CHAPTER V

THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF DOUBT

The seventh book of Plato’s Republic begins with the Parable of the Cave. To show “how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened” the philosopher draws a picture of human beings living in an underground den, all of them from childhood chained with their backs to the light so that all they can see is moving shadows cast upon the opposite wall. This world of shadows is the system of popular beliefs. To these people “the truth would be literally nothing but the shadow of images.” Plato tells us to imagine what would happen if the prisoners were released and disabused of their error. If any one of them is suddenly compelled to turn and face the light, the glare blinds him and he suffers a sharp pain. If he is reluctantly dragged up into the outside world of sunlight he is at first dazzled. After he is accustomed to the new vision, all reality will appear different. He will see the difference between shadow and substance. He will know that popular belief is error. If now he should return, what a difference there would be between his new wisdom and that which in the den passed for wisdom! “And if they were in the habit of conferring honors among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows, and to remark which of them went before and which followed after, and which were together, and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think he would care for such honors and glories?--And if there were a contest and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den and while his eyes were yet weak,” we are told that he would fumble and be ridiculous, and men would say, “Up he went and down he came without his eyes,” and they would pass a law that no one should even think of ascending any more or try to release another and lead him up.

I will not discuss the metaphysical implications of this parable about which there is dispute. Plato says we shall not misapprehend him if we interpret this upward journey as education. Whoever would face the light must turn his back on the crowd and its shadows. He must climb into another world of values. The educated man thinks differently. His beliefs are different from those of the herd. He is being set free from its delusions, even from what it holds to be important. This is not because he wishes to be aloof or superior, but because he is gaining a different conception of what believing itself is. He has a new approach to things in general, new habits of judging. He is beginning to form his own judgments, and to judge is to weigh, to consider, to question, to seek evidence, to doubt.

Common men cherish their naïve faiths and ask no questions. They imagine that education is simply greater information of the same sort which they also possess in some measure, and that it is the part of wisdom to establish the reality of their shadows. They resent a wisdom which is different from their own and unsettles belief. He who acquires information without the will to doubt is a common man and his kind understand him. Hence men tend to display their information and conceal their education. However much a man may know, so long as he does not become _re-oriented_, the crowd does not suspect him, but admires his learning. He is like a former Mayor of New York in his high hat at the head of the Policeman’s Parade. The multitude used to stand with their mouths open gazing at him. Each in imagination saw in the exalted figure himself risen to a place of honor and success. So it is with the “brainy man.” The “lightening calculator” or the man who can recite from memory the population statistics of the cities of the United States is a museum wonder. But when it was announced in a New York theater that only twelve men could understand Einstein’s theory of relativity, I am told that the crowd hissed.

Information is a kind of skill. Everyone can possess this skill to the extent he chooses, and people do not resent an exhibition of unusual skill of such a nature. In America most men and boys have some measure of skill at the game of baseball, so this game is the popular national form of sport. The skillful professional ball-player is simply one of the common boyhood ideals realized. He differs from the spectators of the game in degree, but not in kind. He plays the same game they all played, and is the same sort of person they all were as boys--only more so. So with most kinds of information, the amount one may acquire makes only a quantitative difference, not a difference in kind. But as a man becomes educated he discovers that he is playing a new game; he is becoming a different kind of person, with different likes and dislikes, different interests, different ideals and faiths, and such beliefs as he has he holds differently.

What the multitude most fears in education is the danger that the crowd faith will be lost in the process. This fear is often justified. Old beliefs will be lost and they should be. The fear appears in consciousness as solicitude for the spiritual welfare of the person being educated. It is really anxiety over the menace of education to herd living and thinking. It is the function of education to lure the individual out of the pack and give him opportunity to know his own mind, a thing he can never do so long as he runs and barks and bites along with all the rest. To return to Plato’s figure, every person who climbs out of the cave not only loses his own faith in the reality of shadows but weakens the faith of those who remain behind. Cave men make strenuous efforts to resist education. Their common practice is to maintain their own systems of pseudo education in which no one is permitted to turn his eyes away from the wall.

