intellects, believe in doctrines because they are absurd, and in direct proportion to their absurdity.

DOUBT.

"The true opposites of belief' writes James, "are doubt and inquiry." It has become almost an axiom that every belief not grounded on truth carries within itself the germs of its own destruction; and these germs are doubts. If from the wreckage new and better beliefs leading to a better Weltanschauung arise, then doubt has served a very useful purpose and was normal, but if, on the contrary, doubt merely destroys and leaves a barren waste, then its work has been most baneful and pathological, for any belief, however absurd it may be, is psychologically better than mere impotent doubt, just as any kind of life, even the most wretched, is biologically superior to death. Belief brings psycho-physical satisfaction, peace and stability; chronic doubt leads to intellectual unrest and finally to insanity. Therefore, while doubt plays a most useful rôle in intellectual development, especially during adolescence; while it spurs the intellect on to free itself from the errors of the past, and extend further and further the boundaries of knowledge, its usefulness ceases as soon as it becomes chronic and merely destructive. In the development of an organism there are always two forces at work, anabolism and katabolism, i. e., a healthy life and growth, but so soon as anabolism ceases entirely, or in part, we have rapid degeneration and decomposition ending in death. So when doubt fails to give birth to new beliefs, when the katabolic or destructive process in it is more active than the anabolic or constructive, there follows an intellectual degeneration which ends in morbid despair, melancholia, and frequently in suicide. Healthy, legitimate doubt is the mother of investigation, investigation begets knowledge, and knowledge means progress. But not so with Pyrrhonistic or universal skepticism. That bears no fruit whatever, not even ignorance. Indeed it is worse than sterile, it is a positive negative; a poison, not an opiate. We can make the distinction between normal and abnormal doubt clearer by illustrations.

1. Replying to a questionnaire sent out by Dr. Burnham a respondent writes: "This belief in a real truth lying somewhere intermediate between the adverse testimony

6

of different witnesses (to which he arrived after a period of doubting) saved me from a radical skepticism, and, of course, from anything like despair, and even from a storm and stress' period. This kind of doubt was rather a constant and steady stimulus to inquiry. The result, therefore, was healthful, in that it incited me to study, and carried me through the iconoclastic period to the reconstructive one that followed. Nor do I think that I was ever led to any real pessimism. I never really doubted that God was good, or that the world was rational, but I had found that men had presumed to dogmatize on a great many subjects which they knew nothing about. I had therefore a kind of misanthropy, but even this form of pessimism tended to yield—as I learned to study men themselves and to see how many-sided is what each calls truth-to a vigorous hatred only of intolerance."1

Another writes: . . . " Everything was challenged, and everything almost seemed open to doubt; but finally, I reached bed-rock in the following propositions:

"There is such a thing as truth, whether I can ever find it out or not-if the truth were known there would be a best way to live in view of the truth-the wise thing to do is to walk in the light of what truth is known, and constantly to strive for new truth. This was a solid foundation-on this I might build but little, but that little would stand."

A clergyman wrote to Dr. Starbuck, "I always hail doubt as sure to reveal some unexpected truth. As often as I have tried to dodge doubts I have suffered. My real doubts have always come upon me suddenly, and unaccountably, and have been the precursors of fresh discovery." 2

The main features of one of the most extreme cases were somewhat as follows: "My correspondent," writes Dr. Burnham, "was educated in the religious environment of a Puritan family. As early as the age of fourteen, probably, his skeptical tendencies began. He felt that God was gone from the world. The emotional stress in his case was very great; he felt himself a sinner in having doubts, and yet found no escape. This condition lasted through his college course. Life seemed empty. The relativity of good and evil undermined the ethical standing ground. A few years

of travel did not hinder the contest, that raged with perhaps

1 The Study of Adolescence, Ped. Sem., Vol. 1, p. 184. "The Psychology of Religion, p. 242.

increased fury. He was possessed with gloomy views of life, of its utter uncertainty, and of the absence of anything in it that could be taken up with whole-hearted courage. For a time there was emotional and ethical pessimism of an extreme sort. Perhaps the first reaction against this state of doubt showed itself in a kind of pantheism resting upon the beauty rather than the order of nature. Finally, the fixing of more certain religious views came with an objective study of the life of Christ. He adds that the whole fight was made single-handed, and that he was hurt rather than helped by religious instructors." 1 Even in this severe case the doubts were productive of much good, and cannot, therefore, be considered pathological.

2. There is another type of individuals less bold and active. Like inexperienced or faint-hearted swimmers, as soon as they find themselves in deep water they rush back to terra firma. Doubt in their case does not lead to new beliefs, but a return to old ones.

I quote again from Starbuck: "It was during my senior year at college that I first began to feel any troublesome doubts as to the things I had been taught; the influence of study in the natural sciences, and the reading of some of the Huxley controversial articles, were responsible in part for this. However, my religious intensity increased at this time, and it was during this year that a conviction began to form in my mind that it was my duty to become a minister. ''2 The following case is from Prof. Leuba's collection : Case B. A clergyman converted at 20.

