Chapter IV: Immortality (1)

To write a useful essay on immortality has long been one of my ambitions, and, as regards the views in that essay, my faith and my reason alike have so far brought me to this thesis: _Whatever is real is immortal_.[5] "A most meagre contribution to the subject," I hear some one exclaim. But is it so very meagre after all? "A most gloomy contribution," says another, "for evil, and above all death, are real." But is it so gloomy? Remember, not even death can be real alone. Possibly, too, the meagreness will seem less and the gloom will be illuminated if the need of the real being also the ideal, is brought to mind. That the real must be ideal, that the world must be so [p.235] constituted that the law of whatever is good will prevail in it, has been a faith manifested among all men and expressed through history in countless ways. True, no particular experience ever satisfies it. Not even the particular things we adjudge to be best are adequate to it, and the things we think evil, the suffering and the hardships of all kinds, the always tragic death and the too often offensive life, seem its eternal rebuke. Yet the faith remains, and you and I and all others are forever calling out to it. Our very doubts are its altars; our honest, rational thoughts, as they are uttered, are prayers; perhaps the only prayers to which we have any right.

So the real, which must be also the ideal, is immortal; and this, quite apart from any particular questions about the body or the soul, makes a world to live in and to hope in, whatever happens. Of body and soul, too, it says something. These, in just so far as they are real, are immortal, and any real relation between them is immortal also, for the conclusive test of immortality is just reality, reality here and now. Whatever is real in your life or in mine, whatever reality our present personality may possess, be it physical or spiritual, be it both or neither of these, that and only that is immortal. That and only that, however, let it be said again, is now or never. The most serious error, so it seems to me, in all the controversy about immortality, is the notion, or the superstition, that something that is real now can pass away, or that something real in the future is not real, not freely real now. With this error corrected, of course at the expense of certain attempts to bind reality to [p.236] something that is visible, if not to the natural eye, at least to the eye of the mind, man has nothing to fear. Reality will hold him to itself, will support whatever truly inheres in his friendships or his family ties, in his best hopes or in his personal conceits, for ever and ever. Reality can never betray what it has ever harboured.

And the whole trend of thinking in this book has been to make the reality here spoken of a most hospitable harbour. So innate to all experience is the spirit of truth, the principle of veracity, that life can have no absolute illusions. True, life also can have no positive knowledge final and exact, so that all things definitely manifest are only relatively true or real. All things definitely manifest, whether to the consciousness that looks without or that looks within, are mixedly true or false, real or unreal. But just this impossibility, now so familiar to us, at once of absolute illusion and of absolute knowledge, is, as said so often, a condition of _the_ true and _the_ real, and it means in this place that nothing which is ever defined, which is ever hypostasized or apotheosized, which in any way is erected into a thing or nature quite by itself, possessing determined or determinable qualities, can ever be said to be either mortal or immortal, since it must be as truly one as the other. It must be significantly, but never purely and exclusively either. Not this hand of mine nor that picture on the wall, not this body which, so to speak, I seem to wear, nor that soul, which you or I imagine to be in the body and more or less loosely connected with the body, is unqualifiedly immortal. Nor yet [p.237] is any of these unqualifiedly mortal. Still, again, there is immortality, and an infinitely hospitable immortality, which the hand and the whole body and the soul, be it yours or be it mine, all have a place and a part in. There is immortality, and, besides those things that were just named, divinity is also immortal. But even a God dies, this being just one of the things that make him God. Any man, then, or any being, or any thing, may say, "I am immortal." No one, however--to speak now only in words directly applicable to man--may say, "My body is immortal," nor even, "My soul is immortal," if, so speaking, he means only what he seems to say. Body and soul alike, if two separate things, are _both_ of them at once living and dying. They are equally mortal or immortal, for only so, as two things, can they belong to the real self. Can parts, be they two or many more, ever be unmixedly what the whole is? There is immortality, then, yet nothing, not the body nor the soul, is wholly or selfishly immortal. Reflect, to take an illustration from the practice, if not from the conscious thinking of men, how through the centuries of the dualistic view of human nature, the saving, or the losing, of the separate soul has been a keen human interest, and how the separate body, living, has been neglected and despised, and, dead, has been cherished and honoured. Yes, man's immortality is deeper, and it is more hospitable, than any distinction, be this invidious on one side or on the other or be it not, between the physical and the spiritual. Even in the case of the spiritual, _the_ cannot be _a_.

