Part 9

The conclusions of logic in this matter have sometimes been questioned, if not defied. Quite properly, it may be, many people, and particularly many among scientists, have been in the habit of distrusting the leading of mere logic in the solution of their problems. But in this particular matter I think that no scientist has ever succeeded in making out a negative case. A few have tried to do so, have thought themselves for a time successful, and then in the end, though not without some reservation, have gone over to the other side. Probably their undertaking has been inspired by the extravagant views sometimes entertained, as when money-getting is supposed to educate [p.167] people to an appreciation of music and art, or a ready memory for one class of things to imply the same facility in acquiring a memory of another class of things, or skill in the use of tools to make a good dentist, or physical self-control or intellectual sincerity to ensure moral truthfulness. Whereas, if it could be remembered that no special training could ever be literally applicable beyond the particular sphere of its attainment, the relation of part and part of human nature being only analogous and metaphorical, and that in any scientifically observed case special training, when artificially acquired, or when a result only of a suggested and merely imitated routine, can hardly count as conclusive evidence, the problem would lose much of its interest, and science would be ready even to accept the logical solution. Logically, then, the translation is possible, and scientifically there is no real evidence against its possibility.

As to the translation being positively natural or necessary, as well as possible, the suggestion may not be impertinent that whatever is truly possible must be also real; that is to say, certain of realization or rather somehow and somewhere, in some manner and in some degree already in expression. Even the possible can never have been made out of, or sprung up out of, nothing. Moreover, the translation here spoken of, wherein one developed side of life flashes its message, more spiritual than literal, to another side or the other side of life, plainly can require nothing unnatural. It exacts only that all the different elements of our nature and experience, whether as personally or as factionally manifested, shall be [p.168] forever true to their origin. The apparent obstacles to translation certainly cannot be obstacles on the ground of the analogies of the various parts being only metaphorical instead of literal, for already in the original differentiation that has made person and faction, that has separated the parts, these have been overcome. The very nature of the person is their overcoming. The unity of experience must persist assertive and inviolable, whatever the divisions of experience. The distinct vertebræ must always contain a spinal cord that has a common origin with them.

And it remains to be said that since the person is thus at once the living integral exponent of the unity of experience and the member of some class or faction, translation is his most characteristic activity. In this translation, too, we see him a leader, or a party to real leadership, by nature. In it lies his true genius. Indeed, this translation is just that which makes the great leader or the great genius, for through it the person is ever showing himself superior to his class and training, and to the formal institutions that have brought him up. Factional life, as we know, develops through imitation and repetition, but personality through invention under guidance of the flashing analogies. Invention, too, the application of special development beyond the sphere of its origin, is only the psychological term for what sociologically is leadership. In the theory and in the practice of art, morals, religion, politics, science, and all the other special sides of experience, the factional and the personal are ever to be distinguished in this way--the one imitative, the other inventive. Witness [p.169] the familiar antitheses between the typical and the vital in art-expression, the formally ideal and the really pleasant in morality, the legal and the sovereign in politics, the orthodox and the spiritually alive in religion, technical skill and originality in science, and so on. These antitheses are all very important to the understanding of human experience, particularly of its history, but they are frequently seriously misapplied. More than anything else they show the personal ever asserting its superiority over the factional; the living whole, over the developed, established part; and always in order that the whole, overcoming the exclusiveness of the part, may translate and appropriate its acquirements.

There is thus a case for personality hidden in that historical analogy of the individual to its group-divided environment, whether society or nature, and there is also an equally strong case for society as something distinct, as something that has its own peculiar work to do. The rôles, too, that belong to personality and society are as distinct and as real, besides being as organic to each other, as in general are whole and part. But the person, at once a corrector of partiality and a leader, a distributor of special development, holds a conspicuous place and moreover takes a part that just because of his essential superiority to the definite and formal is of the greatest moment to our conclusions as to the nature of all positive experience. All positive, formal experience we found defective even to the extent of paradox or contradiction, but personality, characteristically, must be superior to this defect. Personality must bridge all [p.170] the divisions of experience, all the gaps in society, all the chasms of history. It must be, though perhaps one may not safely use the word, the very incarnation of that spirit of truth, that principle of validity and power for adequacy, which has already come to our notice more than once. Factionally experience is relative, phenomenal, divided against itself; factionally, too, it is at once formal and contradictory; but personally it reaches beyond the forms and contradictions, and is directly in touch with what is true and real. So the contrast between the personal and the social, the vital and the formal, shows itself quite parallel to that between the real and the phenomenal, the true and the paradoxical.