Again, education has been likened to leaven. When it is honest it is very much like yeast. Before the culture is introduced the solution of ideas is in equilibrium. The mind has simply accepted what was poured into it by parents, teachers, priests, and politicians. In the solution there is reflected a compact, “still,” neatly ordered little system of knowledge. “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.” Duty is clear, all is conventionally arranged, truth is eternal and logic can prove it. Human rights are decreed by the founders of the republic. The course of destiny is disclosed to reason and faith and the promise sealed in divine revelation. At this stage, most minds are carefully sealed up or a prophylactic is stirred in, for if those sugary solutions are exposed to a live spiritual culture they begin to “work.” Then they are spoiled for certain purposes. With the fermentation there is sometimes foam and gas; but a chemical change is taking place, brewing a mind with a “kick” in it. It is interesting that bread and wine and education are all made by a similar process; hence an educational Volsteadism has often been enforced so that many of the best minds have had to be “home brewed.”

Professor Dewey somewhere speaks of education as freeing the mind of “bunk.” It is a large task. No one wholly succeeds. I never saw a completely “debunked” individual. Strive as we may to eradicate it, there is always in our thinking an amount of error, of wish-fancy accepted as objective fact, of exaggeration, special pleading, self-justification. Many of our beliefs are not founded in reason at all, but are demanded by some unconscious and repressed impulse in our nature. Men make a virtue of their faith when in fact they are _victims_ of it; they can no more help believing certain things than a neurotic can stop a compulsive habit.

It is said that it is easy to doubt and that to believe is an accomplishment. It is not so. It is easier to believe than to doubt. The things we must train ourselves to doubt are as a rule just the things we wish to believe. It is children and savages and the illiterate who have the most implicit faith. It is said that unbelief is sin. This is not so; it is nobler to doubt than to believe, for to doubt is often to take sides with fact against oneself. Nietzsche said that this trait is characteristic of “higher men.” It was Huxley, as I remember it, who considered that man could in nothing fall so low as when he deliberately took refuge in the absurd. Even with a rationalist like Huxley doubt is not merely a function of the intellect. Under certain circumstances it is a moral necessity.

The pursuit of knowledge is not the same, however, as scrupulous avoidance of error. He who strives to do his own thinking must accept responsibility for himself. He must expect that he will make mistakes. He may end in total failure. He must take his chances and be willing to pay the cost of his adventure. I know professional scholars who are so afraid they may write or say something which their colleagues will show to be wrong that they never express an opinion of their own or commit themselves to any downright statement. Such equivocation and qualifying--playing safe--is not what I mean by doubt. I do not mean merely that one should be always on guard against the possibility of error, but that one should learn to hold all one’s beliefs with a half-amused light-heartedness. Most minds are loaded down with the seriousness of their convictions. Solemnity in the presence of our eternal verities is awkwardness, and makes us always a little ridiculous, giving us the appearance of one about to shake hands with the President. Why not enjoy the humor of the situation? Our great truths may all the while be “spoofing” us. It will do no harm to give them a sly wink now and then.

Crowd men have no sense of humor. It is very difficult to educate solemn and opinionated people. Like Omar, they always come out by that same door wherein they went. I have known students to complete a course of study having learned nothing, because of their disinclination to consider any fact which might cause them to surrender some belief about religion or economic theory with which they entered. Whoever leaves an institution of learning with the same general outlook on life that he had when he first came might better have employed his time otherwise. He is not a student; he is a church-member.

A well-known reformer says in his autobiography that his education, to the present time, has been a long process of “un-learning.” The progressive disillusionment began in college when he was forced to abandon the religious dogmas of his childhood. It continued through a series of hard experiences and misdirected efforts to improve the world from each of which he reaped a harvest of doubt, leaving behind the exposure of one economic or sociological fallacy after another, until in the end he had left only his faith in Woodrow Wilson and in the proletariat. Then he lost Wilson.

Perhaps one who still has the proletariat is not utterly disillusioned. If the education continues that too may go the way of earlier beliefs. It is one thing to despair of a society only one section of which can stand the test of our idealism. It is quite another matter if one is led to re-examine one’s idealism. It is this latter kind of doubt which has the greater importance. The significant thing is not the particular belief which a man gives up or retains but the manner in which he believes what he does believe. Change the latter and you change a basic habit pattern; you change the man.