The soldier and the mechanic have been mentioned [p.238] as types of personal individuality appropriate respectively to the medieval and the modern period, to the period of the "universal individual," on the one hand, and of unity realized, not through a type, but through the working together of different individuals, on the other. The type was of another world; the living unity is here and now in this. For the mechanic, then, death is not what the soldier has found it, and immortality is different too. But how fully to describe the difference, and how above all really to appraise it, I do not clearly know. Perhaps there is not enough of the poetic in my nature. The soldier, as the political historian or as the philosopher sees him, has had his appreciative poets, but the mechanic has been little sung. The mechanic's death, however, and the life following it, afford a theme that some poet of the future, let me hope, will be able to do justice to. The soldier leaves this for another world, by his violent death only fulfilling his extreme subjection here. The mechanic, somewhat like the tools which he employs, actually continues with the always productive life of this world, by his death, natural rather than violent, even contributing to, as well as sharing in, what is produced. Not less than the soldier's is his after-life an appropriate fulfilment of his earthly career; each gains through death the natural reward of his life's service. But though I find myself so unable to say what I would, to express either in prose or in poetry all that I seem to feel, there is just one thought that I must try to articulate, and that will certainly assist the understanding of the difference between the two deaths or the two after-lives.

[p.239] Soldiers are companionable, of course, but they live less in and with each other than in and with the will which they serve or than in and with the separate world which at any moment may suddenly take them to itself. Their lives, accordingly, or their deaths, are aloof from each other, and are brought together only through their common subjection or their common destiny, through something which is without. But the mechanic is social in his own nature, in his own right. The very reality, too, of the world in which he works is, as in so many ways we have seen, maintained only by a divided labour. It is, then, a reality, or a labour, that bridges the chasm between one man's life and another's, as well as between all separate lives and the unity of all life. It makes the many lives "parallel" and harmonious--nay, it makes them actively and vitally sympathetic. Not, as is certainly true, at the expense of any one's real individuality, for each man has his place and his part, real and immortal, and not one falls unnoticed or unguarded to the ground; but, nevertheless, whatever all have and do, they have and do together. They live-and-die together. There is, in a word, but one death, as well as but one life, the life or the death, which all share, and which accordingly is definitely and specifically nowhere and nobody's. And in the light of this supreme unity, while any live, none can be merely dead, or while any die, none can be merely alive or living to themselves or their time alone. And, living and dying together, in and with each other, all are parties to the immortality of what is real.

So, again, there is immortality for mankind--the [p.240] immortality of him whom I have called the mechanic. There is immortality, mine and yours and ours. We die, but not as dies the soldier, who leaves this life for another quite apart, securing there a companionship denied him here; we die a death that is never death alone, and we die as we live, in a companionship that is real now and throughout all time. Furthermore, our death is always, or always may be, self-denial, and self-denial, too, in its supreme moment, the moment of its greatest achievement, but our self-denial is also very different from that of the soldier.

There is immortality, then, but what results has all that has now been said for the interpretation of history, for our feelings about the life and death of our fellows, and for the relevant doctrines of Christianity?[6]

We commonly think of history as the passing of persons, nations, and civilizations. Men come and go, but history goes on for ever. To be sure, history accumulates, as if its gifts from humanity, innumerable treasures, books, relics, institutions, buildings, machinery and the like, but the donors, as we are wont to think, are lost to it, remaining as ideal influences perhaps, but not as vitally active in the life they once assisted. This common view, however, must now seem wrong. The past must ever persist in the present, and not as an aside in some other world, nor yet as merely so much ideal influence, but vitally as a party to the present. Those that were must also live now. Have we their literature? Yes, and their consciousness [p.241] too. Their institutions? And also their life. Their achievements? And their power and will. Altogether too fanciful, some one thinks; but give it meaning from what has been said here especially about individuality. In the real world there can be but one life and one death, and we individuals, whatever our century, divide the labour of them both. Even our present life and consciousness and our will must be said to belong, in return, to those who have gone before; for it is wrong, it must be wrong, to think of the life of the past and the life of the present as two lives, as independent and perhaps even different in kind. Not those that are now gone once lived and we live, but they and we are living, they in us, and we with them; they in the world of our life, not in a world yonder and apart. They live in us, to suggest a simple analogy, that is perhaps more than a mere analogy, very much as our own past selves, our infancy and our youth, are alive with us and in us to-day. If a physical scientist can see the same force in the military weapons and engines of ancient times that he sees in those of our own time, if a sociologist can find the same social phenomena then and now, may not the historian regard the older life in general and the newer life as not less intimate? Did different winds blow in 1492 from those that blow to-day? Was it a different sun that shone in 500 B.C.: from that which shone in A.D. 500, or which shines, or tries to shine, to-day? We do not deny that the animal nature is still alive in us as well as around us, although at the same time we suppose it to belong to a very early period in our development. Why, then, should we exclude what is [p.242] so much more recent? Because it is too distinctly human to be so robbed of its temporal independence, of its own date and place? That is certainly a strange reason in view of the fact that men have insisted on erecting, in their minds, for the human nature that has passed away, a place which is altogether timeless and eternal. Why not dignify human nature, then, by making it, and all that it bears, eternal in its own natural life, not in a sphere that is unnatural? It is sheer materialism, in letter or in spirit, either to entomb the historic past, as some would, in books and monuments of all sorts, or, as others would, to lay it aside in a so-called immaterial world. Who does either of these things forgets how the books are written and how the monuments are erected, and how in general the things of the past come to be. The future is always a party to whatever is done. The men who have ever achieved anything have always been, in their character and in their work, as if made by the future, "ahead of their times." An uncanny phrase, unless one can think of the deeds and men of any time as in a vital unity with the deeds and men of all times. A man is great only as he identifies himself with some social force, with some actual movement of his day, fulfilling it out of a long past, bringing it to focus and so making it definite and manifest, and as the life around him which gave him birth, adopts his will and repeats his achievement. History has many cases of human societies repeating in their lives as a whole the careers of great men. Only it is not repetition exactly; it is resurrection and continuation. Great men make history, but they make it only because they [p.243] are alive in it before their birth and survive in it, in its doing and in its thinking, after they die.[7] Would history be even thinkable without such continuity? Could we honestly call it history? What good American to-day is not, convinced that he has a share in what Washington and Lincoln accomplished years ago, and also--and this one may, or may not, regret--in the doings of Benedict Arnold and Booth? And, to put a very practical question, would it not be well if in the popular consciousness great men, good and bad, were really identified with history instead of being treated as fixtures outside of it? Make them separate fixtures and you make them oracles, the spirits of quite another world, with which the demagogue, as if a medium, can excite the people; but identify them in a vital way with history and they must grow with it, speaking quite as much out of the present conditions as out of the past. Hero-worship is too often idolatry, and for my part the literalism of it is only "spiritualism" trying to be respectable. Every extravagance, of course, has to have its lawful or conventionally respectable expression.

