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.