Not all scepticism has educational value. There is a kind of doubting which is merely the negative response of the unteachable, the suspiciousness of the wilfully ignorant, the refusal of the incurious to examine disturbing and challenging evidence. There are, as an eighteenth century philosopher said, minds that are moulded to the form of one idea. Many people, after they have accepted one idea, tame it and keep it as a sort of watchdog to frighten all other ideas away. This refusal to be convinced may appear to be scepticism; it is only stubbornness. The late Mr. Bryan and his followers were very sceptical of evolution. But this hostile attitude is very different from the scepticism of those scientists who hold that the theory is a mere working hypothesis which is yet to be confirmed. The scepticism of ignorance is motivated by the desire to save an old faith. Savages have been known to exhibit this incredulity toward certain aspects of our more advanced knowledge. If you were to tell the natives of Borneo that there is no dragon in the sky which eats up the moon during an eclipse, that there are no spirits and no magic, I imagine they would laugh in your face and think you a fool. Many a discovery and invention has been greeted by a grinning and incredulous public even in civilized society. The scepticism which has value is that which leads one on to further study and investigation. And it is characterized by intellectual modesty.

Philosophic doubt is not the pitiable condition of the soul that timid spirits imagine. It is not pessimism or cynicism, but a healthy and cheerful habit. It gives peace of mind. Men who stop pretending can sleep o’ nights. There is a certain scepticism which is in no sense the spirit that denies. It is a frank recognition of things as they come. It is almost a test of a man’s honesty, among those who have stopped to think about the nature and limitations of our knowledge. Certainly cultivated people do not exhibit the same degree of cock-sureness as do the ignorant. People think the old saying about “doubting the intelligence that doubts” is funny. Popular audiences will always laugh at it. But why not? It is a platitude that the more a man learns the more he realizes how little he knows. Existence is filled with inscrutable mystery. To none of the profound questions that we ask of it is there any final answer. We must be satisfied ultimately with surmise, with symbol and poetic fancy. Speculations about the soul, God, the ultimate nature of reality and the course of destiny, and as to whether existence has any meaning or purpose beyond our own, or whether our life itself is worthwhile--all these speculations and many others of similar nature lead to no conclusions in fact, and we return always to the point from which we started. The very terms in which we put such questions are often meaningless when closely examined by the intellect, and the answer to them is determined by our own moods.

There is a general belief that science can answer the riddle. But science is only one possible view of things, the one best adapted to the needs of creatures like ourselves. It cannot deal with questions of value. It can tell us how things operate, their relative mass and positions in space and time, but it cannot tell us what they are in themselves, nor why they exist nor anything about their goodness or beauty. The more exact scientific knowledge becomes, the more closely it approaches mathematics. Pure mathematics deals only with abstractions and logical relations and can dismiss the whole world of objects. Science presupposes the data of experience and the validity of its own logical principles. It substitutes its mechanized order of things for things as we experience them.

Human reasoning is partial in all its processes. We think successfully about things when we ignore all the aspects or qualities of them except those which are relevant to the purpose at hand. The H₂O-ness of water is no more the ultimate nature of water than is its wetness, or its thirst quenching quality. That it is H₂O is only one of the things that may be said about water. Now if we add together bits of one-sided and partial scientific knowledge, we do not thereby gain a sum total which is the equivalent of reality as a whole. We have a useful instrument for dealing with our environment, because in thought we have greatly simplified it by ignoring in each instance all that is irrelevant. But what we now have is a universe of discourse, a human construction which is what it is because we are always more interested in some aspects of things than in others.

All our ideas are views--they have been likened to snapshots. The world of which we are part is in flux. It comes to us as process, and our intellect does not grasp the movement any more than we can restore the movement of a man running by adding together a series of photographs. The movement always takes place between the pictures. Intellect is an instrument, not a mirror. Our world is not reducible to a form of thought, and when men speak of truth, reality, cause, substance, they are really only saying what they mean by certain words. The world, as James said, has its meanings for us because we are interested spectators, and so far as we can see none of these meanings are final. Whitehead and others have shown that some of the basic concepts of physical science which have held sway since the seventeenth century are now subject to revision. Santayana says that knowledge is faith--animal faith. It would be strange if it were otherwise, if hairy little creatures such we are, whose ancestors lived in trees and made queer guttural noises, should so organize human discourse as to be able to say the last word about reality as a whole. It is well that we should marvel at our achievements of knowledge, for they are man’s noblest work; but let us remember that human reason, itself a phase and part of the process of nature, can only view the whole process from its own partial standpoint, and that is enough unless we aspire to infallibility.

