



Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org




THE WILL TO DOUBT

AN ESSAY IN PHILOSOPHY FOR THE

GENERAL THINKER

BY

ALFRED H. LLOYD

Truth hath neither visible form nor body; it is without habitation or name;
like the Son of Man it hath not where to lay its head.


LONDON

SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO., Lim.

25 HIGH STREET, BLOOMSBURY, W.C.


1907




PREFACE.


The chapters that follow comprise what might be called an introduction
to philosophy, but such a description of them would probably be
misleading, for they are addressed quite as much to the general reader,
or rather to the general thinker, as to the prospective student of
technical philosophy. They are the attempt of a University teacher of
philosophy to meet what is a real emergency of the day, namely, the
doubt that is appearing in so many departments of life, that is
affecting so many people, and that is fraught with so many dangers, and
in attempting this they would also at least help to bridge the chasm
between academic sophistication and practical life, self-consciousness
and positive activity. With peculiar truth at the present time the
University can justify itself only by serving real life, and it can
serve real life, not merely by bringing its pure science down to, or up
to, the health and the industrial pursuits of the people, but also by
explaining, which is even to say by applying, as science is "applied,"
or by animating the general scepticism of the time.

That this scepticism is often charged to the peculiar training of the
University hardly needs to be said, but except for its making such an
undertaking as the present essay only the more appropriate the charge
itself is strangely humorous. One might also accuse the University of
making atoms and germs, or, by its magic theories, of generating
electricity or disease. Scepticism is a world-wide, life-wide fact; even
like heat or electricity, it is a natural force or agent--unless
forsooth one must exclude all the attitudes of mind from what in the
fullest and deepest sense is natural; scepticism, in short, is a real
phase of whatever is real, and its explanation is an academic
responsibility. Its explanation, however, like the explanation of
everything real or natural, can be complete only when, as already
suggested here, its application and animation have been achieved, or
when it has been shown to be properly and effectively an object of will.
So, just as we have the various applied sciences, in this essay there is
offered an applied philosophy of doubt, a philosophy that would show
doubt to have a real part in effective action, and that with the showing
would make both the doubting and the acting so much the more effective.

But it may be said that effective acting depends, not on doubt, but
rather on belief, on confidence or "credit." This will prove to be true,
excepting in what it denies. To be commonplace, to write down here and
now what is at once the truism and the paradox of this book, a vital,
practical belief must always live by doubting. Was it Schopenhauer who
declared that man walks only by saving himself at every step from a
fall? The meaning of this book is much the same, although no pessimism
is either intended or necessarily implied in such a declaration. Doubt
is no mere negative of belief; rather it is a very vital part of belief,
it has a place in the believer's experience and volition; the doubters
in society, be they trained at the University or not, and those
practical creatures in society who have kept the faith, who believe and
who do, are naturally and deeply in sympathy. And this essay seeks to
deepen their natural sympathy.

Here, then, is my simple thesis. Doubt is essential to real belief.
Perhaps this means that all vital problems are bound in a real life to
be perennial, and certainly it cannot mean that in its support I may be
expected by my readers to give a solution of every special problem that
might be raised, an answer to every question about knowledge or
morality, about religion or politics or industry, that might be asked.
Problems and questions, of course the natural children, not of doubt,
but of doubt and belief, may be as worthy and as practical as solutions.
Some of them may be even better put than answered. But be this as it
may, the present essay must be taken for what it is, not for something
else. It is, then, for reasons not less practical than theoretical, an
attempt to face and, so far as may be, to solve the very general problem
of doubt itself, or say simply--if this be simple--the problem of
whatever in general is problematic; and, this done, to suggest what may
be the right attitude for doubters and believers towards each other and
towards life and the world which is life's natural sphere; emphatically
it is not the announcement of a programme for life in any of its
departments.

The substance of chapters I., II., III., IV., and V. in small parts, and
VI. and VIII. was given during the summer of 1903 in lectures before the
Glenmore School of the Culture Sciences at Hurricane in the Adirondacks,
and except for some revision chapters V. and VII. have already been
published--Science, July 5, 1902, and the journal of Philosophy,
Psychology and Scientific Methods, June, 1905.

To Professor Muirhead, the Editor of the Ethical Library, I wish here to
express my hearty appreciation of his interest and assistance in the
final preparation of this volume for publication.

