand manifest opposition, for in no other way could his art, limited to conditions of rest, [p.137] be equal to its subject. Where experience is contradictory, then, there is movement, whether for that which is known or for him that has the knowledge. In your character or mine, so like a lover's unselfish selfishness in its apparent inconsistencies, in our double views about reality or unity or law, in a subjective-objective science, in an agnostic philosophy, in all these the contradictions are only the marks of essential unrest, of necessary movement, that make the picture possible. For a world of opposites there can be no peace. The very things opposed are themselves fluent and unstable, and that third something, the tertium quid, a picture of which the opposition tries to be or to which the things opposed necessarily point, belongs, as Alice in Wonderland seems to have discovered, to yesterday or to-morrow, never to to-day.

But, secondly, contradiction, at least as here understood, is an expression, or in experience a means to the expression, as well as to the maintenance, of real unity. In general this is because real unity cannot take sides, and so can never reside in anything that is, but must rather be served by the co-operation of all things and in particular by their mutually corrective or balancing differences. This no doubt will appear to some readers as just one more example of a philosopher's impossible subtleties, as a mountain with its top in so rare an atmosphere that the common man would not dare to climb it if he could. Yet, suppose together we rise to the heights of this seeming impossibility by a little unprejudiced study of the conditions, remembering that the summits of very wonderful mountains, plainly impossible of ascent, have often been reached [p.138] from the other side, and that difficulties of breathing are often due to a needless exhaustion. To take a first step, then, contradiction is only difference, or contrast, at its limit. Naturally there is some opposition, some mutual resistance, in all difference, in that, for example, between one man and another, or one thing and another, between religion and art, red and green, or warm and hot, and often the difference or the opposition seems very slight; but contradiction, so called, is only this difference abstracted and unrestrained--it is difference at its worst or best, difference as only opposition, or, once more, difference where any possible unity of the things opposed has lost all material ground or all chance of actual, visible form, and has become, accordingly, at most merely an empty, abstract principle. Contradiction, then, is difference so wide that unity seems wholly betrayed rather than served or maintained. A real unity, however, requires for its realization just the freedom from material form or ground which such extreme difference would force upon it. It therefore gains instead of losing reality by passing into the world of the materially and visibly empty and abstract, or, say, by leaving behind any hope of a finite residence and entering the sphere of the infinite, to which difference, or at least contradiction, so cordially invites--or expels--it. And, this being true, we can see how unity is served or maintained, as was said, by the contradictions of experience.

Commonly men have an idea that differences mean, or point to, unity, but they are more likely to suppose that the unity is by mere contrast or antithesis than [p.139] clearly to recognize that it is a most intimate fact of the differences themselves. They will even see in a number of things only so many varying aspects of some one thing, and will go so far as to look upon the aspects as actually enriching and deepening the unity, but they still fail fully to appreciate how the real unity is immanent and immediate in the differences. Again, in all their thinking they contrast, and may consciously observe that they contrast, only objects or people that really have something in common, comparing, on the other hand, only such as in some way are manifestly different, and in their practical affairs they compete only with those who with them are parties to one and the same life, a fundamental sympathy, indeed, being a necessary condition of their rivalry, and actually and actively hate only the beings whom because of a common humanity they might love; but here, too, their appreciation lags behind the fact.

In life generally, moreover, in small things and in large, extremes do have the habit of meeting. A man's virtues are so near to his vices. The widest variations in things are only relatively at variance. Even what is cold is somewhat warm. Nothing is absolutely anything. In history a single ideal, rising to influence, has always divided men into two opposing camps. Witness the fact of bipartisanship, not in politics alone, but in all of life's interests. Democrats and Republicans, Radicals and Conservatives alike have loved their country and honoured their country's flag and, regardless of party, their country's heroes or patriots. Epicureans and Stoics--in recent times or long ago--have found the same life worth living. The [p.140] Roman Law and the Roman Holiday, working together, like the right and the left hand, different yet in sympathy, made the great empire. Two men, furthermore, in active, open conflict are in truth at serious difference with each other; but, as they might even say, if their conflict were in the form of a debate, where words instead of fists or pistols were the weapons, in the bare, unapplied principle involved, or say in the abstract, in the final success of whichever is the "best man," they do and they must agree. Simply throughout this life of ours there has been and there can be no idealism without conflict and no conflict, whatever the issue or the manner, without common weapons, which means, too, without some common relationship and some common interest. As for the idealism, too, what is it but a demand for real unity? And the common weapons, or for quite general purposes, the common forms in which a conflict or an opposition is expressed, as if the hiding-place of unity, perhaps a sleeping unity, only indicate in the very differences a basis, a potential of agreement, even an earnest of an underlying and sometimes awakening accord. So, truly, in life at large extremes do meet. But commonly men recognize at most only that they meet, without realizing that their difference is intrinsic to a real unity.