Know the Truth: A Critique on the Hamiltonian Theory of Limitation: Including Some Strictures Upon the Theories of Rev. Henry L. Mansel and Mr. Herbert SpencerJones, Jesse Henry
Religion
Know the Truth: A Critique on the Hamiltonian Theory of Limitation: Including Some Strictures Upon the Theories of Rev. Henry L. Mansel and Mr. Herbert Spencer
This volume is one which will always awaken in the mind of the candid
and reflective reader a feeling of profound respect. The writer is
manifestly a deeply religious man. The book bears the marks of piety,
and an earnest search after the truth respecting that august Being whom
its author reverentially worships. However far wrong we may believe him
to have gone in his speculative theory, his devout spirit must ever
inspire esteem. Though it is ours to criticize and condemn the
intellectual principles upon which his work is based, we cannot but
desire to be like him, in rendering solemn homage to the Being he deems
inscrutable.
In proceeding with our examination, all the defects which were formerly
noticed as belonging to the system of the Limitists will here be found
plainly observable. Following his teacher, Mr. Mansel holds the
Understanding to be the highest faculty of the human intellect, and the
consequent corollary that a judgment is its highest form of knowledge.
The word "conceive" he therefore uses as expressive of the act of the
mind in grasping together various marks into a concept, when that word
and act of mind are utterly irrelevant to the object to which he applies
them; and hence they can have no meaning as used. We shall see him speak
of "starting from the divine, and reasoning down to the human"; or of
"starting from the human, and reasoning up to the divine"; where, upon
the hypothesis that the two are entirely diverse, no reasoning process,
based upon either one, can reach the other. On the other hand, if any
knowledge of God is possible to the created mind, it is only on the
ground that there is a similarity, an exact likeness in certain
respects, between the two; in other words, that the Creator plainly
declared a simple fact, in literal language, when he said, "God made man
in his own image." If man's mind is wholly unlike God's mind, he cannot
know truth as God knows it. And if the human intellect is thus faulty,
man cannot be the subject of a moral government, for every subject of a
moral government is amenable to law. In order to be so amenable, he must
know the law _as it is_. No phantasmagoria of law, no silhouette will
do. It must be immediately seen, and known to be binding. Truth is
_one_. He, then, who sees it as it is, and knows it to be binding, sees
it as God sees it, and feels the same obligation that God feels. And
such an one must man be if he is a moral agent. Whether he is such an
agent or not, we will not argue here; since all governments and laws of
society are founded upon the hypothesis that he is, it may well be
assumed as granted.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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