A business man says to a friend: "Personally, as you know perfectly well, I should prefer to do what you ask, but professionally I simply cannot, for you know also that business is business." A preacher declares: "Personally I should just like to speak out clearly and without restraint, but my church will not let me." Personally the soldiers in opposite camps exchange many courtesies, but factionally, professionally, they meet with rifle and sword on the battlefield. The father punishing his offending child says: "This hurts me more than you." And, in general, personally there are no divisions of life--all are all things together, and restraints that separate man and man are lacking; but factionally there is always restraint, and open conflict and inner inconsistency are unavoidable. The person is thus the medium, not of an abstract universality, but concretely, through his factional training and his leadership, of the universal life.

This paragraph, and many of the paragraphs that follow it, except for considerable revision and adaptation, were published some time ago. See an article, "The Personal and the Factional in Society," in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. II, No. 13, 1906.

Chap. Iv., p. 72.

VIII

AN EARLY MODERN DOUBTER.

I referred in an earlier chapter to the great Frenchman who boldly declared that his doubting was all that he could be certain about, but that this, being so very real, being indeed universal, left him a belief in himself, although only in his always doubting self. Descartes' belief in himself has interest for us, for while his thinking followed lines somewhat different from our own, he seems to have reached nearly, if not quite, the same very personal conclusion, namely, the right of the doubter to say: "I am."

Descartes was born in Touraine in 1596, and for the larger part of his life he was at least nominally a resident in the Paris of Louis XIV, Montaigne, and the earlier Jesuits. He was educated at a school of the Jesuits in La Flêche, and in the course of his mature life he published works of importance not merely in philosophy, but also in science and mathematics. His Meditations and Search after Truth are easily first among his contributions to philosophy. He died in 1650.

Yet not exactly with the Descartes of positive history, but with Descartes as a doubter, as perhaps the most notable progenitor of the modern confession [p.173] and the modern use of doubt, are we now directly concerned; for without the license of this broader view we might lose a large part of the advantage of the centuries that lie between Descartes' time and our own. He had many disciples, and these disciples uncovered much in the Cartesian philosophy that Descartes himself failed to see, or saw only imperfectly. He was not without faults, too, some moral and some intellectual, if the two are separate, and these faults we shall not consider, though the conscientious historian should never play to the sentimentalist by disregarding them. But with our present task we can afford to forget the faults; just as we cannot afford to lose the interpretations and corrections of the disciples. With interests as vital and personal as ours, we seek something more than matter of fact. Our interest is very near to that of the historical novel, but needless to say, this book is an essay in philosophy, not a novel. Past men and past times can be really useful to us, only if, belonging as we do not to the seventeenth but to the twentieth century, we really use them. What we ourselves are able to find in any period or in any human career is always truer or realer, possibly in a sense it is also better history, than what lay on the surface at the time or than what was seen, however profoundly, even by contemporaries. So much better did Descartes and all really great men build than they knew or even willed.

Descartes came into European life at a crucial moment. The period of the Renaissance, with its rediscovery of the old world and its stirring vision of the new, had culminated in the Reformation, not [p.174] merely in the religious reformation that set Protestant against Catholic, but in the reformation that appeared in every department of man's life--in art, literature, and science, in morals and in politics, as well as in religion. Man asserted his independence of established authority in any form. Man, not king, not pope, not even God, became the real centre of the universe. Justification by his own faith was simply overflowing with a meaning that knew no bounds in his experience.

But the birth of Descartes was fifty years after the death of Luther, and by the time he had reached his intellectual majority, as might well be expected, the Reformation had changed from a spiritual enthusiasm--whether among those who were its great leaders or among those who, not less devoutly, were bent on summarily checking its progress--into a practical, thoroughly worldly situation. The two opposing parties, without exaggeration, seem to have settled down to real business, and not less in the thought of one than in that of the other the end justified any means.

The society of Jesus was definitely organized and began its notable career in 1640, and although its members, the Jesuits, have given to history many wonderful examples of devotion and heroism, Jesuitry itself is synonymous with the extreme materialism to which the Roman Church resorted in its desperate defence against the Protestants. And on the other side, men became not less sensuous and worldly, giving as good as they got. They simply met, or opposed, like with like. Reading the history of the time with [p.175] its controversies and jealousies and intrigues and persecutions, one can only conclude that the honours were about even. If Catholicism felt justified in her acts of sensuous brutality, of almost hellish violence, which culminated in the massacre of St. Bartholomew, Protestantism was made the specious, yet not less welcome, excuse for worldliness, general materialism, and sensualism out of the Church and in it. Any religious reform, or reform of any sort, must always bring an unscrupulous lawlessness with it, and the great Reformation was by no means an exception to this rule. Extreme humanists, naturalists, atheists, sensationalists, social and physical atomists, Machiavellists, sceptics and opportunists of all sorts, swarmed in every capital of Europe, and especially in Paris.