Man is a disputatious animal who loves to speak like Sir Oracle. Uneducated people, ashamed of their ignorance, commit themselves hastily and cling to their commitments, for to change one’s mind is an admission that one was mistaken. We wish to be vindicated as having all along been in the right. Hence it is more natural to contend for a principle than to test a hypothesis. The ego becomes identified with certain convictions. We feel ourselves personally injured if our convictions are subjected to criticism. We are not ordinarily grateful to the person who points out our errors and sets us right. But if our education is to proceed, we must get over our delusion of infallibility.

This fiction of infallibility is very common, and those who have not learned to doubt this fiction, who are sure that they have the truth and are on the side of the right are as a rule the more ignorant and provincial elements of the population. It is no accident that Fundamentalism, prohibition, and other forms of moral regulation exist in inverse ratio to urbanity and have their strongholds in rural communities. People to whom it never occurs to ask how they know so clearly they are right when better informed people have doubts on the subject, are the ones who naturally strive to coerce their neighbors. To many minds there are no social or moral problems. The answer is always known by the crusader. It is very simple. To him there can be no two opinions. The standards which prevail in his own parish, the self-expression of his own type, are the will of God. Principles of right and wrong are known immediately without reflection or regard to the situations where they are to be applied; they are revealed to conscience. “Right is right and wrong is wrong everywhere and forever the same!”

Men who hold such a view learn little from experience, and this is why crowds never change their minds. They have first to be disintegrated and a new crowd formed about new standards, because each crowd represents its will as a divine command, a matter of eternal principle.

To learn anything from experience it is necessary to take into account the results of our behavior. But when you do a thing merely because it is demanded by a universal principle which must be vindicated at all costs, or because it is a divine command to be carried out with unquestioning obedience, you need not consider the results. Hence you cannot be shown that you were mistaken. In this sense men’s gods and their _a priori_ ideas have the function of preserving their fiction of infallibility. There always appears what Professor Overstreet calls the proclamation of “the One Right Way.” Differences of opinion are held to be not mere differences of point of view, but the difference between Right and Wrong, Good and Evil. Those who think differently are the wicked, the ungodly, the _enemy_. They must be convinced by being vanquished, silenced. Every knee must bow and every tongue confess. There is no longer a meeting of minds in the search for truth. The triumph of the Right is in the belief of the average man a knockout. There must be no compromise; any attitude other than intense partisanship is disloyalty. One in a discussion must line up for or against a proposition, take sides, have a ready answer for anything that the other side says, and be sure that nothing will cause one to modify one’s views. Is any one ever convinced by public debate? Or does one emerge from a church quarrel, a political campaign, a session of the legislature, a convention of a trade union with a broader outlook or better understanding?

The egotism of the ignorant keeps them in ignorance. There is an amusing notion that the masses are kept in ignorance by clever conspirators against freedom and progress. The average man’s reasoning consists chiefly of the repetition of cant phrases in support of preconceived ideas. He wishes to hear only what he can applaud, and he applauds what saves his face and puts his enemies to shame. Theological disputation has always been carried on in this spirit, and so have most popular discussions of morals, politics and economic problems.

Professor Overstreet says that this “One Right Way” attitude is essentially adolescent. This does not mean that it is essentially youthful. Adolescence is the period when there is normally an exaggerated emotional interest in the ego. A delayed adolescent type of mentality is common. Psychologists speak of it as narcissism,--a fixation of interest upon the idea of self. Among psychopathic individuals and also among crowds this _narcissism_ is very dominant and leads to exaggerated notions of self-importance and to other fixed ideas. Inability to entertain any doubt of self becomes inability to question any idea which one would like to believe true. Hence the delusion of infallibility. I think that vast numbers of otherwise normal people are made susceptible to crowd thinking because they simply do not know that there are ways of life and thought different from their own which good people may and do honestly hold. Crowd appeal at once entrenches prejudice and flatters the ego, compensating it perhaps for any half-conscious feeling of inferiority it may have because for instance a man over-rates school education and “did not get it.”

