Skepticism

Last Thursday Father Leonard Feeney, in one of his regular talks, said that "the worst impurity of the mind is skepticism." Feeney was wagging his finger at the religious heterodoxy of Harvard, but unknowingly, perhaps, he was pointing past that heterodoxy towards one of the roots of man's progress.

For skepticism, we think, is a healthy thing. It is that curious process of mind which makes a man blink at his environment, scratch his head, and try to figure out what is going on. There is considerable historical evidence that such a process may be a valuable one. Newton, for example, was raised in an environment which taught him that all objects had a proper place, and that if given a chance they would find that place. Newton watched a falling apple, skeptically refused to believe it was heading for its only true and rightful place, and developed a theory to account for its fall. Whether Newton's skepticism was right or wrong is not the question: his resulting theory has had useful results.

There are other examples, based on far less apocryphal stories, of the process doing some good. Einstein's skeptical attitude towards Newton's is one; the geometricians' distrust of Euclid is another. Bentham refused to accept the "natural laws, natural rights," theories of previous economists; Susan B. Anthony skeptically disagreed with the idea that only men could vote. None of these people claimed to be right or wrong in the absolutist sense of Father Feeney; they simply questioned the status quo. And in every case their questioning has helped mankind along. As long as man keeps on scratching his head and asking questions, he will go right on doing himself some good.