                                              A. H. L.

  THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN,
      ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN, U.S.A.




CONTENTS.


  I. Introduction
  II. The Confession of Doubt
  III. Difficulties in the Ordinary View of Things
  IV. The View of Science: its Rise and Consequent Character
  V. The View of Science: its Peculiar Limitations
  i. Science would be Objective
  ii. Science would be Specialistic
  iii. Science would be Agnostic
  VI. Possible Value in these Essential Defects of Experience
  VII. The Personal and the Social, the Vital and the Formal in Experience
  VIII. An Early Modern Doubter
  IX. The Doubter's World
  i. Reality, without Finality, in all Things
  ii. Perfect Sympathy between the Spiritual and the Material
  iii. A Genuine Individuality
  iv. Immortality
  X. Doubt and Belief
  Index



THE WILL TO DOUBT.


[p.001]

I.

INTRODUCTION.


Without undue sensationalism it may be said that this is an age of
doubt. Wherever one looks in journeying through the different
departments of life one sees doubt. And one sees, too, some of the
blight which doubt produces, although the blight is by no means all that
one sees. There is heat everywhere in the physical world, but not
necessarily only arson or even destructive fire. Morals, however, social
life, industry, politics, religion, have suffered somewhat--and many
would insist very seriously--from the prevailing doubt. Moreover, if the
outward view shows doubt everywhere, the inward view is at least not
more reassuring. Who can examine his own consciousness without finding
doubt at work there? We would often hide it from others, not to say from
ourselves, but it is there, and we all know it to be there. Other times
may also have been times of doubt, but our day, as the time to which we
certainly owe our first and chief [p.002] duty, is very conspicuously
and very seriously a time of doubt.

Now there are some, and they are many, who would decry the discussion of
such a thing as doubt, for they see only danger ahead. Doubt they
compare with death or disease, and to dwell upon any of these is idle,
unnatural, morbid. Why not let such things alone, and look only to what
is pleasant, to what is good and true and beautiful? Then, too, doubt,
the confession of doubt, is the royal entrance to philosophy and the
risk of an entanglement with philosophy, which seems to them the source
of much that is harmful, the essence of all that is impractical, is
altogether too great. Doubt for them is even less to be played with than
fire, with which already it has been compared here. Again, as others in
matters political and industrial, so they in matters intellectual and
spiritual resent anything that appears likely in any way to disturb the
standing credit of the country. To doubt is just to join the opposition,
and the opposition is made up of heretics and agents generally of mere
destruction. To treat doubt as real and positively significant, as
having any true worth in human experience, as being even a proper object
of will, is to stop permanently, not the wheels of commerce and
industry, but the wheels of the present life in all its phases. In a
word, perhaps one of the words of the hour, Christian Science has not
wished to be more inhospitable to the reality of disease than have these
believers to the reality and usefulness of doubt.

Yet all who feel in this way are short-sighted. Their contentions, like
those of their cousins, perhaps [p.003] their country cousins, the
Christian Scientists, may have worth for being corrective, but at very
best they are only one-sided. In a fable, never in real life, a man
might get the smell of burning wood in his house and refuse to recognize
the danger because of the inevitable delay to his business which the
alarm of fire would involve; but doubt is not less real nor less
dangerous, nor even less capable, when under control, of useful
applications. Any danger, too, squarely faced is at least half met. Why,
then, be so impracticable, so like characters in fables, as to overlook
or turn one's back upon the doubt of the day, refusing it a place and a
part in real life? The negative things of life can be so only
relatively. Death itself cannot possibly be absolute, and doubt, not
unlike death, indeed perhaps only one of death's messengers, must be
even a gift, or an agent, of the gods. Some things, dangerous when
hidden, are wonderfully serviceable, when recognized and controlled.
Sometimes men really have entertained angels unawares.

And so throughout these chapters, although some may think me and those
who follow me morbid, and although we may have to enter the dangerous
parlour of philosophy, the doubt of our time is to be squarely and
fairly faced. In all candour, we are from the start to be confessed
parties to it, hiding nothing intentionally, and at the same time trying
always to give nothing undue emphasis. The doubt that all seem to know,
that many really feel without perhaps clearly confessing, and that some
confess or even actually boast, we shall face and examine closely,
[p.004] trying as we can to find its true meaning and real worth. In
short, the confession of doubt, of our doubt, and the fruits of
confession are the burden of these chapters.



