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
properly controls the application of science to practical life.
It may now be asserted that the facts are not in accord with the view to
which I have just given expression, that sometimes, and very of ten too,
the forms and doctrines of science are imposed without modification or
translation upon practical life. Thus, though the names for edibles
themselves as present to the eye--or to any other sense--are not normal
substitutes for food, nevertheless some people, whether from poverty or
from indigestion, have fed on them, just as they have taken long
journeys with maps, time-tables, and guide books. In education, too, the
formal conditions of science have suggested object-lessons and pure
induction; in political organization we have had programmes of extreme
elemental individualism, of lawless democracy, and of abstract communism
and Christian Socialism; in religion God [p.115] has been like a thing
seen, perhaps a tree walking or a man working, whether with hoe or rake
or with other implement, perhaps a trident, and belief has been
identified with an articulate dogma or formula; and many a realistic
novel, treating the details of life as a scientist might treat them, or
many a psychological novel, more problematic than artistic, has been put
upon the market. But what can all this mean, undoubtedly true as it is,
save that science belongs to life, yet is applied to it with difficulty
and only under conditions of conflict? In the case of the edibles,
poverty or illness, both of them incidents of conflict, is responsible
for the unnatural substitution, and in cases of education, politics,
religion, and literature, the substitution is equally a makeshift which
the conditions of conflict impose upon life. An individualistic
programme will not work, nor will a purely socialistic programme work.
Mere induction will not educate. No visible God ever was divine, and no
articulate creed ever was true. Life is a game throughout; its vital
character, its very integrity is its experimental character; it is not a
settled, abstractly perfect thing. Life is dynamic, not static.
Accordingly it must move forward by its mistakes, or by storm and stress
of the incongruous and misapplied, being inspired, not by somebody's
complacent optimism, but by a sacrificial, always heroic idealism; and
its scientific practices, however truly a mixing of things formally
incongruous or disparite, are just aids to its reality. Moreover, those
science-formed practices are always in some measure sophisticated. Human
nature is rather a fine thing in its way, as [p.116] many a man has
flattered himself and his kind by saying. Witness the homeless,
ill-clad, starving child feeding over the odorous grating and before the
well-stocked window of the restaurant, and feeling, if not actually
saying: "As long as I cannot have and eat, it is good to smell and see."
Witness, also, the educator or the statesman or the priest or the
novelist.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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