But what, now, of friendship and family ties? Can we view these in the same light? I think we would; I think we can; I think we must. True, it is easier to speak in this large, "philosophical" way of history and of the men who have had part in it, inventing and effectively using the machinery that has enabled its progress, than of such matters as friendship and [p.244] family. In these latter matters the heart more than the mind is addressed. Still, the relations of friendship and kinship are not themselves born, nor do they die and all friends abroad and kin at home live and move and have their being only in these. Does it destroy or even weaken the meaning or the reality of friendship to have it said that the relation is as universal as particular or local, and as eternal as temporal? Is a relationship worth less than any one of its manifestations? Why, the universality of the relationship gives meaning or reality to any manifestation. Friendship, then, or kinship, for this person or that, cannot be separated from the experience in general. Separate it, and one's friends or kin surely do die, remaining after death, like the characters of the older history, as only ideal "influences," or as unearthly spirits that sometimes idly chatter. But in reality, friendship, or kinship, is one, not merely many, all of its members labouring together for, and forever surviving in, what it truly is. The friends, then, or the kin that lived, live still. In others about us? Yes; and in ourselves too; or rather in the relation of man to man or in the unity of all that lives. Not literally in others, then, although the meaning intended was a genuine one, nor yet literally in ourselves, for nothing crudely like transmigration of souls is in my mind, but--to repeat--in the living relationship of friends or kin. There is indeed a truth in transmigration, as also in other related notions; witness all the facts of inheritance, of historical succession or continuity, of social growth and personal character, of evolution; but it is the truth, or is near to [p.245] the truth, of a reality that is conserved even in its changing. The soldier of the past, let me say, at his death was "translated," but the mechanic of to-day is transmuted. The latter word may be stranger and harsher in sound than the former, but there is truly less violence and more honour in its meaning. So, again, friends and kin that ever lived, live still. Friendship and fatherhood and motherhood and all the relations of kin, nay, all the relations of life, that make our individuality real, that make it personal, that make it social, that make, it natural, have been from the beginning, live now, and must survive forever, and by their survival hold for the present and the future life all who have ever been. Where would faith go, and where worth and responsibility, if birth really created and death destroyed, or if birth were a coming from no one knows where, from a realm unlike and apart, and death the return? Birth cannot create or introduce; it can only express, revealing and realizing. Death cannot destroy or "translate"; it can be only fulfilment at a crisis.

