The History of Belief and Doubt

The eighteenth century believed. The nineteenth century doubted. By the twentieth century, the impulse to doubt was so strong that it strangled belief. Uncertainty was the new god.

The major belief in the eighteenth century was belief in the existence of truth. Truth was believed to be knowable, graspable, utterable. It was pre-eminent in the pantheon of worship. It was the goal of every honest-hearted, right-reasoning inquirer. Dr Samuel Johnson, (lexicographer, essayist, moralist) a walking Ten Commandments of how to live, insisted on it.

Boswell, his biographer, tells us, “He inculcated upon all his friends the importance of perpetual vigilance against the slightest degree of falsehood.” In Boswell’s words, Johnson was “known to be so rigidly attentive to…strict and scrupulous veracity…that even in his common conversation the slightest circumstance was mentioned with exact precision.”

According to Johnson, “Truth should never be violated, because it is of the utmost importance to the comfort of life.” Johnson, in tune with his century, believed in Truth.

In the nineteenth century, doubt crept in and cracked the great cathedral of belief. By the end of the century, belief, and even the possibility of belief, lay in ruins. One turns to John Keats, who in his public utterances (his poetry) argued that “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty,” but privately (in his letters) derided that very assurance and championed “Negative Capability,” the capacity to be in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” In the same letter [Dec. 21-27, 1817] he criticized Coleridge whom he described as being “incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge.”

The twentieth century was attracted by ideas like Keats’s. In literature, for example, doubt was especially seductive. Triumphantly-uncertain and mysterious poetry proliferated and was lauded. World events reinforced skepticism, which hardened into cynicism.

The Great War shook whatever traditional ideas were left. Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms wondered whether the words honor, loyalty, or beauty had even any meaning left. Werner Heisenberg’s discovery of the

“uncertainty principle” provided empirical proof for the idea that man no longer lived in a world of absolutes, that certainty was as dead as Nietzsche’s idea of God.

The physical world was uncertain; how much more so was consciousness? Psychology took up this theme and caught the gladiators of human motivation in a net of suspicion and doubt, a net woven from the subconscious. A humble relativism in all the disciplines began to replace the arrogance of absolute assurance. It became harder and harder to find something, anything, to believe in absolutely. Disillusionment, following defeat after defeat, finally succumbed to despair.