The will to doubt : $b An essay in philosophy for the general thinkerLloyd, Alfred H. (Alfred Henry)
Philosophy
The will to doubt : $b An essay in philosophy for the general thinker
Lloyd, Alfred H. (Alfred Henry)
Belief and doubt; Philosophy -- Introductions
The individual and the environing society are the closest of blood
relations, though we often allow ourselves, all too easily as has been
said, to lose sight of the fact; they live under the same roof, and rely
for sustenance on the same fare; and while to some the contradictions of
life may be overlooked as personally impertinent and unimportant, being
referred wholly to the environment, they are plainly the unavoidable
heritage and the personal responsibility of every individual that counts
himself a member of the human race. The objection, then, that was raised
does not remove contradiction as a cause of doubt, but merely emphasizes
what in a subsequent chapter must occupy us, the social aspect of
experience.[2] Thus, not only does experience, in ways now coming to our
view, teem with contradictions, and is contradiction a cause of doubt,
but also experience so conditioned is social as well as individual, a
matter of personal relations between man and man as well as a matter of
the single person's inner responsibility. Society in its manifold
classes, in its conflicts and in its history, may help us to see the
whole of experience, the unity [p.044] of experience on all sides and in
all parts, but it never does, and it never can, relieve the individual,
or deprive the individual, of any side or part of what makes up an
experience-whole. Grown men and women may be more definitely set in
their lives and their ideas to certain specific things than children,
but in no one, young or old, can such specialism ever be wholly
exclusive of any of the other things.
To return to our immediate interest, if men are given to being doubters
in their views about reality, spiritual and material; about unity or
wholeness; about space and time, on the one hand fatally vast and
independently real, and on the other formal and illusory; about
causality, so actual and positive now, and yet so complete yesterday, or
ever and ever so long ago; and about knowledge, so perfectly wise and so
thoroughly vain and foolish; if, I say, men are double in all these
different ways, in their moral judgments they seem, if possible, even
more confused, and the confusion, the division against themselves, is
the more serious for being with regard to what so directly concerns
personal life and human fellowship.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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