But perhaps you will say “You are ready enough to attack other people’s
notions about the semi-material resurrection; but you are not equally
ready to explain your own notions about a spiritual resurrection. You
cannot even tell us what a spiritual body is, except that it has the
power of loving and being loved.” Precisely so; I am quite ignorant. Yet
in my knowledge of this matter I am superior to a very great number of
other theologians. For they think they know, whereas I know that neither
I nor they know. Let me go a little further in my confession of
ignorance and admit that I do not really possess knowledge about a
number of other matters about which many profess with great glibness to
know everything. I am certain that I exist; but I doubt whether I can
analyse and explain the reasons for my certainty, and I am quite sure I
cannot prove my existence by logic. If I am pressed for a proof, I
should say (as I have stated in a previous letter) that my belief in my
existence was largely due to the Imagination. _Cogito, ergo sum_, “I
think, therefore I am,”—if intended as a serious proof, and if there is
any real meaning in the “_ergo_”—appears to me to be the most babyish of
arguments. I respect the gigantic intellect of the arguer, but not even
a giant can make ropes of sand; and it needs but a little grammar to
dissolve this reasoning to nothing. “I think” means “I am one thinking.”
In some languages, in Hebrew for example, you might have no other way of
expressing the proposition than in this form: “I am one thinking.” What
sort of reasoning then is this! “I _am_ one thinking, therefore I _am_.”
“This _is_ white paper, therefore it _is_!” Surely a ridiculous
offspring to issue from great logical travail! And besides, what
infinite assumptions are presupposed in that monosyllable “I”! How do I
know that “_I_ think,” and that it is not the great world-spirit who
thinks in me, as well as rains outside me? Why ought I not to say “_it_
thinks,” just as I say “_it_ rains”? What do you mean by “I”? Tell us
what “I” is. And how can the desperate logician set about telling us
what “I” is, without assuming that his own “I” is, which is equivalent
to assuming “I _am_”? Surely this is altogether a hopeless muddle, and
we ought to give up reasoning about “I” and “am;” yes, and I would add
not only about “I” and “am,” but also about a number of other
fundamental conceptions, which are far more profitably assumed as
axioms. For my part, whenever I use the words “mind,” “matter,”
“substance,” “spirit,” “soul,” “intellect,” and the like, and make any
serious statement about them, I hardly ever do so without a mental
reservation, saying to myself—“but of course there may be no such things
precisely as these, but some other things quite different, producing the
results which we ascribe to these; so that all these statements may be
only proportionately true.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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