Apologia DiffidentisDalton, O. M. (Ormonde Maddock)
Philosophy
Apologia Diffidentis
Dalton, O. M. (Ormonde Maddock)
Bashfulness
Let me rather believe that if each several idea is compacted by my
active intelligence out of some vast system of relations, then only a
supreme intelligence akin to man's can brace together the whole system
or universal sum of things. For this earth, yes, and all the complex of
the spheres, exist to me imperfectly as idea alone, nor can I conceive
them any complete existence apart from a kindred but omniscient mind.
Each advance in human knowledge should then be an infinitesimal approach
towards the supreme comprehension; and the aspiring race of man is
justified in that inchoation of long hope which is folly to the single
life.
I would also believe that new relations between things may be detected
not merely by the staid and ordered process of collating abstractions,
which is science, but by swifter and more genial methods of intuition.
"Hurrah for positive science,
Long live exact demonstration!"
cried Walt Whitman, exulting over the filed fetters of mankind; and let
us all echo the cry, nor ever forget the razed Bastilles of
superstition. But there glimmers a wealth of truth in the penumbra
beyond our lanterns to which science will creep too slowly without the
aid of imagination. Yet this truth may be seized by swift sallies into
the darkness, and assured to us as it were by some dim apperception of
the soul, when the whole personality is made tense, and subtly
anticipates the cosmic argument. Life is too short to renounce this
daring: the sense of kinship with the All-Consciousness sanctions if not
commands the right adventure.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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