The Will to Doubt Part 6

[2] Chap. Iv., p. 72.

[p.172]

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 Fleche, 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 a.s.serted his independence of established authority in any form. Man, not king, not pope, not even G.o.d, 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 h.e.l.lish violence, which culminated in the ma.s.sacre 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.[1]

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 a.s.serted, 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 G.o.d--G.o.d 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 G.o.d," "Collegiants,"

and the "Brotherhood of the Christian Life," but with one ideal, the direct untrammelled wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d. "G.o.d is," they proclaimed in so many words; "and G.o.d, just G.o.d, is all. Church and creeds and rites and priests are hindrances, not helps, to true religion." This att.i.tude, 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 s.h.i.+eld.

3. But with the scoffing scepticism and its complementary counterpart, the dogmatic mysticism of religion, there was a.s.sociated 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 formulae 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 G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sion 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d.

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 a.s.sociate 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 a.n.a.lytic 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 cla.s.s 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 ill.u.s.trates 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 Fleche 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 n.o.bler 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 companions.h.i.+p 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 G.o.d, 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, G.o.d, veracity incarnate, is also_.

And here begins or began a great controversy, nor can the issues of it be said to have been wholly settled even to-day. What did Descartes understand when in this way he proved to himself the existence of G.o.d?

Was only the G.o.d he seemed to have lost once more restored to him, and restored intact? Did he merely justify, and so return to its old place of authority, the traditional theology of his day? Was his doubt, as some would view it, not his own genuine experience, but simply the conceit and pretence of method? These questions need an answer, for their answer affects not only Descartes' regained religion, but also his regained real world in general. So many have been disposed almost to laugh outright at the simple-minded Descartes for his doubting everything from matter and mind to G.o.d, only in the end to get everything back. They have seen him as one chasing the verities out by one door only to welcome them with outstretched arms as they run in at another that had been left open for their return; and this view of him has been strengthened by the fact that conservatives in religion the world over have made Descartes their victim by appealing to his proof, borrowing for themselves his philosopher's robes, as if these could be easily a.s.sumed and as easily put off. But as to the justice of such a view there is little if any good evidence. Matter-of-fact history is not our first concern here, as was said; yet, whatever may or may not have been uppermost in Descartes' mind, the doubt of his day was both general and very [p.187] genuine, and the final worth and validity of his thinking lies wholly in that, not in his or any one's mere logical gymnastic or verbal strategy. Moreover, for reasons which hardly need to be given, the strong probability is that, notwithstanding his well-known lack of courage in openly living up to or even thinking up to all the consequences of his reasoning, he did feel in his philosophy not a mere recovery of what had seemed lost, nor a cunning apology for the old, but the birth of a new point of view; and, if this possibility should be verified, among other things the conservatives, who have been borrowing so much support, have been little if any better than parasites. Still, even the probabilities in the case are relatively insignificant to us, since the people of the time and of later times, and we ourselves from the scepticism and mysticism of the seventeenth century, have learned to think of G.o.d with a fulness of meaning never attained before, as--what shall I say?--not a definite truth, but the living spirit of truth; not a pa.s.sive perfection, but a perfect activity; and not even a divine person, in the sense of one more separate being of consciousness and will to inhabit the universe, but the moving and conserving power of all personality--the very active principle of reality present in the vicissitudes and conflicts of our existence. And, such being the outcome of history, we have to take it as really the meaning of the great Frenchman's formulae. We put aside the controversy, then, with the simple reflection that results in history or anywhere else are at least very hard indeed to conceive if they are anything more or less than realized motives [p.188] perhaps the realized motives of a man or men building somewhat beyond their clearest knowledge. Whatever has come about must always be what more or less clearly men have been feeling after.

The G.o.d whom Descartes really proves to his time, and still more positively to us, must surely be the G.o.d not of a satisfied unquestioning believer, but of the universal doubter who loves truth and whose doubting and loving make him the always curious thinker; a G.o.d without visibly or even quasi-visibly fixed or specific character of any sort, since with his nature set to such a character, tethered like a beast to a stake or like the sun bound to an orbit, he would not be and could not be divine enough--which is to say, veracious or perfect enough--for a universal doubter's curiosity; a G.o.d, then, who has the divine character of true infinity, who is, too, a spirit in fact as well as in word. Infinity certainly cannot belong to a being that is apart; such a being would at once belie his nature; and "spirits," divine or human, must not be supposed to be, like Elijah, the merely translated beings of this visible and tangible world, for they can belong only to the invisible and the intangible, which is in this world and of it, in its knowledge, in its love and strife, in its changes of all kinds, in its work and in its suffering. Yes, a truly living G.o.d, living here and now, is the G.o.d of Descartes' proof; the G.o.d of just that world of movement and conflict, of poise and reality, to which the differences and above all the contradictions of experience, as examined by us in preceding chapters, have already borne witness. Let us recall how we were able to say that the very conflicts of human [p.189] experience were the wisdom of G.o.d. And if this all amounts to saying, as apparently it does, that only Descartes' universal doubter, who loves truth too much ever to claim its final possession, can believe in a real G.o.d, then we have reached something that will surely repay the most careful reflection.