But the extravagant, more or less unconventional things of any time are often the best signs of its inner life, since in them we see a few men boldly, if not prudently, stepping over the bounds of custom, and sometimes even of decency, and giving expression to what is actively present, though often suppressed or concealed, in the lives of all. Thus contemporary with Descartes, and from one side or another expressing the materialism of his day, there were at least three very significant movements, all of them endorsed by parties, of course under different names, from both of the contending churches, or from their outside echoes or reflections, and all of them at least in some degree when not in great degree beyond the bounds of common conventional respectability. These [p.176] movements in one church or in the other, or in neither, as the case might be, were, first, a scoffing scepticism; second, a dogmatic mysticism; and third, a most visionary gnosticism.

1. Vanini (1585-1619) in Italy, Montaigne (1533-1592) in France, and Bacon (1560-1620) in England, among many others that might be named, were more or less extravagantly, not mere doubters, but satirical, often derisive, scoffing doubters of everything in human life. Conceit of knowledge, whenever asserted, in church or state, in everyday consciousness or in science, was declared idolatry and held up to constant ridicule. Could man's wisdom at its best be anything more than a blinding folly?

2. And religion, the religion of a few, as if in acknowledged sympathy with these sceptics, surrendered everything but God--God being more a longing than an actual fact; a spirit than a positive thing or person. Even within the Catholic Church the Oratory of Jesus, a society energetically opposed for good and sufficient reasons by the Jesuits, was organized in the interests of a purified, truly spiritual Christianity; and among those who had broken with the Catholics appeared new sects of many names, such as the "Friends of God," "Collegiants," and the "Brotherhood of the Christian Life," but with one ideal, the direct untrammelled worship of God. "God is," they proclaimed in so many words; "and God, just God, is all. Church and creeds and rites and priests are hindrances, not helps, to true religion." This attitude, commentary as of course it was on the conditions of the day, had almost more satire in it and more doubt than any of the words [p.177] of the most active scoffers; it was so unconscious; so quietly and so piously it picked up the crumbs that the scoffers left. Indeed, the sceptics and their devout, pure-minded contemporaries, Pierre Charron (1541-1603) and Jakob Boehme (1595-1624), both advocates of religious purity against theology and sensuous ritual, must be said not to have engaged in separate activities, but to have shared the labour of a single activity. Scepticism and such mysticism are but two sides of the same shield.

3. But with the scoffing scepticism and its complementary counterpart, the dogmatic mysticism of religion, there was associated also a most visionary gnosticism. Thus the science of mathematics was heralded as a key to all the secrets of the universe. A few simple applications of mathematics to physical phenomena had been successfully made by the scientists--for example, by Galilei--and ere long certain men in the world of the intellectual life went wild over the possibilities of mathematics. Obliged, as soon they were, to abandon every other field of knowledge--theology, politics, material science, tradition, and convention--they needed but little encouragement to give themselves heart and soul to this last resort. Their enthusiasm for mathematics doubtless had a deeper source than this simple account of its rise would suggest, for an intellectual atmosphere in which just such a purely logical, abstract science would develop was the natural product of medievalism; but Galilei's successes may be said to have precipitated the movement, and in any case for many mathematics became, both in its principles and in its method, an intellectual [p.178] cure-all, and in consequence not only were remarkable advances made in the science itself, but men went to the extreme of applying the methods and the formulæ of mathematics in every conceivable direction. Religion, morality, and politics, as well as natural science, were all subjected to mathematical treatment. Among the surviving monuments to this activity the Ethics, so called, of Benedict Spinoza (1632-77) is certainly the most noteworthy; a work of five books on God, mind, emotions, bondage, and freedom--each with its special quota of axioms, propositions, corollaries, scholia, and the like, and the procedure of the whole amazingly consistent with that of Euclid. Excuse, also, a personal reminiscence. I can myself recall how in the enthusiasm of a first course in geometry I formulated a Euclidean proof of the proposition: Knowledge is power. I, too, had my axioms, my special demonstrations, my corollaries, and my final Q.E.D.'s. But any present-day resort to mathematics or its methods is only a shadow, or an echo, of the movement of the seventeenth century. At that time it was a movement of last resort and all the passion of a deceived intellect, of a mind given over to the most far-reaching doubts, and a disappointed faith, once more acquiring hope, was present in it. The truths and methods of mathematics--what but veracity incarnate, the very mind of God made manifest to mankind!