[p.005]

II.

THE CONFESSION OF DOUBT.


Our confession must, of course, be thorough-going, and can be made so
only through a complete statement of every possible reason that
experience affords for the attitude of doubt. To the end, therefore, of
such a statement we shall consider in this chapter certain general and
easily recognized facts about doubt itself, while in chapters that
follow we shall continue the confession by examining, first, our
customary or "common-sense" view of things, and then the view of
science, and having brought together in each case numerous
incongruities, or contradictions, which ordinarily are at best only
casually noticed or timorously overlooked, we shall find ourselves
facing in a peculiarly telling way, not only certain strong reasons for
doubt, but also some of the real issues that doubt raises. As no issue,
moreover, can be more central or crucial than the meaning of the
contradictions found to pervade our views of things, before completing
our confession we shall allow ourselves some reflections, that should
prove useful to us in the end, upon the possible worth of contradiction
in human experience; for even to casual thinking contradiction, although
good ground for scepticism, suggests some positive advantage and
opportunity; the advantage of breadth, [p.006] for example, of freedom
from special form, or the opportunity of personal spontaneity and
initiative as against the restraints of formal consistency, of class,
and of institution; and if these things, among others, can be associated
with our case for doubt, our reflections will certainly not have been in
vain. Then we shall close our confession by seeking the companionhip of
a great doubter of modern times, and by learning what we can from him of
doubt itself and of the doubter's natural world. And finally, as a
result of all our own efforts, supplemented by his help, we shall be
able to reap some of the fruits for life and thought that a confession
so fully made may fairly claim.

From start to finish, moreover, of this study of doubt we have to
remember that there can be no important difference between what is
possible and what is real. Thus anything whatsoever that can possibly be
doubted is really doubtful. Also, if anybody is amazed to hear mention
of facts about doubt, as if doubt should not somehow submit to its own
nostrum, let him merely reflect that, strangely enough, nothing is quite
so indubitable as doubt, nothing so convincing as the reasons for doubt.
Let me not be too subtle, but to doubt doubt is only to affirm it, and
somehow--whether for good or ill need not now be said--all the negative
things of life possess a peculiar certainty, and are all most easily
proved. A great Frenchman once put the case quite plainly when he said,
after canvassing very carefully the whole field of his consciousness,
that his doubts were the only things there, the only things he could be
quite certain about, and these were so very real that they left him
absolutely [p.007] nothing but belief in himself, in his all-doubting
and ever-doubting self, to rest upon. His was surely a sweeping
confession, and his residuum of belief may not at first sight seem very
promising or very substantial, but quickly, I think, we shall find
ourselves in agreement with him, at least as to the reality and the wide
scope of our doubting, and it is also a possibility well worth
foreseeing that we may even find his belief in the reality of an
ever-doubting and all-doubting self a rock for our own saving.

So, to turn now to those general and easily recognized facts, which were
to be the special interest of the present chapter, in the first place:
_We are all universal doubters_. We are all universal doubters in the
sense that every one of us doubts something, and there is nothing which
some of us have not doubted. Who would be so rash as to say that what a
fellow-being had questioned might not be questionable to himself also,
or that, if anything in his own experience had ever been subject to
question, all the other things might not also be subject to question?
But the merely dubitable is the already doubtful. In this sense,
therefore, not so abstruse and formally logical as it may appear, we are
all universal doubters.

Our life is ever cherishing what we are pleased to call its verities,
some in religion and morals, some in politics, some in mathematics and
science, some in the more general relations to nature, but what elusive
things these verities are! How shallow, or how hollow all of them are,
or at one time or another may become. To take a rather minute case, such
as it is [p.008] always the philosopher's license to make use of, a case
that is, however, quite typical in experience; here is a word--any word
you like--that has been spoken and written by you for years. Always
before it has been spelt correctly and clearly understood, but to-day
how unreal it seems. Are those the right letters, and are they correctly
placed? Is that the true meaning? What has happened, too, to give rise
to these unusual questions? Well, who can say? And who has not
substantially asked every one of them, not merely with reference to some
long-familiar word, but also with reference to much larger things in
life? Self and society, love and friendship, mind and matter, nature and
God have again and again been subjected to essentially the same
questioning. The verities of life, all the way from simple words used
every day to the great things of our moral and spiritual being, have
lost, sometimes slowly, sometimes very suddenly, the reality with which
we have supposed them endowed, and although we may still bravely believe
we find ourselves crying out passionately for help in our unbelief.
There certainly are the verities; not one of them can possibly fall to
the ground; yet these very verities are never quite in our experience.

