[1] See an article: "Epistemology and Physical Science--A Fatal Parallelism," in the _Philosophical Review_, Vol. VII, No. 4, July, 1896.
[2] See articles: "Pluralism: Empedocles and Democritus," in the _Philosophical Review_, Vol. X, No. 3, May, 1901; "A Study in the Logic of the Early Greek Philosophy--Being, not-Being, and Becoming," in the _Monist_, Vol. XII, No. 3, April, 1902; and "The Poetry of Anaxagoras's Metaphysics," in _The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Method_, Vol. IV, No 4.
[3] See Münsterberg's _Psychology and Life_, p. 267. Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1899.
[4] For an interesting account, mainly psychological in standpoint, of will as involving such a poise, see Münsterberg's _Grundzüge der Psychologie_, Vol. I, chap. xv., Leipzig, 1900.
POSSIBLE VALUE IN THESE ESSENTIAL DEFECTS OF EXPERIENCE.
An original sin, or an essential defect, must somehow be for some good purpose. At least, if a general faith in the ultimate propriety of all things has any ground to stand on, such must be the case. The sin or the defect cannot be unmixed; its very originality, its essentiality, must line it, though it be the blackest of clouds, with some silver. Theology has sometimes forgotten this, but an honest doubter cannot afford such a lapse.
Yet before examining the possible worth of the original defects of experience, or, as some might regard the present enterprise, before attempting to give the devil himself a "character," we must recall the various steps of our general undertaking as it has progressed so far. We have been, in the first place, occupied with a thorough-going confession of doubt, with the greatest possible candour hunting down all the reasons for the attitude of doubt which experience affords, and so far, in the second place, we have found doubt justified, whether for good or for ill, because of its potential when not actual universality among men, of its character as a condition of all conscious life, of [p.132] its importance to real active life and deep experience, of its intimacy even with habit, and of its natural sense of dependence and consequent impulse to companionship with nature, man and God, but more than all--and this was the special interest of the last two chapters--because of the paradoxical and self-contradictory nature of all human experience. As regards the last point, our ordinary consciousness, the often-boasted consciousness of common sense, was found to harbour a widespread, very persistent duplicity towards such vital things as reality, wholeness or unity, space and time, the causal relation, knowledge, moral freedom and natural law; and science, to which many when dislodged from their ordinary standpoint have been accustomed to retreat with greatest confidence and hope, was examined with similar results. Science was found in its rise to involve abstraction of interest and disruption of life, and in its avowed point of view to be--suppose I say at this point--impossible but contradictory. So, in a word, as a clinching argument for doubt, as an argument that at least on the surface has less of hope in it than any of the others, we are face to face with the bare, hard fact that in the very nature of human experience, besides the relativity and instability and subjectivity, there dwells a spirit of positive violence. Contradiction is just one phase of the error to which all men are said to be addicted. As a background for the inconsistent theologian, the fickle woman, the shifting politician and other equally double-faced monsters, we see both-sidedness, individually and to a certain extent socially, to be a basal habit of human nature, [p.133] and if the doctrine of original sin is tenable at all, in just this fact it would appear to have its strongest support. _Humanum est errare_ may be translated: Man is most human when hopelessly divided against himself.