Beale, Dorothea, 1831-1906; Cheltenham Ladies' College -- History; Teachers -- England -- Biography
‘Of course I can do nothing in a letter but suggest lines of
thought and lines of reading. After Armstrong, I should most
like you to take either Green’s _Prolegomena_ or Martineau’s
_Types_, and read both several times. Green will help you to
see the unity underlying all possibility of knowledge.
‘It is perhaps more than anything the harmony of the Threefold
Unity which helps me to realise the conception of the divine
which Jesus uttered most clearly.
‘One sees the absolute physical unity, each atom forming part
of the complete whole, and standing in vital relation to the
whole.
‘One sees all knowledge as real, only when it takes its place
as in (can I say part of?) the Universal thought. One can see
things only when one sees all in God. But one sees that this
which we have separated off as physical nature, is yet the
means and the condition of the intellectual too; for Light,
which is necessary to vital processes, is the means by which
the Universal thought is revealed to our intelligence, by which
God touches, as it were, from without and awakens, and causes
truly to live, our intellectual being.
‘Thirdly, each—the physical, the intellectual—are felt by us
to be the means to the highest of all, the perfection of the
moral nature. Without this, goodness, power, and intellect
would be worthless or horrible; and as the material can only be
translated into the conception by the intellectual, so we feel
that the moral alone can interpret the intellectual.
‘That the full solution is not ours must seem natural to us,
who know ourselves to be shut in by space and time. But I am
sure that men will not long remain blind to other facts, as
they have been to some extent in this generation, owing to the
scientific sudden growth of our day.
‘The facts of conscience are to me quite inexplicable on
any other hypothesis than that of One who is supremely good
speaking to His children, not through “eye or ear,” but
directly. There is the unity of consciousness which makes
memory possible, and moral judgment possible; and yet there
is a secondary consciousness, the “categorical imperative,”
the ideal goodness, ever revealing to man a higher and
better. What if the conscience has never—I should say Except
in One—received the perfect vision of goodness? This is only
to say that the receiver is limited and imperfect, not that
the perfect spiritual sun is not, or rather I should say the
universal light, for the sun is a localisation of that which
is invisible; is saturating through infinite space. Words ever
fail.
‘I know that endless questions are still unanswered, but this
seems to me to be a real knowledge, which is consistent and
which gives peace, that all other theories are inconsistent,
and that the highest, the moral being is starved upon them.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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