The mere wordiness of a philosopher! Possibly. And yet Christianity has very nearly implied, if indeed it has not actually said, and said or implied again and again, exactly the same thing. To science, I know, we are peculiarly indebted for the conception of the organism, or the organic, which enables us to bring together the universal and the individual, the eternal and the temporal, the omnipresent and the local, without losing the worth or the reality of either, and of course--for so they would not be together--without erecting separate quarters, or worlds, for their [p.246] occupation; but, when all is said, science has only applied at large the very special and personal doctrines of Christianity, and has therein helped Christianity to a better consciousness of itself. The Resurrection, the Immaculate Conception, the Divinity, the Immediacy of the Kingdom, the Sacrifice, and the Brotherhood of Man are doctrines which one and all testify quite directly that our real individuality, our real being, lies not in a separate existence of any sort, here or hereafter, but in the abiding relations of the actual life now. In these the Christ resides, the always living Christ. What else can the following mean? "In as much as ye have done it unto one of these, my brethren, even these least ye have done it unto me." And again: "For whosoever shall do the will of my father which is in heaven, the same is my brother and sister and mother." The living Christ, one of the dogmas of our day, is more than a fancy and more than a dogma, and for no one so truly as the scientist, the evolutionist. Christ was too great, too deep-lying, too far-reaching in human history not to be more. The letter of Christianity, we are often told, has got to go, but it is quite as true that the real letter of Christianity has got to stay, has yet to come: the real letter, I say, not the parody of a mere physical appearance and reappearance nearly two thousand years ago. If Christ was really not born as men are born, if he did not really die, if truly he still lives in and with our lives to-day, if Christianity honestly means the brotherhood of humanity and the divinity of man, then simply the Christ was more than a pagan's messenger from another world, and [p.247] more than the creature of a single moment in history or a single place; also he reveals to us more in ourselves than any of these things, and instead of resorting to such notions as parthenogenesis and trance to explain the birth and the resurrection, we must rather recognize in him, and in ourselves, an individuality that has, not in spite of, but because of, birth and death, a share in, a place and a part in the immortality of what is real. Now I am not a good preacher, plainly, nor am I exactly a sympathetic theologian, and also I know too well the defects of argument through scriptural quotation; but I have to hope, as personally I believe, that in the foregoing paragraph, given in conclusion to the discussion of immortality in the doubter's world, I have suggested what at least is not an unchristian appreciation of Christianity.

* * * * *

Our journey in the doubter's world here comes to an end. All things are real, yet none final. The spiritual and the material in life are sympathetic even to the point of being vitally at one with each other, thought being free and practical, and material nature being lawful but law-free, and mechanical but productively so, and being in her productiveness definite opportunity, not blind necessity, to human life. And, the "universal individual" being dead, having returned to the other world from which he came, all particular individuals have real and personal shares in the life that is, in the work that is ever to be done. Living or dying, the individual, as we have found him, is the mechanic of to-day, not the soldier of yesterday.

[1] The last few sentences seem like a paragraph from some psychologist of the day. My colleague, Professor W.B. Pillsbury, for example, has just published a book on the attention, in which appears the following statement: "It seems that the problem of voluntary activity is largely, if not entirely, a problem of the attention ... . The processes which are effective in the control of a man's ideas are _ipso facto_ in the control of his movements," and this, besides being the current psychology, is quite in accord with our doubter's vision: "Well thought is well done." (See _Attention_, chapter ix. London, 1907.)

[2] Chap. VIII., pp. 177 seq.

[3] Chaps. III., IV., V., and VI.

[4] See also an earlier discussion in this book, chap. III., pp. 49 seq.

[5] Two preliminary efforts have already been put in print. See the Appendix, "A Study of Immortality in Outline," to a book: _Dynamic Idealism: An Introduction to the Metaphysics of Psychology_ (McClurg, 1898). See, secondly, an article: "_Evolution and Immortality_," in the _Monist_, April, 1900.

[6] Except for a few changes, the next few paragraphs are taken from my article, "Evolution and Immortality," in the _Monist_, April, 1900.

[7] In a small book, _Citizenship and Salvation, or Greek and Jew_, published some years ago, I have tried to show this of Socrates and Christ.

[p.248]

X.

DOUBT AND BELIEF.

There was once a brook that ran, at times slowly, at times more
rapidly, through fields and woods, under trees and over rocks. At
every chance, whatever the obstacles in its course, it fell, much
or little, as it could; but impatience and uncertainty filled its
life as the minutes and the hours passed. Had life nothing more in
store for its troubled waters? Was this groping downward all? Were
the memory and the accompanying hope, which haunted every thwarted
move, of no avail? Would true fulness of life never be attained?

But a great moment for the brook came, rewarding it at last,
bringing assurance in place of threatened despair. A precipice
intervened, and the waters fell hundreds of feet; a glorious fall
--spray, sunlight, colour, eloquence.

"Now," spoke the brook from the deep, smooth pool below, "now I
have lived; now I know that my life was real and that my life was
good, for I have found myself, I have found my world; and I have
found them where I thought them not. And, speaking so, the brook
flowed on contented.

