CERTAINTY.
Ts certainty, at least as to matters of fact, a mere sign of human
folly and presumption? That, we take it, is the question really raised, if any question is raised, between the writer of a very eloquent and telling letter in the January number of Fraser's Magazine who signs himself "F.,"—and writes in a style so clear
and flowing that one might almost doubt whether he is of the order of Metaphysicians at all, who are not often masters of mere style,—and the editor of the Dublin Review, Dr.
Ward, one of the first of living metaphysicians, who replies shortly to "F.'s" letter in the new number of the Dublin. As it would appear from " F.'s" opening sentences that a very brief criticism of our own on the Dublin's paper of last April, " Certitude in Religious Assent," first roused him to battle, through the intensity of his antagonism to the view we shortly expressed,* we may regard our own view as in some degree assailed, though " F." wisely girds himself to the strife with the stronger and more fully armed antagonist on whom we passed the opinion with which " F." so vehemently dis- agreed. That, however, is a matter of no moment. Having carefully studied " F.'s " letter, we have come to the conclusion that if indeed, as he asserts at its opening, he holds " an opinion diametrically opposed" to that which we stated, he must really believe that there is no such thing in the world as absolute cer- tainty as to any matter of fact, and that the only reason why we appear to be certain about some things is that our minds are too narrow to keep any room for that margin of doubt which ought to divide the strongest working truth,—the best established prac- tical assumption,—from infallible knowledge. We say "if" " F.'s " opinions are diametrically opposed to our own, because, except in the opening sentence of his letter, there is nothing dis- tinctly put down to prove that it is so. The greater part of his letter, as we read it, is consistent with the view we expressed, from which in his first sentences he so vehemently dissents, —that " certainty, whether legitimate or not, is a state of mind not liable to vary with the subtraction or addition of new items of evidence, i.e., neither is, nor generally ought to be, proportionate to the number of valid arguments by which it may be defended, or in inverse proportion to the number of valid arguments by which it may be assailed." For the fact that " F." differs vehemently from this position, we are bound to take his own word ; but beyond this, there is nothing in the article which might not be interpreted consistently with it, though there is certainly much which may be otherwise interpreted, and which, of course, looking to the opening statement, we shall thus interpret. By the light of this opening statement we conclude that the real drift of the following passage is exactly what we have said,—that absolute " certainty," at least as to matters of fact, is an unwarranted and presumptuous state of mind for which there is no real defence, —and that the state of mind which should replace human certainty would be at most the admission of a very high presumption held in readiness to be diminished or superseded the moment any new array of hostile arguments should be produced from an unsuspected source :—
4. You, as well as Dr. Newman in his Grammar of Assent, are fond of insisting on the circumstance that certitude, the feeling in the mind, does not depend upon the strength of the evidence, and in this I think you are right. You say, and truly, that you believe in the existence of Moscow or Delhi as firmly as if you had seen them : that if a common fact is proved to be true by two credible witnesses, you believe it as firmly as if it was proved by three ; that the broad outlines of history appear to you as certain as if you yourself had been present at Waterloo or Blenheim, or at the scenes of the first French Revolution. How came you not to see that this proves only what a very treacherous guide certitude is ? A fact proved by many witnesses, as I have already shown, is far more difficult to disprove than a fact proved by few, and yet the mind feels towards the one fact just as it feels towards the other. If seventeen witnesses of undoubted credit and with ample means of knowledge asserted that they saw Mr. Gladstone in the House of Commons on a particular occasion, and twenty-three witnesses of the same order made a similar assertion as to another occasion, you would not feel more sure of the truth of the second than of the truth of the first assertion. Yen would not find it easier or more difficult to lift a weight of three tone, but it does not follow that three tons weigh as much as five, or that the evidence of twenty-three witnesses is not weightier than the evidence of seventeen. What follows is that your feelings are no test upon such matters, and that it you must resort to other means for arriving at the true conclusion upon them, you must suppose the witnesses to contradict each other flatly, or the weights to be placed in opposite scales. To try to weigh evidence by the feelings which it excites in minds agitated by a thousand conflicting interests and passions, often most imperfectly acquainted with the theory of evidence, and almost always unaccustomed to its application, is just like testing the strength of materials by touching them with your fingers. A deal board, an oak plank, an iron plate eight inches thick, and fifty other things are equally impenetrable to the finger-point ; but the deal board may be pierced by small shot, the oak plank would turn an ordinary musket ball, the iron plate would resist all but the heaviest rifled cannon.