"At the age of twenty I entered a theological seminary and remained there four years. The third year I became a member of a conversational club whose motto was the Hebrew for We stand united for investigation." During the course of our studies in rationalistic Biblical criticism, a night was devoted to the discussion on the Fourth Gospel, the author of the essay taking ground against the historical validity of this gospel, regarding it as a sort of philosophical writing on certain phases of Christian teaching. I remember the reader's last sentence: The Fourth Gospel is a great epic. By this essay the floodgates of doubt were opened to me. For three days the wild tide swept and surged past and

1 The Study of Adolescence, Ped. Sem., Vol. 1, p. 186.

2 The Psychology of Religion, p. 242.

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around me. I felt I must give up the Gospel of John, and if so, my Christian faith also; and with this the universe would go. I yielded myself to what I conceived At the close of the period

to be a Higher Guidance

I found myself at one with all things. Peace, that was all. When I looked at myself, I found that I was standing on the old ground, but cherishing a toleration of doubt, and a sincere sympathy with doubters such as I had never known before. I could take the logical standpoint, and could see that the arguments were quite convincing, and yet my inward peace of belief was in no way disturbed."1

In such cases as these the foundations of religion have been laid so deep in the subconscious soil and cemented so firmly by habit and the emotions that no storming of the intellect, however long and violent, can do them any real damage. Reason is as impotent to make them unbelievers as it is to convert confirmed skeptics and atheists to a belief in theological dogmas.

Prof. Leuba explains this paradox by saying that the Faith-state had supervened, by which he means that an inner adaptation had taken place by which "a living sense of relationship" was established, nay, a union, between the individual and ideal powers. The strong desire and struggle to believe effects a new relationship between the emotions, the intellect, and the will; a state akin to mysticism in which the subject feels an indescribable peace and harmony between his psychical powers. In this new readjustment only those ideas are permitted to enter consciousness for which the emotions and the will have an affinity. Prof. Leuba gives several interesting cases which bring out these facts very clearly.2 Belief is, in other words, more a matter of the basal passional and volitional nature than of the intellect. "The essence of religion," writes Prof. Leuba in another place, "is a striving towards being, and not towards knowing." 3 We generally believe what we desire to believe, i. e., what will harmonize best with our individual being and help it to develop. "As a rule, '' writes James, "we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no use. 994 And what those

Psychology of Religious Phenomena, Am. Jour. Psych., Vol. 7,

p. 372.

2 Faith, Am. Jour. Religious Psy. and Ed., Vol. 1, pp. 65-82. 3 Am. Jour. Psych., Vol. 7, p. 313.

The Will to Believe, p. 10.

"facts and theories for which we have no use' are, are determined by the individual's temperament, environment, and early education. Missionaries are so frequently unsuccessful because the people whom they wish to convert, especially the older ones, already have a religion and beliefs which satisfy their needs, and have no use for the religion the missionaries offer them. Like the clergyman just mentioned, they may be able to see that the arguments are convincing without having the inward peace of their beliefs in any way disturbed.

3. Still another class meets with religious doubts for a time, and then bring the conflict to a close by either becoming passive or indifferent to religion, or else hostile to it, in which case they entertain other beliefs. Doubt has weakened or destroyed their religious impulse, but not their peace of mind, not their work instinct.

Carlyle, in his excellent chapter entitled The Everlasting No,' describes with psychological accuracy the terrible suffering which Teufelsdröckh endured during his doubting period. "Alas, shut out from Hope, in a deeper sense than we yet dream of! For, as he (Teufelsdröckh) wanders wearisomely through this world, he has now lost all tidings of another and higher. Full of religion, or at least of religiosity, as our Friend has since exhibited himself, he hides not that, in those days, he was wholly irreligious: Doubt had darkened into Unbelief,' says he; shade after shade goes grimly over your soul, till you have the fixed, starless, Tartarean black.' From suicide a certain aftershine (Nachschein) of Christianity withheld me; perhaps also a certain indolence of character; for was not that a remedy I had at any time within reach? Often, however, was there a question present to me: Should some one now, at the turning of that corner, blow thee suddenly out of space, into the other World, or other No-world, by pistol-shot, how were it? On which ground, too, I have often, in sea-storms and sieged cities and other death scenes, exhibited an imperturbability, which passed, falsely enough, for courage.

So had it lasted," concludes the Wanderer, "so had it lasted, as in bitter protracted Death-agony, through long years. The heart within me, unvisited by any heavenly dewdrop, was smouldering in sulphurous, slow-consuming fire. Almost since earliest memory I had shed no tear; or once only when I, murmuring half-audibly, recited Faust's Deathsong, that wild Selig der den er im Siegesglanz findet (Happy