The confession of doubt, which we set out to make with all possible candour, is now nearly concluded even to the harvesting of the promised fruit. The confession began, as will be remembered, with recognition of certain general and easily demonstrated facts, of [p.249] which there were five, as follows: (1) We are all universal doubters. (2) Doubt is essential to all consciousness. (3) Even habit, though confidence be the horse, has doubt sitting up behind. (4) Like pain or ignorance, doubt is a condition of real life. (5) And the sense of dependence, so general to human nature, gives rise to doubt, although also, like misery, it always seeks company--the company of nature, of man, of God. Then, after this beginning, which left us by no means so hopeless as might have been expected, we proceeded to try the doubter, nay, to try ourselves, first before the court of ordinary life with its ordinary views of things, and secondly, before the court of science, and, in both trials, we found the doubting justified. Alike in ordinary life and in science, even in science where such a result was perhaps hardly to be expected, we found what at least seemed like illusion and what certainly was paradox, and almost against our will we had to conclude that a spirit of contradiction and duplicity and vacillation dwelt at the very centre and the very heart of our human experience. This spirit of violence, too, as the evidence of its presence accumulated, bade fair to dispel whatever hope our confession had left us. Yet out of the evidence there gradually did appear a reason for deepest assurance, and in the end our fear, not our hope, was dispelled. Contradiction was seen in its very nature to possess positive value. It was seen to protect experience, even while experience was specific and concrete, definite and individual, against any fatal digression or partiality of view. It was deeply conservative, corrective, and [p.250] compensative in its effect, but it was all this without ever being merely negative or destructive towards anything, since its own efficiency required persistent individual differences. To experience it gave movement, constant unity or wholeness, realistic value and poise, practicality, and, lastly, social expression. And we were able, accordingly, to conclude, in so many words, that both ordinary life and science, so given to duplicity in their standpoint and in their ideas, were really building well, far better, indeed, than they seemed or than they clearly knew. Contradiction, in short, as we came to see it, meant unity, but not an empty, abstract unity; it meant unity rich and real with an infinity of differences; and so what had at first appeared an uncompromising reason for doubt turned, right before our doubter's eyes, into an unassailable ground of belief, making the very world which we had been so uncertain about a world for an inviolable faith. But truth, we saw at once, could no longer be identified with a formal idea, known or unknown or unknowable; reality could no longer have the character of a fixedly constituted thing, whether such a thing were present in experience or not; and perfection, even the perfection of God, could no longer be a mere status, a passive possession of certain characters, attributes, or prerogatives. Truth became, as was said, in want of a better word, a spirit; reality was a life; perfection was a power. And thereupon, with the new view thus afforded us, coupled as it was especially with the sense in which personally a man could claim reality for himself and yet be party to the factional life of society, we were able to turn to [p.251] Descartes, an early modern doubter, a father confessor of many doubters, and, overlooking some of his shortcomings in thought and character, to appreciate both the use that he made of doubt, the intimacy that he, too, found between doubt and faith, and the world of reality, of most vital sympathy between the material and the spiritual, of genuine, personal individuality, and of immortality, through which he led us, doubter, universal doubter though he was. That great Frenchman, as we were enabled to understand him, got back the world, the self and the God which he seemed to have lost, but he got them all back transfigured. He got them back, not by denying and excluding what appeared negative and treacherous in their nature, but by facing this and using it, by accepting it and turning it even against itself. The very Paris to which he returned as believer was the same Paris, the Paris of doubt and of evil in all its forms, that earlier, hopeless and despairing, he had put behind him. And, once more, his experience was ours, and so helped us to interpret and deepen ours, quickening the value of our own previous discovery that within the very sources of doubt lay the real bases of belief. Our own doubted world of what was relative and artificial, and above all contradictory, had already turned, without loss of anything that was in it, into a world of reality and belief.

And so, for this concluding chapter, as but a sort of focussing of what almost from the beginning has been borne in upon us, but especially at the close has been rich in reality and meaning, we have a sixth general fact, which may now be added to the original five. [p.252] _We believe through our doubts; we believe, not in something apart, but in the very things we doubt_. To this fact really inclusive of all the others, or if not to this fact at least to this conviction which we have achieved here, we shall now turn, and in our concluding chapter we may even forget, or retain only as the appropriate background, many of those more special or more technical details that from time to time have occupied us. After so much, that to some, if not to all, who have followed me to this place, may have appeared open to the charge of being mere theory, certain simple, very practical considerations, appealing quite as much to the emotions as to the reason, can hardly be out of place. Those who are already satisfied, who foresee only repetition, who are themselves without emotion, or who consider anything like the drawing of a moral to be as useless as it is inartistic, need read no further.

I.

We believe in the very things we doubt. Doubt, this is to say, can destroy nothing. It only calls for closer scrutiny, for wider and deeper view, for greater achievement. Its effect is only to make over, renew, or fulfil what has already been and must ever remain an object of faith, and so doing it keeps the old faith alive. It questions all things, but properly, consistently it raises, not questions of mere existence or reality, but questions of meaning and worth, and whatever it truly questions it always quickens. Have [p.253] we not found that with its inborn and insatiable passion for truth doubt must believe in everything, and that to satisfy this passion, since all things must work together for what is real and true, it must reject nothing but seek even the universe in everything? All things, from the momentary sensation in your little finger, or the tree yonder on the lawn, to the personality of God or the divinity of Christ as an idea in the consciousness of millions of people, all things are; they are in experience; they are unassailable realities of experience; but--and just this is as far as the truth-loving doubter, the doubter who is honest with his own self-consciousness, can go--what really are they? _What are they?_ is such an honest question. In this question, too, there is more reality for the things inquired about even than in any man's assertion that they are this or that they are that. But the question _Are they?_ would be downright treachery. We doubters, then, believe, but would ever know what we believe; we have, yet would realize every possibility that what we have affords.