Still the world has its thoroughly confident people. Every one of us has
met some of those estimable beings to whom doubt seems wholly foreign,
people who assert with trembling voice and sacred vow that their
convictions, political perhaps or religious, are unassailable, and that
they must hold them to the grave. But, whatever may be said of political
convictions, religious convictions have often been [p.009] regarded as a
contradiction of terms. How can one be sure and religious at the same
time? Moreover, positive people under any standard are notoriously as
fearful as they are dogmatic. Fear is often, if not always, the chief
motive of dogmatism, and fear is hardly the most natural companion of
genuine confidence. The part which the emotion of fear has had, both in
the personal life and in the doctrine of the dogmatic among men, would
make a most instructive study.

If, then, dogmatic people are slaves to their fears, while more
thoughtful people, as has not needed to be said, seem to get no reward
from their self-consciousness but the uncertain reward of their doubts,
then only such as live quietly, asserting nothing, depending on nothing,
and even assuming nothing, but simply taking what comes, are left to
represent genuine belief. Yet how many such are there? A few may seem to
approach the ideal, if ideal it be, but the class itself in realization
must be said to be a hypothetical one, and few, if any, of us could ever
really envy or strive to imitate its supposed manner of living; for, in
spite of all the dangers and all the doubts and fears, only the
constantly examined life can ever really lure us. Doubt, besides being a
general condition of life, seems to be also incident to what gives life
worth.

But, furthermore, not only are we all universal doubters; the case for
doubt in the world is, if possible, even stronger; for also--and this is
the second general fact: _Doubt is a phase, nay, a vital condition of
all consciousness_. To be a conscious creature is to be a doubting
creature.

[p.010] In so many ways psychology is teaching us to-day with renewed
emphasis that we are conscious of nothing as it is, and that more or
less clearly we all know our shortcoming in this regard; or again, with
still more directness and emphasis, that for us there is no such thing
as a state of consciousness which does not indicate tension, or unstable
equilibrium, that is to say uncertainty, in our activity. Nor have we
need of the testimony of science to these facts, since common personal
experience is well aware of them. In small things and in great
consciousness transforms or refracts. In small things and in great
consciousness marks a moment of poise between an impulse to do
something, and more or less distinctly recognized conditions or
relations that would put restraint upon the doing of it. Even the law of
relativity, a psychological law only in its definite formulation, in its
idea a simple fact of everyday experience, true for all conscious states
from the crudest perceptions of the organs of sense to the most highly
developed ideas of critical reflection, by binding as it does all the
details of actual or possible experience into a whole, every part of
which acts upon the other parts, points very directly to this fact of
poise and instability, besides indicating also that knowledge never can
be literally or objectively exact, and that at least with some clearness
every knower must know it cannot. How can there ever be even a single
stable or a single finally accurate element in the consciousness of a
creature whose experience, in the first place, can comprise only
related, interdependent parts, and whose nature, in the second place, is
an essentially mobile and active [p.011] one? Moreover, as just one
other way of suggesting the inexactness and uncertainty of consciousness
and the balancing, tentative nature of all conscious life, we always
think, and think properly, of conscious creatures as having will, as
doing what they do purposely or from design. The new psychology,
however, to which we naturally turn, and which again has only formulated
what we can recognize from everyday experience, declares that the
purpose in conscious activity is not a developed, but an always
developing one. Purposive action is action that never finally knows, but
is ever finding out its real intent, purpose being identical with the
progressively discovered meaning of action. A volitionally, purposively
active being is always a seeker as well as a doer. Indeed, any doing
would itself be empty, or idle, if it were not a seeking, and so if it
were not subject to conditions of some uncertainty. In so many ways,
then, through the necessary inexactness of consciousness, through the
unstable equilibrium of all conscious activity, through the law and fact
of relativity, and through the tentative and provisional nature which
must always belong to purpose, we see how doubt must be a phase or
condition of all consciousness.

