The Father of Modern Doubt

Extract

The following words will be an attempt to analyse the cause of the Cartesian Doubt, which, in our opinion, still lives as an intellectual disease in some of the noblest minds of our age.

1. It is our conviction that the universe and man are wholes or unities. Indeed each in its own way and both when united are such wholes or unities that any separation of a part is fatal to the whole. To exemplify: the laws of ethics will be found to be, in the end, sound economic laws. Theft, if not repressed by a commonwealth, will in the end destroy the commonwealth. Or again, the laws of mathematics, if denied, will mean the denial of the laws of psychology. Or the denial of ‘Thou shat not commit adultery’ will spread contagious disease. Or again, voluntary individual poverty will increase communal wealth.

2. Moreover, as man is a moral unity as well as an intellectual unity, man’s intellectual acts may be moral acts. Hence what is intellectually possible may be morally wrong; even as some acts, such as deliberate drunkenness, which are physically possible, may be intellectually harmful.

3. Man, like every other created being, is an imperfect being. Not only is he imperfect in being but in acting.

Moreover, since man can act deliberately some of his defective acts may be deliberate. But as man is master of his deliberate acts by his will, man’s deliberate defective acts, of body or soul, are moral faults. Acts attributable to the will are chargeable to the will.