Doubt, I repeat, destroys nothing. From time to time certain doubting people have called their prophets impostors, and have imagined themselves able to put the impostors out of the way, but, as history has always shown, only with the result of reviving among themselves and often of awakening in the minds and hearts of others the sense and conviction of just that for which the offensive impostors may have suffered violent death. Even history's petty impostors, too, as well as those who have proved heroes and great leaders, have always had their justification. An [p.254] absolute impostor has never been. Again, certain people have cried illusion and unreality at things political or moral or even at things physical, but only in the end to feel, and to make others feel, first, their evident narrowness, if not their actual dishonesty, and then their need of a more hospitable idea of what is valid and real. Nothing can be, or ever has been, unreal. And, in general, doubt of a thing or a person or a God only needs its own conscious assertion to turn actually into an appeal from its particular object to the ideal or spirit or principle for which the object had stood, and upon this appeal even the object that has been for a moment condemned is justified and glorified. Thus, doubt may deny or depose or put to death, but as it is honest it also realizes or restores or revives. Through doubt the sensuous, which is the particular and visible, is ever becoming spiritualized; even this corruptible puts on incorruption and this mortal puts on immortality. Or, in these words, if we doubt we may reject the object, the letter, but we cannot reject the letter without accepting and asserting the spirit, and we cannot assert the spirit without recalling and exalting and even worshipping the letter. The rejection makes for universality by casting down the barriers of the particular experience of time or place, of person or nation, of the Greek perhaps, if again I may look to history, or of the Jew or of the Christian, while the recall and the worship make for definiteness. Without the previous rejection the worship could be only idolatry. So, as Descartes will be remembered virtually to have said, doubt is innately loyal to reality in [p.255] everything, and just through this loyalty the world it spurns, the world of God and man and nature, is for ever called back, a real world once more, because a realized, a spiritually realized world. Why forget, as so many seem to, that reality is an achievement; achieved it may be, as with the brook, even by a great fall?

But have you ever climbed a mountain up and up and up, through thick woods, over rough, almost impassable trails, into clouds dense and chilling, stormy and angry, over treacherous snows and frightful cliffs, and come out at last on the very top to see both earth and heaven, yourself between, the clouds dispersed, the hardships and dangers all forgotten, the whole world real and yours? Well, that is doubt become achievement. Have you worked at some problem of everyday life, or a problem of science or philosophy, patiently or impatiently applying all the rules and precepts at your command, trying every resort known to you, and in final desperation many you only guess at, and then, when failure seems almost certain, caught a glimpse of the real meaning and the real way, attaining to an insight that reveals a new world to you? That, too, is doubt rewarded. Have you ever visited, perhaps more curiously than reverently, some great Catholic cathedral, or, better still, some temple of the far Orient, and watching the worshippers there, suddenly had a vision of religion as greater and deeper than any Protestantism or even than Christianity? That, again, is doubt's achievement. Have you ever suffered a great heartrending disappointment, let me say a great personal loss, and [p.256] found it seemingly impossible to return to the routine of your former life, but nevertheless, almost imperceptibly, come into a sense of presence and gain from the very thing that seemed taken from you? That, once more, is doubt without its sting, robbed of its victory. Doubt means sacrifice, often enormous sacrifice, but always a more than equal gain. The light that casts the shadows of doubt, when one can face it, and really does face it, as, for another example, in this book we have been trying to face it, is so splendid and so uplifting.

So, a third time, doubt destroys nothing; it only makes reality forever an achievement and belief a constantly active life. The fact, now no stranger to us, that doubt is social, also shows this. Doubt is social, as has been said, since by its isolation it makes the longing for company, and by its greater freedom the larger opportunity for company; and since also the very contradictions or controversies which arouse it are never merely individual, being always social also, and social relationship means effort and sacrifice, and is accordingly a peculiarly interesting witness to the losses that doubt must suffer for its greater gains. Doubt, in short, shows belief, working not merely for the reality of all things, but also for the love of all men. As social, then, as working for the love of all men, doubt involves sympathy. Yet not an easy, passive sympathy. A restless, labouring, always growing sympathy is the sympathy of the doubter; a sympathy that makes all it covers labour and grow also. Does it hurt your business to doubt it sufficiently to make you able to sympathize with the interests of [p.257] another? To this question Adam Smith gave a timely answer when at a critical moment in industrial history he found in sympathy a condition of successful competition. Does it hurt your politics, if you can lose enough of the partisan's conceit or the jingo's bombast to sympathize with the other parties or the other nations? The value of real independence in politics is one answer, and the idea of federation among competing states, or of international polity as a basis of successful national life, is another. Does it hurt your understanding to outgrow your own profoundest ideas and see some validity in the doctrines and formulæ of others? Does it hurt your Christianity to make concessions to another's Christianity or to the worship of any land or any time? The reading of the last great book, or the visit to the pagan temple, is an answer. Simply the doubter the world over, social being that he is by nature, imbued as he is with a living sympathy, must recognize, and must labour to maintain or achieve, the unity of humanity. For him just this is God, or truth, and it is worth far more than anybody's religion or than anybody's rational formulæ. It must stand, too, both as the universal authority which both religion and reason have over the lives of men and as the motive or living principle, or spirit, by which particular religions and particular formulæ, however serviceable, are forever unstable.