Illustrations are abundant. Thus, once more to take a somewhat minute
case, which is really more significant for being minute, with regard to
conscious activity being in a state of tension, visual sensations always
involve muscular sensations, and these are incident not only to
expressed, but also to possible, yet restrained, movements. The eyes may
have been [p.012] moved and the head turned, but in spite of the
impulses present in them the legs have not been used to bring the
observer nearer to the object seen, nor have the arms and hands been
raised to secure a contact with it, and perhaps a tracing of its lines,
although some stimulus for such contact and tracing must be always
present as a part of the actual or possible value of the experience. Or,
again, to adopt an illustration used for a different purpose by
Professor William James, so simple a process as the spelling of a word
is complicated with all sorts of diverting and unsettling impulses as
each letter is expressed. Let the word be _onomatopoetic_. Can I really
spell it correctly? And what a gauntlet of dangers I have to run. The
initial letter _o_ tempts, perhaps with childhood memories of the
alphabet, to _p-q-r-s-t_, etc., or to indefinite words or syllables,
actual from my past or possible to my future experience, such as _of,
off, opine, October, -ology, -ovy_, and so on, or, to suggest mere
possibilities, such as _ontic, oreate, ot_, or _ow_; and every
succeeding letter is equally a scene of combat, a place of dangers
met--safely met, let us hope, and triumphantly passed. Worthy the boy,
or the man, who reaches the end unhurt. And what a voyage of
uncertainties, what a course between hope and fear, confidence and
doubt, the spelling of words or the spelling of life as a whole always
is. One's whole vocabulary, real or possible, or one's whole repertory
of acts is more or less directly involved, whatever one does. As to the
tentative nature of purpose, which seems the only other point here that
can possibly require illustration, the right we all [p.013] reserve to
change our minds in the different affairs of life tells its own story.
We never do do, or can do, exactly what we consciously would do; and
recognizing this, men, as well as women, insist on the right of a change
of mind, and sometimes even of conscious misrepresentation or of
disparity between their seeming and their being in thought or in deed.
That such a claim has its dangers does not now concern us; it has also
its opportunities; but the fact of it and the ground for it are quite
evident. Even jurisprudence, for which loyalty to established and
visible forms is peculiarly sacred, has its ways, direct and indirect,
of recognizing that purposes develop, that the returns are never all in,
that any purpose or meaning must sooner or later assume a new form, and
so may even now be other than it seems. Bequests for institutions, for
example, are allowed to continue in force, although, with the demands of
a more enlightened day, the formal conditions under which they were made
have been openly violated. In short--for it all comes to this--"Not the
letter, but the spirit," is an inevitable comment, or at least an
inevitable feeling about everything that is done. A man vaults a fence,
and then, even if he get over fairly well, vaulting is not what it was
for him. He may continue to use the old word, or the same arms and legs,
but with a changed meaning and a changed feeling of limb and muscle, and
so with a new purpose and a new body to control and modify his next
performance. And what is true for vaulting is true also for making boxes
or tables, for writing essays, for talking, for thinking, for founding
colleges or theological seminaries, or finally, for [p.014] what we so
indefinitely call living. An activity such as throughout its length and
breadth ours is, conscious activity that must for ever heed the call:
"Not the letter, but the spirit," an activity that never is, therefore,
and never can be without the elements of the game, since it must ever
wait on its own revealed consequences in order to grow into an
understanding of its real meaning; such an activity, among other things,
cannot but fasten doubt upon us as a most natural heritage. As man is
conscious, to doubt is human. Other things may be human, too, but doubt
is so certainly and conspicuously.