Nor, furthermore, does it take much reflection to appreciate that mathematics was after all a very appropriate form for credible knowledge to take in a time of scepticism and of religion turning to purism. [p.179] Trustworthy knowledge of actual things--that is to say, real concrete knowledge--being held impossible, there was nothing left but knowledge of the strictly formal relations of things. Formal principles, just like those of mathematics, are altogether innocent of the confusion in actual things and persons, in particular events and current issues; and accordingly in the seventeenth century, just by reason of this innocence, they were peculiarly timely. Doubt seemed quite unable to touch them; controversy was turned to agreement before them; and even a truth-loving God, so to speak, could appeal to them in support of his right to rule the minds and the lives of men. You and I might question the reality of the things we count or the justice of the ratio between our wealth and the wealth of certain others in the world, but we could not easily question that two and two are four, or in matters of wealth that one thousand and two thousand dollars are in the same ratio as two million and four million. Such knowledge as this may not settle any actual quarrels that we have, for example, over the number of acres we own or the taxes we pay or the prices charged by our butchers or grocers; but what of that? The quarrels are idle any way, and our mathematical wisdom, being exact from the start and self-evident, is a basis of perfect agreement between man and man and men and God.

In short, mathematics is exact and universally credible just because it is so empty and so logically formal, being always "in the abstract," in that ideal, wholly blessed region, where there is no disputing, where all men readily admit anything that can be [p.180] suggested; and its being exact for this cause made it the only credible knowledge for Descartes' time, a time at once of scepticism and mysticism. With Vanini, then, and Charron, who were separately engaged, as was remarked, in a single activity, we may associate the mathematicians of the day, among whom none were more distinguished than Descartes himself and the members of the Cartesian school. To Descartes we are largely indebted for the Analytic Geometry, and Pascal did important work in the Theory of Equations.

In rough outline we now have the times of Descartes before us, and with deepened meaning I may say again that Descartes came into European life at a crucial moment. Materialism was rife, not merely theoretically among a few scientists and philosophers, nor practically in some isolated class of dissipated human beings, but really and more or less openly everywhere in the whole life and feeling of society. Even the devout played into the hands of the worldly by their very purism. And an accompanying doubt, cropping out significantly, now in positive irreverence, now in mysticism, now in intellectual formalism, appears to have thoroughly possessed the minds of men.

There was, too, in Descartes' day a growing sensitiveness to the paradoxes of man's experience which have occupied so much of our attention. Nothing was what it seemed. One writer boldly declared--not much later--that France, nay, the whole world, could not be happy until all should turn atheists. The boast of Louis XIV, "I am the State," whether literally made or not, was hardly less startling. The sensualism of [p.181] the Catholic Church or the Pharisaism of the Protestant was flagrantly paradoxical, and was keenly felt to be so on all sides. Men turned doubters perforce, and in the fact that with their scepticism rose also a movement at once of individualism and cosmopolitanism, we cannot fail to see how the course of history illustrates the conclusions of a previous chapter. The time was one in which through its humanism, or its cosmopolitan individualism, civilization was to reap the harvest from the medieval organization of society.

Descartes, in spite of, or perhaps because of, his training at a school of the Jesuits, seems to have caught the spirit, the real meaning of his time, getting behind the mere letter of their instruction and of their point of view. Only mathematics gave him any satisfaction, and he left the La Flêche school in the first place conscious that he had learned little or nothing, in the second place curious about the possibility of men ever knowing anything, and in the third place evidently through the influence of mathematics strongly prejudiced in favour of introspection, or of thought conducted independently of things, as the only possible way to certainty. This education, then, and its outcome, true as it was to the life of the day, fitted Descartes for his life work, which was nothing more or less than the erection of a system of philosophy on the basis of a thorough-going confession of doubt.

Descartes entered upon his great task by taking his day at its word. St. Paul, addressing the Athenians, reminding them of one of their own temples, and quoting their own poet Aratus, was not more tactful. [p.182] Thus, as if speaking directly to the sceptics about him, Descartes doubted everything, because he found, not only in his own consciousness, become too reflective for implicit belief, but also in the wide experience of his race, that everything was dubitable. He doubted church and state, science and society; and he went even farther than this. Also he boldly doubted mathematics, so long his own support and the reliance of many others in his time. He did not know surely that there might not be an evil spirit in the universe, a spirit of deception, which even in mathematics was obscuring the mind's vision, making it see things not as they are, but as they are not. Deception was real enough and obvious enough in life at large to make such a suspicion as this at least plausible. Moreover, the notion of an agent of evil in the world had been a commonplace for centuries. It was just a part of that medieval training. So although nothing could be said with certainty either way, the plausible mischance had to be faced; mathematics went the way of all doubtful knowledge, and man was left with literally nothing but his doubt, his universal doubt. "Dubito," said Descartes; "to doubt is my inmost nature"; and speaking so he at once marked the first step in his reasoning, so important then and now, and in the simplicity and directness of real genius reported a great, deep fact of his own experience and of that of his time.

