THE PIT OF DESPAIR.
WHEN scepticism has gone its full journey, when it " doubts truth to be a liar," it finds itself at the beginning again : it trembles on the verge of belief. There was a school of philo- sophy in Greece which held, if I remember rightly, that nothing is true ; that if anything were true, it could not be known ; and that if anything true were known, it could not be communi- cated. That position was refined upon and made more sceptical in the course of controversy. " I know nothing for certain," the best dialecticians asserted, " nor do I know even this for certain that I know nothing for certain." But as it was necessary for them to go on living, and even to express opinions for their daily bread, they affirmed that this suspense of judgment induced a true feeling of apathetic bliss and tran- quillity which was the highest good for mankind. And they burked the descent into the blackest depths of scepticism.
There is nothing wrong or blasphemous in the passage through utter scepticism. The stupidity of many who call themselves sceptics comes only because they do not go far enough. " Prove all things " St. Paul admonished us ; but they halt on the way, and put a taboo upon the examination of half their opinions. They doubt the existence of God without doubting the existence of the universe : they doubt the existence of the universe without doubting the existence of themselves. And the most laughable of them refuse to believe in virtue and accept the reality of vice ; or, a little more speciously, reject the idea of an absolute good, but confess allegiance to the idea of progress.
Then what is that lowest depth of scepticism ? It is so profound as to be unnameable : it is a thousand miles below those jesters of Greece. If a man has in truth doubted his own worth and his own capacities even for doubt and his own being, if he has stood naked before himself and questioned whether he existed, if there is no remnant of his inborn and inbred opinions unassaulted, if he has no taboos, no inhibitions, no lazy beliefs left to him, then he is at last free to believe rationally as well as emotionally. But that self-stripping in scepticism appears so bitter that few can approach it.
The most usual subterfuge is to say, prematurely, " I will believe, but I will believe as little as I find convenient. Certain things must be taken for granted in order to go on living, and I will take them for granted as I come across them." A stupid position. Why, to begin with, why under the circumstances go on living ? It cannot be done honestly. But the chief fallacy rests in this : that the body of truth may reside in exactly the proportion of belief that such a man refuses to examine. Exactly the position which he regards as extra- vagant and not capable of proof may be true. And he is shutting himself off from any intercourse with truth.
But the man who faces his naked soul in utter scepticism will either die of inanition, finding nothing at all to provoke him or steer him through life : or he will see that he has shed all false beliefs, all possible questionings, and that he is left absolutely without an item of doubt in his mind. The truth will be what in him remains behind after the assault of reason, and that will be constant, energetic and inalienable. What refutation can there be to a man who has already refuted the whole of his opinions ? If afterwards he believes in God, are you going to discomfit him with arguments ? He has urged them all himself : and his God is not your God.
The value of Mr. Stokes's book is mainly in the degree of scepticism which he has reached, and the proof that he has not yet reached the ground of his nature and the absolute clarity of thought is in the fact that still, while professing ecstasy, he remains sceptical. He has discovered for himself (when all is said, a great achievement) the position of Pyrrhonic scep- ticism : lie formulates it for himself almost as it was formu- lated over two thousand years ago. " Nothing is completely true," he asserts, " including this remark." But he is not so sure of himself that he can afford to speak words that will be misunderstood ; he never speaks in the accents of belief for fear the reader will wrongly imagine that Mr. Stokes means the same as he does himself.
His merit is to have shown, diversely and thoughtfully, the progress of scepticism. For, to put the case shortly, if you stop at any stage of doubt, that stage is no longer sceptical ; it
becomes a false belief. It is necessary to doubt more and more, deeper and deeper, until, if everything is doubted, the very impetus of scepticism will pull you round into belief through knowledge, and that chain of scepticism remains only as a dialectical instrument ready to hand for the exposure of heresies. In form The Thread of Ariadne is an account of the beWilderments and contradictions and despairs through which the author passed before he found peace of mind and certainty of value (or " meaning," he terms it) in everyday life. his phrases are his own ; for he made the journey almost without help from orthodox philosophers. But they are concrete and striking phrases, and it does not need much trouble to translate them.
His first difficulty is to explain the grip upon all men of The Common Heritage." We talk in words which other men have made for us ; we accept as satisfactory for ourselves the ideas and the problems which have been suggested to us. We divide between good and bad, life and death, being and nothing, and under a general hypnotism accept these divisions as valid in themselves. It is impossible for us, while we remain in this state, to accomplish a single act of understanding ; for we are lost among platitudes which are not created by ourselves, and it is only by neglect of them, or exorcism, that we can resolve them. And here he touches upon the root of what he tries to impart. No one idea exists at all except as a-eomplement to its antithesis. Good is only good by its relirtion to the bad. It is the two antitheses together and indistinguishable which are the reality behind the distinction : one by one they are false. This divine levelling of qualities, far from preventing US from krtowing where we are, is the only means by which we can properly see where we are ; and in order to be virtuous, to be sane, to choose between good and evil, we must be free from any artificial or platitudinous distinction between good and evil.
It is for this reason that Mr. Stokes exclaims, " You have principles or you have not, you have ideals or you have not ; but I neither have nor have not, and that intensely." He touches here upon a problem which is definitely philosophical : a problem which every philosopher has solved for himself and has implicitly stated. Mr. Stokes makes no acknowledgments to his forbears ; but the plain fact that he has found and elucidated the problem for himself ensures that he brings a new mode of approach to it. The book is consequently one which every complacent or superstitious man could study with advantage. It might shock him into doubting his reason. But we must wait with interest before we judge Mr. Stokes's quality until he rises to the problems of his new ethic, and beyond the mere facts of his journey through scepticism. If only he would state, here and there, with the old Platonic virtue of courage, the new positive dogmas, the new conquests of thought, which he feels himself to have attained, we should have more opportunity for observing how solid and helpful his philosophy proves itself. For the peril of mysticism, the peril of the bliss of scepticism, is that it may be useless, though there is no disproving its truth.
ALAN PORTER.
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