Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 74.djvu/492

488 am only trying to illustrate vicious abstractionism by the conduct of some of the doctrine's assailants. The moments of bifurcation, as the indeterminist seems to himself to experience them, are moments both of direction and of continuation. But because the direction of growth is not unequivocal, and because in the "either—or" we hesitate, the determinist abstracts this little element of discontinuity from the superabundant continuities of the experience, and cancels in its behalf all the continuously connective characters with which the latter is filled. Choice, for him, means henceforward disconnection pure and simple, and a life of choices undetermined to advance in any respect whatever, must be a raving chaos, at no two moments of which could we be treated as one and the same man. If Nero were "free" at the moment of ordering his mother's murder, Mr, McTaggart assures us that no one would have the right at any other moment to call him a bad man.

A polemic author ought not merely to destroy his victim. He ought to try a bit to make him feel his error—perhaps not enough to convert him, but enough to give him a bad conscience and to weaken the energy of his defense. These violent caricatures of men's serious beliefs arouse only contempt for the incapacity of their authors to see the concrete situations out of which the problems grow. To treat the negative character of one abstracted element as annulling all the positive features with which it coexists, is not the way to change any actual indeterminist's way of looking on the matter, though it may easily make a prejudiced gallery applaud.

Turn now to some criticisms of the "Will to believe," as another example of the vicious way in which abstraction is currently employed. The right to believe in things for the truth of which complete objective proof is yet lacking is defended by those who apprehend certain human situations in their concreteness. In those situations the mind has alternatives before it, so vast that the full evidence for either brand is missing, and yet so significant that simply to wait for proof, and to doubt while waiting, might often in practical respects be the same thing as weighing down the negative side. Is life worth while at all? Is there any general meaning in all this cosmic weather? Is anything being permanently bought by all this suffering? Is there perhaps a transmundane experience, something in Being corresponding to a "fourth dimension," which, if we had access to it, might patch up some of this world's zerrissenheit and make things look more rational than they at first appear? Is there a superhuman consciousness of which our minds are parts, and from which inspiration and help may come? Such are the questions in which the right to take sides for yes or no is affirmed by some of us, while others hold that this is methodologically inadmissible, and summon us to die professing ignorance and proclaiming the duty of every one to refuse to believe.