It is just so with evidence Few subjects are worth the trouble of the most complete investigation which it would be possible for an ingenious man to bestow upon them. We have to judge as well as we can and act for the beet, and few intellectual defects are practically more mischievous than inopportune indecision and hesitation. Now when we have once considered a subject, and decided upon any prac- tical course in reference to it, when, to use a most expressive phrase, * See our "Current Literature," in the Spectwor of April 29. we have ' made up our minds' about it, we naturally regard the con- clusion at which we have arrived as true, and constantly forgot the grounds upon which it originally rested, and accept it as a matter not to be disputed. No man can have mixed much in practical affairs with- out observing innumerable instances of this. No man, I think, can have seen much of the world without also seeing that in practice it is of the highest importance to steer between indecision and obstinacy; to avoid, on the one hand, the fault of being blown about by every wind of doctrine, and on the other the equally dangerous fault of refusing to disturb our convictions when once formed, whatever new evidence or alteration of circumstances may come to our knowledge. This is a practical problem on which I need say nothing except this: that though the feeling of positiveness, or the certitude which probabilities produce in the minds of persons who have determined for any practical purpose to act upon the supposition that the probability represents actual truth, is a natural, and in many oases, a useful state of mind, its existence forms no additional evidence, either to the person who feels it or to any- one else, that the probable hypothesis is actually true. To refuse to recognise a theory as merely probable, when the question whether it is probable or certain is brought up by circumstances, because you have acted on the supposition that it is true, is a mere weakness,—the weak- ness of a person who does not like to be disturbed in matters on which he has decided."
Now it is obvious, as we have said, that these passages are capable of an interpretation strictly in accordance with the view which " F." declares himself diametrically opposed to, and also of the other interpretation. We never said or imagined that certainty ought not to depend on the
strength of the evidence. What we did say was that certainty, whether legitimately or illegitimately attained, is not, and usually at least ought not to be, affected by new items of hostile evidence. As to the " is not," " F." agrees with us. As to the " ought not," he vehemently asserts his dissent ; but his illustrations and argu- ments, unless they really mean that all certainty is practically a mere convenient bit of intellectually unjustifiable arrogance,—
convenient to prevent the delays and annoyances which would arise from taking small margins of residuary doubt into account, —do not go in the least to sustain his dissent. Admit of course that twenty-three good witnesses of ?1r. Gladstone's presence are better than seventeen witnesses, if you are weighing external evi- dence; what we maintained was that certainty even when illegiti- mate (i.e., mistaken), and of course still more when legitimate, ought not usually to be liable to increase or diminution according to the new confirmatory or hostile evidence adduced. Suppose I myself was in the House as one of the seventeen and twenty-three witnesses of Mr. Gladstone's presence in the House of Commons, and that on both occasions I spoke in direct reply to Mr. Gladstone, answering him, and answering him explicitly, and watching his gestures and listening to his interjections during my speech. In such a case the additional number of external testimonies neither would make nor ought to make the least difference in my own certainty ; for that cer- tainty is based on evidence which, to me at least, must be and ought to be of a far higher order than that of the number of witnesses. There is as much difference between the assurance which 1 ought to derive from my own explicit, direct, and distinct memory of an event close at hand, and the evidence of others, as there is between a mathematical proof and a plausible inductive conjecture. I am dependent on my own faculties only, for judging directly of an event which is clear and sharp in my memory ; I am dependent first, on those of others, and next, on my own judgment of their weight, for judging of the worth of testimony. it is simply absurd to say that unless I were an opium-eater or in delirium, I ought to feel confirmed in my belief that I spoke directly after Mr. Gladstone, and replied explicitly to him, by being told by either seventeen or twenty-three