But doubt, which is thus social and imbued with a living sympathy, and which though requiring sacrifice does not destroy belief, but only makes belief active and reality an achievement, may be viewed here in still another way. It shows mankind using or spending [p.258] instead of either hoarding or throwing away any of the resources of knowledge and faith, of developed habit and personal association, which life accumulates. Some doubters, as men say in the business world, invest what they have; some speculate. Some are conservative, even timorous; some are very rash. Yet doubt as expenditure is necessary to all who would enjoy the proper, natural increase of their possessions, and while the rash, be they transgressors or reformers, sensualists or materialists, or equally impractical idealists, at a throw may win or lose great riches of mind or spirit, the timorous and ultra-conservative, the "practical" and conventional, are not less dependent on chance. There are the new rich, too, and the aristocratic poor, and both remind us strongly that the real use of what we have is not only a duty, but also a very sober duty. To hoard blindly or spend rashly is to risk unwisely, perhaps to lose all, or, if to win, to win idly; while to use well, to doubt clearly and honestly, to doubt even in one's belief, to doubt only for fuller meaning, for broader and deeper life, for richer companionship, is personally to earn lasting spiritual treasure.

Modern science, whose knowledge comprises merely working hypotheses, the means to truth, not truth itself, or if truth, then only a living, growing truth, affords one of the best examples of this. Modern science is a great faith, a great belief, but only because it is a life, not a status or possession, only because it is a constant spending, a constant using of knowledge, that earns interest, even compound interest, as regularly as the years go by. And experience in [p.259] general, as well as science, is also a great belief, and also only because always doubting and so always using and always earning.

Doubt, in a word, is more than a necessity of experience; it is distinctly a duty. Experience itself is but another name for that hard master who says to every unprofitable servant: "Thou wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I did not scatter; thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the bankers, and at my coming I should have received back my own with interest. Take ye away therefore the talent from him and give it unto him that hath the ten talents."

II.

That doubt is only the expenditure of the treasures of life for future gain human history bears witness in a striking way. Times of a general scepticism among any people have always been also times of conventionalism and utilitarianism towards all things great and small. To employ again a word used before, this means that life has come to regard its establishments of all sorts as only "instrumental," not final. Of course, conventionalism and utilitarianism are commonly decried, just as the accompanying attitude of doubt is commonly decried; but the fears, though not altogether idle, are usually short-sighted, for there is gain ahead. In a certain community, for example, patriotism, morality, and piety, long identified with specific forms and customs and doctrines, have come at last to seem quite unsubstantial. A rising cosmopolitanism perhaps has undone the first, sensationalism [p.260] or naturalism the second, and mingled ritualism and secularism the third. But however unsubstantial all three may appear in consequence, they are nevertheless retained as still useful, as means to some end, being at least good things to wear or to assume in any way, and from the change, though it appear so like decline, the community in the end is most decidedly enriched.

How can this be? In answer, let us beard the very king of the race of the conventionalists and utilitarians in his forbidding den. Machiavelli, with his teaching that the end always justifies the means, and his open advice to the leader who would be successful, to make a point of at least seeming loyal and good and pious, shows a typical mingling of the sceptic and the utilitarian in sacred things. Moreover, what Machiavelli taught was also common practice in his time, and soon became a principle of brilliant statesmanship all over Europe. And to add meaning to his case by associating it with others, conspicuously in Descartes' time, as we have observed, and also in Athens at the time of the Sophists, and in Jerusalem when the Pharisees flourished, the same standpoint was much in vogue; while in our own times we do not need to look far to find it. Education, social life, politics, religion abound in it, for the tribe of the Machiavellists is no more a lost tribe than it is one that began with him whose name it bears. If the name is too offensive to some by reason of its connection with a particular character and a particular period in Italian history, for Machiavellism they may substitute institutionalism, certainly a more innocent term at first sight; but the offensiveness, though hidden, [p.261] or half-hidden, still remains a part of the fact with which we have to deal. The meaning of institutionalism is just that of some asserted end justifying any available means, and so under cover of its peculiar conceits sanctioning violence. Watch any institution and see how one or another of life's objects of devotion is become, or fast becoming, a mere utility. The institution makes life mechanical, and doing this it is as treacherous as it seems loyal to the treasured things of life, the developed ideas and established customs; it is even as sceptical towards them as it seems faithful; and in the spirit, if not in the letter, of Machiavellism it shows them no longer implicitly worshipped, but in use, which is to say, "put to the bankers," and so robbed of their character of sacred treasures. And as for Machiavelli himself, it may be worth while to remember that with all his offensiveness he has undoubtedly been very much maligned, and that to any student of history he seems only a very apt though an unpleasantly outspoken pupil of the most powerful institution of his time--the Roman Church--for which things moral and religious had certainly become effective instruments of very worldly ambitions. So in Machiavellism or in institutionalism, the name now being indifferent to us, we see worship passing into use; we see sacred things become secular, or things supposed final becoming only instrumental; and we see, therefore, what appears like loss or decline.[1]