It is interesting to note how this delusion of infallibility may often lead men to believe and assert the most incredible fabrications. I quote from a recent New York newspaper an exaggerated example which will illustrate what I mean.

“The League of Nations has been asked to do a lot of strange things by people all over the world, but it remained for a New York business man to request action on the most unusual topic of all. Announcement is made by the league secretariat that it has received a letter from the New Yorker declaring his opinion that ‘brain enslavement,’ otherwise known as spirit writing or receiving messages from the dead, is the cause of many evils. He said he wanted the league to stop this system all over the world, making the specific charge that the American courts of ‘so-called justice’ are controlled by the spirit movement.”

Note the last sentence; the “specific charge” is very typical. There is not the least notion that so sweeping an indictment should be supported by evidence. It _must be_ so, for how can the alleged tolerant attitude of the courts be explained otherwise? An explanatory idea is asserted as an established fact. Here we have a mind incapable of entertaining doubt. As usual in unhealthy reasoning, the thinking in this case is a syllogism. Spiritualism is a form of brain enslavement which is the cause of wide-spread evil. All who do not sufficiently oppose it are controlled by it. The courts do not sufficiently resist it. Therefore the courts are controlled by the spirit movement. If the premises are true the conclusion of course follows logically. The trouble with diseased thinking is not its logic, but its inability to examine its premises in the light of fact. A healthy mind would doubt these premises before reaching such a ridiculous conclusion. Doubt makes for sanity.

I do not wish the force of this example to be lost. Most people will see it so long as we are talking about spirits, for there is much wholesome doubt about the doings of spirits. But let us substitute for spirits something else concerning which surmise commonly passes as established fact, and we have something very familiar. “The American courts are controlled by Wall Street,” or by the Catholic Church, or by British propagandists, or the attempt is being made by labor unions or by Communists. So it is with popular thinking on most subjects. Acquaintance with facts does not seem to be necessary for the formation of opinion. I can easily assert alleged facts on my own authority; it hurts my pride when I am asked for evidence. I once heard a fundamentalist preacher say that everyone who doubted the infallibility of the Bible merely sought an excuse for living a life of sin. Such statements must be true; they are so logical, moreover they justify a man in his fixed beliefs and put doubters always in the wrong. Many people even in their reading do little more than seek confirmation for notions founded on such thinking. The censorship of books is hardly necessary to keep people’s minds in the beaten path. Many people cannot read a book with which they do not agree. We disguise our infallibility under the infallibility of our favorite author. He becomes an authority. We read our own meanings into his text when necessary. We pick out the passages which support us and quote them on all occasions. For instance, a mind saturated with the teachings of Karl Marx will take in nothing else and will view every other author from the standpoint of his agreement with Marx. It is always so with the sectarian mind, whether in religion or in politics.

The sort of logic which we have just been considering leads men to assume extreme positions of all sorts. Opinionated and undisciplined minds always tend to carry an idea to extremes, to jump to a conclusion, to let enthusiasm carry belief beyond the limits of good judgment. This all or none attitude is supposed to be zeal in the service of principle. It is merely intemperance. Education strives for the virtue of temperance, and temperance--which among the uneducated becomes merely abstinence from the use of alcoholic beverages--is the avoidance of rash assertion, and of ill-considered and hasty inference. The temperate man stops to think. Careful thought seldom leads one wild. An educated mind is not so likely to “go off half-cocked.” It has fewer enthusiasms and so accumulates a reserve; a sense of the ridiculous helps it keep its balance.

Most men feel uncomfortable when they must hold their minds open and judgment in abeyance. Judgment suspended gives a feeling of unstable equilibrium, of tension; it is irksome like resistance to temptation. In addition to this discomfort in being unsettled, there is a disturbing feeling of insecurity in the thought that we live in a world in which certitude is rare and difficult. In many situations it is necessary to act before all the evidence is at hand. We must act on faith and take our chances. All men cherish their faiths, but few have the courage to act on faith. We naturally wish to feel ourselves more secure than we really are in a world where much is left to chance. A formula generally believed gives such a delusion of security. The greater the number of those who believe, the more convinced is the average man of the truth of the formula and the more safe he feels.