Some have criticized Descartes for what they regard as a fallacy in his reasoning. He jumped, they claim, without any real warrant, from the idea of a thing as his premise to the actual existence of the thing as his conclusion, from the idea of veracity, so necessary in the consciousness of the doubter, to the substantial existence of a perfectly veracious being, as if, to use their time-worn a.n.a.logy, the idea even of the very smallest sum of money would make the money itself materialize in somebody's pocket. But, whether or not Descartes fully understood his own thought, this criticism is very superficial, and it gets only a specious cogency from the same matter-of-fact history that we have already pushed aside. No idea, however clear, however necessary even to the consciousness of a doubter, of perfect truth could ever conjure into existence the unworldly, independently existing, spiritually and intellectually isolated G.o.d of the Middle Ages; and for that matter one might say, I think quite pertinently, that money not in the pocket is something less than real money, or--which comes to the same end--that the idea of money, if the pocket be indeed empty, must imply some sense of the emptiness as well as of the money; and with such an implication the idea taken for its full meaning is no such conjurer as Descartes' critics have chosen to imagine it. After [p.190] all the "mere" ideas, or the "mere" things in general, that appear in controversies, are only ingenious ways of packing the jury. An adequate idea--that is to say, an idea taken just for its full meaning, for what it denies as well as for what it affirms, for the complete universe of its discourse--does and must answer to existence; yes, and to substantial existence too. So, again, the G.o.d that Descartes by the doubter's idea of veracity proved to his time and to us, if not also as clearly to himself, can have been no mere substantial existence wholly outside the doubter's life and consciousness. In such case the universal doubting would indeed have been only the insincere verbal strategy of a conservative, the conceit of purely artful method, and the jump objected to would have been quite necessary. But Descartes' G.o.d answered to just the idea of truth which a universal doubter could honestly entertain; to truth realized only in and through doubt; a G.o.d, living in and with the seeking, struggling consciousness of the doubter.

Furthermore, for a being, call him doubter or thinker or what you will, whose very nature in deed and in word is awake to a sense of lack and is in consequence making a continued outcry: "Never this, but always something else, something fuller and realer, something including and using this, something maintained by the very conflicts of this,"--for such a being very plainly there never can be anything that is wholly and hopelessly beyond, that is not potentially and so actively real in him; there can be no outer nature, but an including and developing nature, and no transcendent G.o.d, but an indwelling, ever uplifting, [p.191]

forward-bearing G.o.d. Exactly such a being was Descartes' real self, the self of his I _am_--"I as thinker and doubter am"--and this self had need neither of struggling with nature nor of wrestling with G.o.d in order to get one or the other on its side, for in its doubt, in its constant confession of incompleteness, even--though this is a flagrant paradox--of its own reality as in a sense always outside or beyond itself, it had won the supreme victory at the start. Negatives are always such very sweeping, comprehensive things; and to be, so to speak, one's own negative, to be real and lacking, is somehow to include all things within one's own life and interest. If I may apply an ordinary phrase in an extraordinary way, to be always "beside oneself," always doubting, always wanting, always striving, or to be, in the words of earlier pages, ever and always divided against oneself, is to have enlisted man and nature and G.o.d for ever in one's service.

There is truly such a difference between programme and principle 1 It is the difference between medievalism and modernism, between supposed finality and recognized and a.s.serted movement, between supernatural authority and the authority of natural growth. Enthrone a programme, and it is arbitrary and exclusive; it claims, as it must, the sanction of another world; it hopelessly divides human nature as personally embodied or as socially organized; it makes life and its sphere irrational and so dependent on a blind faith: but a principle, enthroned, draws all things into itself, using to its own constant realization even the changes and differences of life, making faith [p.192] and reason lie down together, and transfiguring both a brutal nature and an inhuman G.o.d by revealing them as not indeed formally but vitally rational, and not indeed mortally yet humanly alive. In Descartes' proof of G.o.d we see the birth of modernism; the programme deposed; the principle set in the place of authority.

Finally, then, Descartes did not simply restore what had been lost.

Though we have been regarding only the religious aspect of his philosophy, we can see in general that, just as not the old G.o.d, but nevertheless G.o.d, remained to the doubter's life, so also not the old verities at large, yet nevertheless the verities, or not the old reality, yet nevertheless reality, remained also. Man, after all his doubting, even because of it all, was enabled to return to the world of all those "isms," the all-pervading materialism, the scoffing scepticism, the dogmatic mysticism, and the intellectual formalism, with a new spirit, a spirit of real confidence, a spirit of hope, a spirit of life, that just by reason of its wants and conflicts believes itself not only very real but also fully worth while.

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

[1] See an article by H.C. Lea in the _American Historical Review_, January, 1904, "Ethical Values in History," especially p. 238 seq.

[p.193]

IX.

THE DOUBTER'S WORLD.

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

I. REALITY, WITHOUT FINALITY, IN ALL THINGS.

Doubt is only a particular state, or phase, of consciousness, and it is worth while to observe that any state of consciousness whatsoever, any att.i.tude of mind, must a.s.sume or postulate something real. Indeed, this a.s.sumption of reality is so positive that no consciousness is ever without some will to believe, while no will to believe is ever without some real object believed in. Can there be smoke without some fire, or a seeming without some being? Were either of these things possible, then by the same token there could also be a willing without some doing or a wanting without some having. To be conscious of something, [p.194] then, means not only that something is a.s.sumed and, if a.s.sumed, willed to be, but also that something really and truly is. Of course, the consciousness is; but, however subjective, the consciousness must have more than its mere subjectivity, than its mere seeming or wanting or willing, being in some way genuinely objective or grounded in reality.

In a word, all consciousness implies and demands, postulates and possesses, a real world; possibly not just the world formally presented to it, but nevertheless reality, and reality, too, in which somehow the presented world has a place and part.

This may or may not be axiomatic, but at the very least it is very near to being axiomatic, and, near or far, it quite agrees with the conclusions to which, although along somewhat more specific lines, our own thinking and Descartes' thinking have been constantly pointing. As Descartes might have said, there is no consciousness without a thoroughly warranted "I am," and no "I am" without an also thoroughly warranted "The world of my consciousness is and is objectively real."