other people that they saw him too the same night ; or to feel staggered in it by being assured that they did not see him, or did see him elsewhere. We meant to maintain, what seems to us perfectly obvious, that certainty, even when illusory and founded on some treachery of the faculties, is and commonly ought to be confidence of a kind which the production of secondary confirmatory evidence should have no power to increase, or of secondary hostile evidence to dimin- ish. The claimant in the Tichborne case is either Sir Roger Tichborne, or Arthur Orton, or some third person ; now does " F." seriously mean to assert that his mind ought to be influenced one way or the other by the evidence now under course of production in Court,—that he ought to qualify his belief in his own identity in deference to what really are "valid arguments" for all other people except himself as to his real origin ;—that, if he be the lost baronet, for instance, he ought to feel staggered in his own mind by Sir J. D. Coleridge's tremendous accumulation of facts to show that he is not? Of course " F " does not mean to assert any such nonsense. He would quite admit if pressed on the point, that what is a valid argument ' for an out- sider will have no weight at all to one who is admitted within the circle of a higher order of evidence altogether; that a thousand'valid arguments' of one kind ought to be neglected peremptorily by any one who has access to a single valid argument' of another kind. Yet this was precisely what we meant by denying that belief ought to be kept permanently open, like a banker's account, against which all the new items of debit and credit are to be reckoned as they come in,—the sum-total representing perhaps a confident opinion one way one day, perfect suspense the next, an opposite opinion the third, and a return to the old discarded confidence the fourth. We maintain that even a mistaken certainty ought not usually to be so treated, much lees a legitimate certainty. Take the case of mistaken identity reported in the papers the other day, of an in- quest held (we believe in 1834) on the body of a Loudon girl found drowned, who had recently been dismisses by a grocer from his employment in consequence of the jealousy of his wife. The girl's parents, the employer, and the employer's wife all swore to the body, and great was the lamentation, till the girl herself came into the Coroner's Court alive' and well, declaring she had never had any thought of suicide, and so dispelled the illusion occasioned by the extraordinary likeness of the dead girl to the living. Well, we say that before the girl herself was produced alive, the Court had ample justification for rejecting as absolutely worthless, and not weighing even as ' valid arguments' at all, any secondary doubts that might have been raised by persons knowing the girl's cha- racter and affirming that she was not a likely person to com- mit suicide. There was a false certainty, but, nevertheless, one which it was quite reasonable to retain without diminution in the face of any 'valid arguments' of a completely inferior kind to those on which it was formed, though it rightly gave way before a valid argument' of a superior kind. Still more do we main- tain that there are legitimate certainties against which no valid arguments' should receive the least weight whatever. Take, for example, the favourite old story, of the " Arabian Nights " and a hundred other books, of the attempt to persuade a man through valid arguments' addressed to his senses by a hun- dred different actors, that he had been a prince all his life, and not a wretched beggar. If " F.'s " theory of a judgment always kept in suspense be sound, Abon Hassan was quite right in being open to conviction that yesterday he was the Caliph, and had only dreamed he was Abon Hassan. And this example shows, no doubt, that in a creature so weak as man the best sources of certainty may be set aside in favour of the poorest items of presumptive evidence. Indeed, it is a familiar subject of moraliz- ing to sages how easy it is to flatter a man into a belief which his own consciousness ought to refute. Let a crowd of courtiers tell a prince he is generous and highouinded and of commanding genius, and he may be made to believe it, in spite of daily indis- putable internal proofs that he is mean and petty in spirit and dependent on others for every thought he has. But this does not show that there are no matters of fact of which we may be really certain, in spite even of any number of ' valid arguments' to the contrary,—but only that men are often too weak to be certain when they have absolute grounds for being certain, if they are under external and internal influences favourable to a different belief.