I think this wish to feel at home in the universe has inspired much of religion. It is also one of the reasons why, as older religions wane, each man must have his “cause,” his social gospel, his movement. These things afford a sense of comradeship in which there is safety. They give one “something to tie to,” something enduring to believe in. And as each cause or movement claims the future and looks forward to sure vindication and triumph, the future becomes predictable and congenial.

This search for an ideal security has had its influence on philosophy. Many philosophers, from the time of the ancient Greeks till now, have sought to construct systems of ideas, verbal forms in which in contemplation they could find refuge from the universal change in which all things come and pass away. Inasmuch as it is possible to think of an object or class and to mean the same even when the objects themselves are no longer present, a system of abstract and unusual universal ideas is set up and thought of as existing in itself, outside the process of time and change. The system of thought so conceived is held to be more enduring than the world of changing objects. The ideal world is then the real world. In it alone is knowledge of the Truth which abides forever. Such systems appear to me to be elaborate attempts to sustain a fictitious security by taking refuge from reality in a logical arrangement of man’s own empty forms of thought. From the point of view of education it should be said that such philosophies require much learning before one can understand them, but they tend to dogmatism and the closed mind.

A modern method of supporting the fiction of security--less austere and sophisticated than some of those of official philosophy--prevails among those who speak the language of science. It is known as mechanism. As scientific _method_, mechanism is indispensable. It is found by exact measurement and careful scrutiny that given two identical material situations, the same result will follow. There is a certain orderliness about the processes of nature, which if we ignore all else but the movement and masses and temporal and spatial relationships of particles of matter, lends itself to statement in mathematical terms. In this manner events are predictable with great accuracy. And now because it becomes possible for human reason to interpret facts of nature when they are thought of only with respect to mass, movement, position, it is held that nature itself is really nothing but mass, motion, position, etc. The laws and methods of interpretation are thought to constitute the nature of that which is interpreted. A method deliberately adopted in order to give a mathematically rational account of certain selected aspects of nature is now taken for a correct picture of ultimate reality. The reason which measures masses and distances believes it has discovered itself as the true nature of the thing measured. The universe is held to be at once like a machine, and at the same time essentially rational. Security is again grounded in forms of thought.

It is said that all futures are predictable by the new logic of science if we only knew enough about complex phenomena to be able to strip them down to that which can be expressed in mathematical terms. Of course no one professes to be able to calculate the curve of the whole, or to have worked out a quantitative statement of many of the phenomena of life. But it is a scientific faith that it might conceivably be done. This seems to me to be merely saying that we could reduce the universe to reason if we only could do it, which is tautology. I am not sure that a universe so reduced would be anything more than a bare system of thought about only one aspect of the universe. But scepticism here is as distasteful to many scientists as the scientists’ own scepticism is distasteful to theologians.

I am not asserting dogmatically that we cannot know truth or the nature of reality. I am not suggesting that we cannot be educated without ending in universal scepticism or agnostic negation. It seems to me that we have, or can have, such knowledge as will make our intellects fairly adequate instruments in the performance of their proper functions. But I do not see what such functioning has to do with ascribing finality to our beliefs or trying to legislate for all possible worlds. I am not suggesting an attitude of despair in the pursuit of truth, but am trying to state the very reason for any learning at all, for what is the use of it if we know it all before we start?

Education may not end in doubt, but it ends when a man stops doubting. But why speak of the end of a process that should continue through life? As I see it, the process is more often discontinued at the point of some fictitious certainty than in any moment of doubt. Doubt, the willingness to admit that conjecture is subject to revision, is a spur to learning. The recognition that our truths are not copies of eternal realities but are human creations designed to meet human needs, puts one in a teachable frame of mind. And the discovery that thinking may be creative makes intellectual activity interesting. Much has been written by indoctrinators about the wretchedness of the dogmatic sceptic. I wonder how these writers, themselves so innocent of doubt, know so much about him. I have never found such a man. I do not believe he ever existed. There are writers who question things that most men do not even know exist, compared with whom professional “freethinkers” are often naïve. But such writers are often gentle and cheerful spirits whose minds are not at all paralyzed by doubt, but are active, subtle, stimulating.