Thirdly, in this presentation of general facts: _Doubt is inseparable
from habit_. Habit is usually associated with what is permanent and
established, but just here lies its undoing. As we usually understand
it, habit really deadens what it touches by leading to abstraction or
separation from actual conditions. Conservative as it surely is in
things important and in things unimportant, in things personal and in
things social, it sets him who is party to it behind the times, for no
act in its second expression, no simply repeated act, no mere habit
could ever be up to date in the sense of really meeting all the
emergencies of its own time. Personal habits make fixed characters;
social habits make customs and laws; religious habits make churches and
creeds; intellectual habits make schools; and of all these products,
which for the sake of the single term we will call institutions, it must
be said, however paradoxically, that in being made they are also
outgrown, for the habitual turns formal and unreal and so unsatisfying.
A growing nature has [p.015] her ways of making even conservatives keep
pace with her. An institution in the sense of an acquired manner of
action, personal or social, can never really be an end in itself,
although to a narrow view it may often seem to be; it is at best only
the manifested means to a newly developed or developing end which must
eventually transform it. In so large a thing, for example, as political
life, the institutes of monarchy have become the instruments of
democracy, and this conspicuously ever since the French Revolution; in
the history of thought, of man's intellectual life, the objective dogmas
of one time have been only the subjective standpoints of the next, the
metaphysics of one time has made the scientific method, the working
hypothesis, of the succeeding time; and in so small a thing as a child's
vocabulary, the oft-repeated and finally mastered syllable _ba_, or some
other equally intellectual, has become in time only one of the means to
a whole word, say _baby_ or _bath_, or even _basilica_ or
_barometrograph_. In all life the thing we get the habit of is only a
tool with which we strive towards something else. Some one thinking no
doubt of Hercules has called the institutions of life a great club which
the irresistible arm of society, always a hero when looked back upon,
swings fatally against the present.

So intimately is change seen nowadays to be related to habit, or
indirectly involved in it, that in technical science a new account of
habit has been formulated. To cite but one case, Professor Baldwin,
says:[1] "Habit expresses the tendency of the organism [p.016] to secure
and retain its vital stimulations," and such an account, placing the
interest of habit in so general and so changeable a thing as "vital
stimulations," is designed to make habit fundamentally, not merely a
tendency to repetition or imitation, but instead a demand for constant
adaptation or differentiation. In the doctrines of inheritance, also,
always moving necessarily in close sympathy with those of habit, a
similar departure has been made. Both habit and inheritance are in fact
seen to belong to life in a world of change, or variation, and they have
assumed what I will style a protective colouring accordingly. The habit
of always being adapted is at least as radical as it is conservative.

With this reform in the account of habit we have not only analogous
reforms, as was said, in the account of inheritance, but also in the
scientific view of character, custom, law, creed, and the institution
generally. Moreover, if in scientific theory we find these new views, in
practical life there are at least signs of the same standpoint. What may
be called a new conservatism--the most truly conservative thing being
taken to be the most thoroughly pertinent or adaptive thing--has for
many years been getting possession of us, and is now quite manifest. Our
political constitutions are amendable constitutions; our religious rites
and doctrines are recognized as only symbols; our theories are only
standpoints.

So, once more, because change is at least an ever-present companion, if
not actually an integral part of habit, doubt must be as real and
general as habit. [p.017] Change must make doubt. Sociologically,
institutionalism must always imply a contemporary scepticism; the
conservative must have an unbeliever for his neighbour. Indeed, to add
an important point, some go so far as to say in general that change,
that is, something new and different, is not only a necessary incident
but also an actual motive in all activity, and when all is said they
seem quite right. Perhaps habit, as always an interest in adaptation,
would imply as much. Certainly novelty is a universal motive, and as for
society there can be no question that it has a very strong predilection
for lawlessness in all its forms. True, it may be objected that at times
men, individually or collectively, seek not something else, but simply
_more_ of something already secured; more money, it may be, or more
learning, or more territory, or more pleasure. There is, however, in
spite of man's many conceits to the contrary, no change that is purely
quantitative. _More_ is also _different_ or _other_. Accordingly, we
both always find, and, what is even more to the point, always seek a
real change whenever we do anything. To speak again in most general
terms, the motion in the outer world, which is the fundamental stimulus
of all 'consciousness, both physically, that is, literally, and
figuratively, is more than merely an outer stimulus; something there is
within the nature of the subject which answers to it with perfect
sympathy and makes it equally an inner motive. Forsooth, could any
stimulus ever produce a response without its being in accord with an
existing motive? Life, then, is a game, and the game of life, doubts and
all, is a real interest as well as a necessity. We are [p.018] creatures
of habit, but we have, and we cherish, no habit stronger or more
essential than the habit at once of adaptation and variation.[2]

A fourth general fact, very closely related to the foregoing, is this:
_Doubt is necessary to life, to real life, to deep experience_. Doubt is
but one of the phases of the resistance which a real life demands. Real
life implies a constant challenge, and doubt is a form under which the
challenge finds expression. The doubter is a questioner, a seeker; he
has, then, something to overcome; he fears, too, as well as hopes.

Were all things settled once for all, were all things clearly known and
freely executed, or