[118] Cf. p. 159.
[119] From Dr. Schiller’s _Humanism_.
[120] _Pragmatism_, p. 207.
[121] It is this dissatisfaction at once with the abstractions of
science and of rationalism and with the contradictions that seem to
exist between them all and the facts of life and experience as we feel
them that constitutes _the great dualism_, or _the great opposition of
modern times_. I do not wish to emphasize this dualism, nor do I wish
to set forth faith or belief in opposition to reason when I extract
from both Pragmatism and Idealism the position that it is belief
rather than knowledge that is our fundamental estimate of reality. I
do not believe, as I indicate in the text above, that this dualism is
ultimate. It has come about only from an unfortunate setting of some
parts of our nature, or of our experience in opposition to the whole
of our nature, or the whole of our experience. That the opposition,
however, between reason and faith still exists in many quarters, and
that it is and has been _the_ opposition of modern times, and that
the great want of our times is a rational faith that shall recall the
world of to-day out of its endless “distraction” (the word is Dr.
Bosanquet’s), I am certainly inclined to maintain. In proof of this
statement it is enough to recall things like the words of Goethe about
the conflict of belief and unbelief as the unique theme of the history
of the world, or the “ethical headache which was literally a splitting
headache,” that Mr. Chesterton finds in the minds of many of our great
Victorian writers. I shall take leave of it here with three references
to its existence taken from the words or the work of living writers.
The first shall be the opposition which Mr. Bertrand Russell finds in
his _Philosophical Essays_ (in the “Free Man’s Worship”) between the
“world which science presents for our belief” and the “lofty thoughts
that ennoble his little day.” The second shall be the inconsistency
that exists in Mr. Hugh S. R. Elliot’s book upon _Modern Science and
the Illusions of Professor Bergson_, between his initial acceptance of
the mechanical, evolutionary system of modern science and his closing
acceptance of feeling and poetry and love as the “deepest forms of
happiness.” The third shall be the declaration of Professor Sir Henry
Jones of Glasgow (in the _Hibbert Journal_, 1903) that “one of the
characteristics of our time is the contradiction that exists between
its practical faith in morality and its theoretical distrust of the
conceptions on which they rest.”
[122] See p. 203 (note).
[123] See p. 7.
[124] From _Pragmatism and its Misunderstanders_.
[125] See p. 173.
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