Alfred H. Lloyd

“ Knowledge is power. I, too, had my axioms, my special demonstrations, my corollaries, and my final Q.E.D.'s. But any present-day resort to mathematics or its methods is only a shadow, or an echo, of the movement of the seventeenth century. At that time it was a movement of last resort and all the passion of a deceived intellect, of a mind given over to the most far-reaching doubts, and a disappointed faith, once more acquiring hope, was present in it. The truths and methods of mathematics—what but veracity incarnate, the very mind of God made manifest to mankind! ”

“ Friendship and fatherhood and motherhood and all the relations of kin, nay, all the relations of life, that make our individuality real, that make it personal, that make it social, that make, it natural, have been from the beginning, live now, and must survive forever, and by their survival hold for the present and the future life all who have ever been. Where would faith go, and where worth and responsibility, if birth really created and death destroyed, or if birth were a coming from no one knows where, from a realm unlike and apart, and death the return? ”

“ Witness the familiar argument from the knowledge of law in nature to fatalism, an argument as absurd as it is widespread, for the bare fact that we know the laws of nature really emancipates us from the blind fate to which the argument points. Can knowledge ever mean anything but freedom? Certainly no law can ever be known unless the sphere of its operation accords with the nature of those who have the knowledge. Simply to know is to share in and be at one with whatsoever is known, and the clearer and more cogent or rational the knowledge, the truer and realer is this participation or union. ”

“ Genius always forgives; the spirit always recalls and cherishes the letter that has given it birth.
So the institution as an historical fact, whether we see it with the eyes of Machiavelli or with those of a pope, with the eyes of Protagoras or with those of Socrates, with the eyes of the Pharisees or with those of Christ, may show worship turning into use, the sacred becoming secular, but it shows also the life of society becoming enriched; it shows investment for future gain; it shows doubt, not destroying anything, but achieving only what is real; it shows the life of the spirit. ”

“ Prose is simply formally consistent experience, experience that is wholly bound to some determined standpoint, and, being this, in what it presents—that is, in its subject-matter—it is always, not adequate and inclusive, but partial and narrow and one-sided to reality. Prose, in short, sacrifices wholeness, that is to say, depth and breadth of view, to mere formal consistency. Poetry, at least in its subject-matter, is above formal consistency and above partiality. Through its very license poetry bears the message of what is real and whole. Poetry forever prefers reality to prosaic peace. ”

“ To doubt is just to join the opposition, and the opposition is made up of heretics and agents generally of mere destruction. To treat doubt as real and positively significant, as having any true worth in human experience, as being even a proper object of will, is to stop permanently, not the wheels of commerce and industry, but the wheels of the present life in all its phases. In a word, perhaps one of the words of the hour, Christian Science has not wished to be more inhospitable to the reality of disease than have these believers to the reality and usefulness of doubt. ”

“ To speak with the extravagance of a counter-sentimentalism, the individual of our present acquaintance is forever spoiling for a fight. In the life of the society to which he belongs; in the life where he watches for his incoming ship, there must always be hate and evil in all their forms, lawlessness and destruction, illusion and error; but—and just here sentiment, the sentiment of a really searching optimism, called once before a sacrificial and heroic optimism, may find some assurance—never an unmixed hate, never a wholly idle destruction, never an unmeaning error. ”

“ That, once more, is doubt without its sting, robbed of its victory. Doubt means sacrifice, often enormous sacrifice, but always a more than equal gain. The light that casts the shadows of doubt, when one can face it, and really does face it, as, for another example, in this book we have been trying to face it, is so splendid and so uplifting.
So, a third time, doubt destroys nothing; it only makes reality forever an achievement and belief a constantly active life. The fact, now no stranger to us, that doubt is social, also shows this. ”

“ But have you ever climbed a mountain up and up and up, through thick woods, over rough, almost impassable trails, into clouds dense and chilling, stormy and angry, over treacherous snows and frightful cliffs, and come out at last on the very top to see both earth and heaven, yourself between, the clouds dispersed, the hardships and dangers all forgotten, the whole world real and yours? Well, that is doubt become achievement. ”

“ Is not experience more than any one idea or any one ideal? Being really alive, is it not infinitely more than this or that thing, than this or that place or time, than this or that power or will, than this or that point of view? And, if more, what so surely as universal duplicity and self-opposition can ensure at once its vitality and its integrity? ”

“ The men who have ever achieved anything have always been, in their character and in their work, as if made by the future, "ahead of their times." An uncanny phrase, unless one can think of the deeds and men of any time as in a vital unity with the deeds and men of all times. A man is great only as he identifies himself with some social force, with some actual movement of his day, fulfilling it out of a long past, bringing it to focus and so making it definite and manifest, and as the life around him which gave him birth, adopts his will and repeats his achievement. ”

“ Forget the grimy hands and the noisy machinery, the overshadowing smoke and the apparent absorption in mere utility, and think only of the man, who in his best moments feels himself individually responsible and capable, who believes in himself as having at once a peculiar and a necessary part in the real life of his time, and who expresses himself through some skilful mastery over the resources of nature, applying to them the principles his own thinking has uncovered, and using her machinery to the ends of his own nature, which, as we have seen, is bounded only by the "unity of experience." ”