[p.262] But can there be anything besides loss or decline? This again is our question, and the answer now comes quick and decisive, whether we are thinking of Machiavelli or the Sophists, of the old-time Pharisees, or of those in our own life. Decline and even fall never tell the whole story of anything, and just because they mean use, even secular use. That men must worship is surely true, but also men must and do use, and the use, in spite of the strain of the offence and resistance which it is sure to arouse, brings profit always. Use, secular use, may imply sacrifice of the letter or the established form, but it always leads to liberation of the spirit. In scepticism, therefore, and the coincident conventionalism and utilitarianism towards sacred things, in the institutionalism which harbours all these, though often darkly and secretly, we may always read, what in truth history has again and again exemplified, the throes of birth, the birth of the spirit. Must it not be that any visible institution, be it ecclesiastical or industrial or political or educational or ceremonial, just because an institution designed in some way to serve an active, growing life, is always an outgrown, falling institution? As in the case of the Roman Church in the days of Machiavelli, an institution upon its establishment actually justifies its enemies by its own practices, while the enemies, so justified, do but lay it bare, exposing its hidden thoughts and ways, forcing reform upon it, and perhaps in the end themselves "remaining to pray."

So is the spirit born, and so do we see in the personnel of society what a wonderful triumvirate, working [p.263] for the real growth of human life with a power that nothing can resist, is made by the avowed sceptic, the loyalist, always secretly conventional and utilitarian, and the reformer, the great spiritual leader. Even Machiavelli in his most offensive pronouncements must have felt something between his lines which expressed would have transfigured their meaning, not to say also his reputation, greatly, and, consciously or unconsciously, he was certainly a party to the development of what is best in modern life. As for the Sophists, whether we see them as sceptics or conventionalists, did they not have Socrates among them? Between them and him, when all is said, the difference was only that between talent and genius, between great formal ingenuity, which always means opportunism, and really vital insight, which, shattering opportunism with its own weapons, means loyalty, not to existing forms, but to the spirit dwelling in the forms. Much in the same way, too, the Jewish Pharisees had Jesus, a contemporary, who did but recognize and earnestly teach what they were really practising, namely, the utility of the law, or the law for man, not man for the law. Only what for them was merely a selfish opportunity, absorbed as they were in the vested interests of their time and generation, was manifest to him--who was a genius and who used for real gain the talent which they hoarded--as a great spiritual fact, as a universal truth, bringing opportunity and freedom to all men under all law, not to some men under one law. Thus they were institutionalists; he, by merely turning their narrowness into a principle of all life, became a reformer, and, indebted to them as he was, he could [p.264] forgive them even when they opposed him. Genius always forgives; the spirit always recalls and cherishes the letter that has given it birth.

So the institution as an historical fact, whether we see it with the eyes of Machiavelli or with those of a pope, with the eyes of Protagoras or with those of Socrates, with the eyes of the Pharisees or with those of Christ, may show worship turning into use, the sacred becoming secular, but it shows also the life of society becoming enriched; it shows investment for future gain; it shows doubt, not destroying anything, but achieving only what is real; it shows the life of the spirit.

III.

No period of man's earlier doubting can be more interesting than that of the centuries just prior to the Christian era, when the peoples of the Mediterranean contributed so much, directly and indirectly, to the preparation for Christianity and to the discovery, or revelation, which finally came and in due time changed the ancient to our modern world. What the preparation was has already been indicated, at least partially, in the references that have been made to the Sophists and to the Pharisees. Christianity has been only the interest, the earned increment, or rather should I not say the compounded principal, of the scepticism, of the formalism and the utilitarianism which beset the Greeks and the Hebrews, to mention no others, as their peculiar civilizations were merging into the larger and deeper life of a great empire. In their several lives the demand came, and came, too, from within, not merely from without, as in all life [p.265] it must come, for use of their gathered treasures, whether spiritual or material, and the rise of Rome was but the result of that demand satisfied, of the use realized. As for the scepticism, this with all its incidents made the use possible, made it possible for the peoples to give or relinquish what they had to the larger life to which they all belonged, while the religion of Christianity spiritualized for them all the resulting empire.