Modern Skepticism: A Course of Lectures Delivered at the Request of the Christian Evidence Society
Religion
Modern Skepticism: A Course of Lectures Delivered at the Request of the Christian Evidence Society
Church of England; Skepticism; Skepticism -- Controversial literature
This lecture started from the question, what is a phenomenon, and
how do we know of its existence? Seeing that our knowledge rests
primarily on the evidence of our own mind, we drew the inference that
Comte committed a fatal error when he banished the science of mind, as
mind, from his cycle. Reviewing his various devices, and some devices
of his successors, for eliminating psychology, and reducing the study
of mind to a study of bodily functions, we approached the stronghold
of Positivism,--law. And, after discussing the theories maintained
respecting it, we boldly threw down our challenge to this effect: law
phenomenal or mechanical admitted, we assert, the existence of another
kind of law. We say that the freedom of human choice between evil and
good is utterly unlike the freedom of a stone which falls by mechanical
law, and cannot choose but fall. The inference from phenomenal law
is the existence of a phenomenal world. The inference from another
existent law is that there is another existent world. Man, we affirm,
lives in both; has sympathies with both; and, by virtue of his double
nature, is a true citizen of both. The ultimate principle of man's
higher nature is to us inscrutable; for, even as the eye sees not
itself, so neither does the spirit of a man discern that which makes
it spirit. But, though we cannot know the soul, we can know much and
many things about it; things most important--nay, all-important for us
to know, since they distinguish the spirit that burns within us from
matter, from mechanism, and from mere animality. Hence we do not, with
the Positivist, ignore the unknowable. Contrariwise, confessing our
ignorance, where we are ignorant, we strive to observe and gather all
we can.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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