But universal doubt is a real experience, being real just because universal. Nothing ever is real that is not universal. What is always and everywhere is just the mark of something that really is substantial. A real [p.183] experience, however, real because universal, be it of doubt or of anything else, means a real self, so that in the always doubting self Descartes found reality, or a real self; and this always doubting self he further characterized as a thinking self. In other words, the real thinker was for him the universal doubter, and, contrariwise, the universal doubter was real, a real thinker, a real self. Before Descartes' time, to speak generally, men had identified reality with fixed condition or possession, with specific knowledge or established power or definite prerogative, divine or human, and truth was an object of faith rather than thought, say an unchanging programme for life rather than a pure principle--there is such a wide difference between a principle and a programme! But Descartes, as we have seen, identified reality with loss or privation, with such an empty-handed thing as doubt; he recognized no self but the thinker, and no thinker but the doubter. We always feel the pathos of those who, suffering constant privation, find and often declare that life is very real, and yet the sense of reality that comes in this way--namely, in the way of a privation that denies reality all residence in positive experience--is especially strong, and the pathos we feel is certainly not all. Something else hard to name appeals to us, too, and changes the pathos into a nobler because a more positive feeling--good will, perhaps, or honour--since the persistent holding to reality commands a deep respect. Yet, putting this more positive feeling apart, only the pathos of Descartes' real self, real because a thinker and thinker because a universal doubter, can occupy us now. Enough if we see that [p.184] the reality was as indubitable as the universal doubt, the self always being real up to the reality of its experience, and that the pathos is not more for him than for the sceptics and mystics and mathematicians of his time. But, again, in the Latin words, burdened, as so often the Latin has been, with the experience of all Christendom: Dubito, cogito; ergo sum. I doubt, I think; I as doubter and thinker am.

That "I am" seems a sort of epitome of the humanism, not to say of the pathos of the humanism of the time. Man had lost everything but his own self, his lacking, longing, always seeking self. Montaigne put the situation plainly when he said in so many words, that portrayal of self was the beginning and the end alike of physics, the science of outer reality, and metaphysics the science of all reality. Man had been left with his mere self, robbed of beliefs and traditions, and abandoned by everything but his doubts and the empty companionship which these afforded, but to that, an unshaped thing with an undefined activity, real only for what it did not have, he clung tenaciously and often enthusiastically. And Descartes spoke for him: Knowing that I have nothing, I am.

But in this self that was real only because always lacking, always doubting, Descartes found a priceless treasure. Every one is familiar with the principle of Christian theology, that the conviction of sin is a real promise because the actual beginning of salvation, and every one has some appreciation of this principle. It is a principle, too, that no priest ever made or could ever unmake, belonging as it does to the very nature of conscious creatures. In like manner, [p.185] then, Descartes recognized in the consciousness of doubt, or say of intellectual error, the real promise, because the actual beginning or even the very presence of veracity in knowledge. The doubter, conscious of error as he must be, was never without and never by any possibility could be without a sense for truth, an idea of veracity. Doubting all things he must yet believe in truth. Plato said centuries before that mere opinion, however false, was nevertheless always in love with true knowledge, and this Platonic love Descartes found in the doubter's conviction of error. In Plato's spirit Descartes insisted that doubt was a constant yearning for truth, a persistent faith in it. Doubt was informed with truth, with the idea of truth, very much as one has the "idea" of a thing that one cannot master. Man might be a doubter of all things, then, but in spite of his doubt he must believe in the reality of things, not exactly in the individual reality of each and every thing, but in reality in and among all things. For him, doubting and self-conscious, there must dwell in the world a realizing nature or power, an agent of perfect veracity, checking any experience from being altogether deceptive. And, for the present, to narrow our attention to a single phase of the doubter's natural idea of veracity, as Descartes reasoned about it, truth and everything that goes with truth, perfection and absoluteness in all its phases, could not be solely human if to doubt was human. They must, in consequence, be divine. So God, a spirit of truth and righteousness, was real, as real as the real self of always doubting but ever truth-loving man. Dubito, cogito; ergo sum: etiam [p.186] Deus est. I doubt, I think; as thinker and doubter I am: and what is more, God, veracity incarnate, is also.