sceptics. He will, perhaps, not be surprised when I question his right to that position, and when I express my conviction of his ignorance as to what true scepticism is. His view of scepticism is, in brief, that it consists in asking, “But what do you mean?” The idea apparently has not occurred to him that to question or doubt intelligently you must first understand. If I, for instance, who know no mathematics, were to reiterate about some treatise on the calculus, “But what does it mean?” I should hardly in this way have become a sceptic mathematically. Scepticism of this kind is but a malady of childhood, and is known as one symptom of imbecility, and it surely has no claim to appear as a philosophical attitude.
If about any theory you desire to ask intelligently the question, “What does it mean?” you must be prepared, I should have thought, to enter into that theory. And attempting to enter into it you are very liable, in raising your doubts, to base yourself tacitly on some dogma which the theory in question has given its reason for rejecting. And to avoid such crude dogmatism is not given to every man who likes to call himself a sceptic. And it is given to no man, I would repeat, without labour and education.
But in the article which I have cited there is, apart from this absurd idea about scepticism, nothing we need notice. There are some mistakes and failures to comprehend of an ordinary type, coupled with some mere dogmatism of an uninteresting kind. And it is to myself a matter of regret that generally in this point I have been helped so little by my critics, and am compelled (if I may use the expression) still to do most of my scepticism for myself.[1]
X. The doctrine of this work has been condemned as failing to satisfy the claims of our nature, and has been charged with being after all no better than “Agnosticism.” Now without discussing the meaning of this term—a subject in which I am not much at home—I should like to insist on what to me seems capital. According to the doctrine of this work that which is highest to us is also in and to the Universe most real, and there can be no question of its reality being somehow upset. In common-place Materialism, on the other hand, that which in the end is real is certainly not what we think highest, this latter being a secondary and, for all we know, a precarious result of the former. And again, if we embrace mere ignorance, we are in the position that, for anything we know, our highest beliefs are illusions, or at any moment may become so, and at any moment
- ↑ I may mention here that to a criticism of this work by Mr. Ward, in Mind, N. S., No. 9, I, perhaps hastily, replied in the next number of that journal. I should doubt if in the criticism or the reply anything calls for the reader’s attention, but, if he desires to see them, I have given the reference.
