THE SKEPTICISM OF BELIEVERS. 



555 



would rather revere the miracles of Lourdes than 

 grovel before the trickery of a Yankee conjurer. 

 Moreover, to leave a disgusting subject, the re- 

 mark is really significant. To speak brutally (as 

 is sometimes pleasant and healthy), one might 

 say that faith is often used to signify belief in my 

 nonsense ; credulity, bolief in somebody else's 

 nonsense. Now, it is unfortunately true that the 

 rejection of one kind of nonsense is not a suffi- 

 cient security for the rejection of all nonsense ; 

 it follows that skepticism and credulity may 

 mean the very same thing : the acceptance, that 

 is, of a doctrine which is skeptical so far as it 

 contradicts my opinion, and credulous so far as 

 it falls in with yours. It is worth while, how- 

 ever, to look at the matter a little more 

 closely. 



Skepticism, in the most absolute sense of the 

 word — a rejection of belief as belief — is, if not a 

 rigidly unthinkable, at least a practically impos- 

 sible state of mind. Metaphysicians may play 

 with such a doctrine ; as they may urge that it 

 is a legitimate consequence of their opponents' 

 theories. Nobody doubts, however, that if they 

 succeed in fastening that imputation upon any 

 system, they have established a legitimate reduc- 

 tio ad absurdum. As a matter of fact, absolute 

 skepticism does not exist. It is rather impos- 

 sible than erroneous. There is a vast body of 

 truth in regard to which the thinkers generally 

 known as skeptical are fully as confident as their 

 opponents. Mr. Mill, for example, was just as 

 certain as Descartes in any given case that two 

 and two made four, whatever doubts he may 

 have suggested as to the ultimate ground of be- 

 lief. Indeed, the same thinkers who are charged 

 with skepticism are equally charged with an ex- 

 cessive belief in the invariability and certainty 

 of the so-called " laws of Nature." They are re- 

 viled equally for being skeptical and for being 

 dogmatic, for having too few convictions and for 

 having too many. No man, of any school, really 

 denies the possibility of attaining certainty in 

 regard to all such propositions as admit of veri- 

 fication by experience. The real problem dis- 

 cussed is not — ought we to believe, but why 

 ought we to believe that two and two make four, 

 or that Rome exists, or that the planets obey 

 the laws of gravitation ? The believer in neces- 

 sary truths asserts by the very form of his argu- 

 ment that his adversaries do in fact believe, and 

 cannot help believing, the truths which he al- 

 leges to be necessary, though they may deny the 

 propriety of that epithet. The thorough-going 

 empiricist may suggest that in some sense the 



most evident truths would cease to be valid un- 

 der some other conditions ; but he does not de- 

 ny them to be valid within the whole sphere of 

 possible experience. By attacking the supposed 

 distinction between different classes of belief, he 

 really elevates the claims of empirical knowledge 

 as much as he depresses that of a priori knowl- 

 edge. We can no more alter the absolute inten- 

 sity of belief in general than we can change our 

 centre of gravity without some external point of 

 support. One set of thinkers holds that we must 

 pierce to the absolute in order to provide foun- 

 dation for the whole edifice of belief. Their an- 

 tagonists declare that such a foundation can 

 never be discovered, but they add that it is not 

 needed. As the universe no longer requires the 

 proverbial world-sustaining tortoise, so the world 

 of belief requires no reference to anything out- 

 side of experience. 



The point is obscured by the habit of speak- 

 ing of "belief" absolutely, without describing 

 its particular contents, and of proceeding to de- 

 scribe it as in some sense a creditable, whereas 

 unbelief is taken to be a discreditable, state of 

 mind. The inaccuracy of the assumption follows 

 from the obvious simple consideration that belief 

 is unbelief. It is the very same thing seen from 

 the other side. It is a mere question of acci- 

 dental convenience whether a belief shall be ex- 

 pressed positively or negatively ; whether I shall 

 say, man is mortal, or man is not immortal. The 

 believer at Rome is, by virtue of his belief, the 

 skeptic at Mecca, and inversely. The believer in 

 the Ptolemaic system has neither more nor fewer 

 beliefs than the believer in the Coperniean sys- 

 tem ; he has simply a different set of beliefs. 

 To say, therefore, that belief qua belief is better 

 or worse than unbelief involves a contradiction 

 in terms. In the very act of asserting we deny ; 

 and it is a transparent fallacy, though an example 

 of a very common class of fallacy, to give an ab- 

 solute and universal character to a proposition 

 which by its very nature can be only true in a 

 particular relation. Belief and unbelief being 

 identical in nature, either is good just so far as it 

 is reasonable or logical ; that is to say, so far as 

 it conforms to the rules which secure a conform- 

 ity between the world of thought and the world 

 of fact. In spite of all the slipshod rhetoric 

 about faith and reason, no other test is admis- 

 sible or can even be put into coherent and artic- 

 ulate shape. If we still speak of skepticism as a 

 mental vice, we must mean a reluctance, not to 

 believe in general, but to believe what is reason- 

 able ; and in this sense the most skeptical man is 