“ Reality will hold him to itself, will support whatever truly inheres in his friendships or his family ties, in his best hopes or in his personal conceits, for ever and ever. Reality can never betray what it has ever harboured.
And the whole trend of thinking in this book has been to make the reality here spoken of a most hospitable harbour. So innate to all experience is the spirit of truth, the principle of veracity, that life can have no absolute illusions. True, life also can have no positive knowledge final and exact, so that all things definitely manifest are only relatively true or real. ”

“ So real, and so vast, and so physical to us but a moment ago, space and time have now passed into mere phantoms of the imagination. We live, then, not only in a world that is brutally spatial and temporal, but also, and at the same time, [p.039] in a world that is not spatial and not temporal at all; and living here—or there?—we have again to wonder and to doubt even in our belief. To our own constant amazement we find that we make our life a bridge over what would seem to be an absolutely impassable chasm.
As for causation our temerity is not less surprising. ”

“ The doubter's world, then, is the scene, as realistic as you will and perhaps we may say, too, without unwarranted enthusiasm, as bright beneath the morning sun, of the ever present, ever active life of God or—with the same meaning—of an evolution which we may call God or nature as we please. From this thought, too, if only we remember that nothing is unreal and no experience is without some contact with reality, there is but a step to the idea that God and man are actively parties to one and the same life. ”

“ Society means conflict. It is just the natural sphere of life and reality as for ever a divided labour, as for ever divided and laborious—divided even between the powers for supposed good and for adjudged evil, and through the conflicts, in which the division is expressed, what is true and good and vital is being forever kept real. Or, to repeat, society is the natural medium through which movement, unity or integrity, poise and reality, and practicality are secured and realized in human experience ”

“ Here, for example, in practical life is the natural, physical world. How real, brutally real, it is; its very law is fate; its forces are no respecters of persons, inexorably ruling and compelling all alike, giving life and taking it, full of the grimmest humour, raising hopes only to cast them down. Is some one rash enough to suggest that things physical are only so many ideas, real only as states of mind, of God's mind possibly, in some way coming to consciousness in the senses of men? The practical man knows a thing or two about that. ”

“ Instead of a monarch or a book or a city the self-sufficient ruler of human life and human thought, came unity through the ballot; through freedom of thought—always loyal only to a real unity and in being thus loyal also always tolerant; and through all sorts of like means to individuality. The "universal individual" died, and there arose, as it were, out of his grave the living unity of manifold individuals, each one different, yet each quite essential. ”

“ To begin with, specialism makes vision, the mind's vision as well as the sensuous vision, dim or distorted. It may even be said to induce a species of blindness or, as virtually the same thing, to create in consciousness curious fancies, strange perversions of reality, seen not with the natural eye at all, but with the imagination, always so ingenious and so original, and one might almost add so hypnotic, in its power of suggestion over the senses. In ways and for reasons neither unknown nor unappreciated by most men, specialism even closes one's eyes and makes one dream. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Art, appeal as it always is from the human as expressed in the established ways of some given social organization to the natural, shows a people sensitive to a mystery, a real but unseen end, in its developed activities, but not yet willing to let the experimental and instrumental character of those activities have free expression. It appeals to the natural, which is of course the sphere of all adventure, but, still cherishing the human, it never gets, so to speak, out of sight of home. Science, the successor of art, shows home, that is, the human and the subjective, left far behind. ”

“ Somehow law is not many, but one. Many laws can only be different phases or cases of one law. The very essence of law is to be one and single and all-embracing. To put the case theologically, could any one suppose that God made the laws of chemistry and sociology and psychology as so many separate and independent enactments? On such a supposition he had been a strange God indeed, lacking the very thing, unity of being and character, which men have come to associate with divinity, and what theology demands of God, science, even against its own specialism, must demand of its object. ”

“ Duplicity, whatever may be its own special dangers, is always better, being nearer to reality, than narrowness.
Is not the road-mender also a good Catholic, or in some other way, conventional or unconventional, religiously devout, piously doing, not his own, but another's work? Does not the scientist give point to the idea of another and different life, that is to say, of his life of knowledge not being the whole of life, by the agnosticism which he not only carefully asserts but also actually embodies as a factor in his method? ”

“ To theology, God is determinate; to doubt, imperfect if determinate. At times, perhaps only half in earnest, or at least not clearly knowing if he is in earnest or if he wishes others to think him so, the doubter speaks of nature as his God, of the hills, or the fields, or the sea, or the sky, or the busy street as his church, or the great book of the universe as his Bible. At times, with the deepest emotion and with open avowal, nature and God are fully one to him, and the poetry, or the science, or the philosophy, to which his doubting leads him, is veritably a religious revelation. ”

“ Should he ever find hope in what he fears? Should he ever laugh at his own manifest smallness? Yet these are real duties; they are great, transcendent duties; and, richly humorous as they are, only a poetic consciousness can ever appreciate them and truly feel their living obligation.
For this, our life of comedy and poetry, which is real only as it is both, no principle can come nearer to the very foundation of duty than just the principle, deeply true: Whatever is, is right. Men have laughed and men have wept over this truth. Was ever more perfect mingling of doubt and belief? ”