Humanity during the course of civilization has fixed certain habits, made certain discoveries, constructed certain systems of ordered knowledge by emphasizing the relevant and significant. There is little likelihood that the whole structure will come tumbling about our heads because somebody examines into its nature. In fact the highest achievement of civilization would appear to be a mind capable of understanding our human ways of thinking for what they are. But if our learning should cause us to abandon all our consoling beliefs and ideals and pet theories; if it should reveal human folly in our every great cause, and futility in our every scheme of social reconstruction, even then we cannot for such reasons shirk the task of educating ourselves. There would remain for each of us the ideal of what an educated mind might become; no knowledge could take from us the ideals of courage, of preserving our integrity, of standing undaunted before the challenge to our spirit.

Again a question arises similar to that we discussed at the close of the chapter on propaganda. Does not education, then, cause doubt and indifference so that the educated remain aloof and fail to take their share of social responsibility or participate in the activities of their times? Is it not the mass of “common people” therefore, and not the scholars, which accomplishes the overthrow of tyrannies and achieves progress? In a day when everybody is a professional or amateur reformer and people are led to believe that they can make their lives count only as they participate in some mass movement, it is natural that this question should present itself as we consider what education means.

History should aid us to an answer here. The author of “Our Times,” Mark Sullivan, after giving an account of the partisan strife and popular movements of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, suggests that perhaps all this expenditure of energy and intensity of enthusiasm was but part of the passing show and came to nothing, while the so-called leaders who seemed to be creating history were but the puppets of deeper and silent forces. He suggests that the enduring changes are those of science and the arts. I believe we have here one of the important lessons of history. Progress in civilization has been the work almost wholly of scientists, philosophers, artists, engineers, and unique individuals. The rest has been froth and foam, a struggle to liberate mankind from the clutches of its most recent liberators, crowd devouring crowd, mass movements marching to Utopia down blind alleys. Unfortunately there is some truth in the statement that the intelligence of the race has little influence upon mass movements. This is not because scholarship is aloof, however, so much as because the multitude in its enthusiasms does not heed the counsels of wisdom. When I become a zealot for a movement I lose my critical faculties. In exalting my cause I would persuade myself that my existence is of more importance to the world than it really is. No one so devoted and earnest could possibly be in the wrong, and in the righteousness of my cause, I have infallibility. What need have I of the wisdom that comes by taking thought when I have the truth by intuition and intensity of feeling?

If it is true that men can only be made to act under the lash of blind faith and enthusiasm, then the estate of man is a sorry one indeed. For most of the things done will end in tragic failure. It is only the conceit of ignorance to believe that the world can be straightened once for all by people who do not know what they are doing. Moreover, to say that ignorance is necessary to the accomplishment of good is to say, that ignorance is desirable and better for man than knowledge. There have been those who held such a view. Obscurantists always hold it. It is the philosophy of pessimism, and it is interesting to note that it is the believer and the devotee, the man of action and not the gentle doubter who finally ends in pessimism.

For want of intelligence the devotees of causes have been the mischief makers in all times. We cannot always know who does the most good in the world, but the evil that men do lives after them and it is sometimes possible to estimate the amount of harm done. Who has done the most harm in human history, the sceptics or the believers, the devotees of causes or the devotees of culture and urbanity? St. Bernard with his crusade, or Abelard with his doubts? The men who conducted the Inquisition, or the men who doubted the doctrine of the Trinity? Calvin and the obscurantists on both sides of the Reformation, or Erasmus and the Humanists? Cromwell and his Puritans or Voltaire and the Deists? Robespierre or Goethe?

The devotees to causes have kept human life in turmoil. If the immorality they would cure has slain its thousands, their “morality” has slain its tens of thousands. In most cases the strife has been useless and for causes that might have been won in other ways, really won. The devotee of a cause requires little provocation to practice persecution, and only the opportunity to play the tyrant.

Doubt not only has educational value: it preserves social sanity. I would suggest as part of everyone’s education the reading of such authors as Lucian, Epicurus, Abelard, Hobbes, Montaigne, Rabelais, Erasmus, Lessing, Voltaire, Hume and Anatole France. There is no blood on these men’s hands. They have quietly smiled in the face of bigotry and superstition. In their words there is laughter and there is light. Perhaps no one of them ever intended to be a liberator of mankind. They merely thought and spoke as free spirits, and their very presence puts sham and cant and unction and coercion and mistaken zeal to shame. They have done more for freedom and truth than all the armies of crusading devotees.