The essence of the matter appears to us to be this: that certainty, where attainable at all, is usually attainable by sonic one master- key so powerful that all other subsequent arguments, whether pro or con, neither do nor ought to affect that certainty in the least,— are, indeed, only arguments at all when addressed to a mind to which the sources of knowledge on the particular subject, are inaccessible. "F.'s" line of argument, on the contrary, seems to assume that all possible evidences, whether of a lower or higher order, which may accumulate through eternity, have a fair right to a hearing and a weighing before sentence of absolute certainty can be pronounced ; in other words, that belief ought, if we may use a mathematical expres- sion, to be an integration of all the arguments which any con- ceivable intellect could bring to bear on a subject. We do not say this is " F.'s" view, but we do not know what it is if that is not his view. But, at all events, it is obviously and dan- gerously erroneous. Practically the multiplication of evidences for and against almost any fact, however certain, may be absolutely infinite. The farther you pass from the particular witnesses whose evidence would be conclusive, the more the secondary "evidences" widen and multiply,so that the more doubtful the sourcesof evidence become, the more evidences there are to consider. To the present writer it is perfectly certain at the present moment by whom the present article is being written, but if he were to die or lose his reason to-morrow, evidences on this very insignificant subject might soon be accumulated in gigantic proportions. Presumptive
evidences are necessarily infinite ; certainty usually depends on sources which exclude absolutely such presumptive evidences.
The real importance of the question is in relation to the evidence of the existence of God, Le, of a personal Will in direct relations with the human conscience. " F." actually says at the close of his article that you ought to try the question, " Whether there is a God ?" precisely as you try the questions, "Do heavenly bodies gravitate towards the sun ?" " What is the nature of dew ?" "Is a man accused of crime innocent or guilty ?" We should say it would be just as wise to propose to a man to try by these same criteria the question whether he is himself or some one else,—to propose to the claimant in the Tichborns case to consider seriously all the evidence adduced before the Court as to his own origin as bearing on his own belief in the matter. The question whether there is a God or not is a question the evidence of which, in our view, is contained within the mind, just as the evidence of personal identity is contained within the mind. A man may, as we have said, utterly misread his own character, may think him- self a wise man when he is a fool, and a man of the highest virtue when he is a devotee of self. But his mistake is not to be cor- rected by asking him to try his own motives as he would try the question, " What is the nature of dew ?" He has the sources of certainty, if he will only use them, within himself. And the same is true of the question as to the existence of a God. "F." is, of course, quite right in saying that our certainty cannot alter external facts. We never heard of any one who thought it could. But our certainties of a particular kind may be the only and the final evidence as to external facts. The evidence of consciousness is the sole and final criterion, as we believe, of the fact that even in Sirius or the con- stellation Hercules, the number of cubic feet in a cube is the cube of the number of feet in any side ; that what is unjust there, is as wrong as it is on the Earth; or, if I should ever be there, of the fact that I have been in both places without solution of per- sonal identity. And so also we hold that the existence of God can be proved solely by the evidence of consciousness, and can in nowise be proved by the sort of evidence which establishes the nature of dew, or which establishes—to the Court which cannot see inside him—the guilt of a person accused of crime. Again, we hold with Dr. Ward in the Dublin Review that the assumed uniformity of the Laws of Nature—the axiom on which all induc- tive reasoning depends—can never by any possibility be established by inductive reasoning itself, and is indeed only true under con- ditions which, in weighing the evidence for facts, make it equivalent only to a high probability. If, for example, the existence of " psychic force " should ever be proved, the uniformity of the law of gravita- tion will be subjected to a variation of a kind unsuspected for two centuries after its discovery ; and the existence of what chemists call " amorphic " forms of elements previously completely known, is another case of the failure of the principle of the uniformity of the laws of nature for all purposes of evidential use. On the whole, we believe that whoever will study carefully the controversy be- tween Dr. Ward and " F." in Fraser's Magazine, will find that while cautions of great value and force are urged with very great literary ability by " F.,"—cautions, the value of which Dr. Ward would apparently be the last to depreciate,—the truth of the matter, so far as a clear issue has been raised, lies distinctly with the editor of the Dublin Review.
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