The Religious Sentiment: Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and; Philosophy of ReligionBrinton, Daniel G. (Daniel Garrison)
Religion
The Religious Sentiment: Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and; Philosophy of Religion
Brinton, Daniel G. (Daniel Garrison)
Religion -- Philosophy
Contrasting sensation and emotion, on the one side, with intellect
on the other, feeling with thought, they are seen to be polar or
antithetical manifestations of mind. Each requires the other for its
existence, yet in such wise that the one is developed at the expense
of the other. The one waxes as the other wanes. This is seen to
advantage when their most similar elements are compared. Thus
consciousness in sensation is keenest when impressions are strongest;
but this consciousness is a bar to intellectual self-consciousness,
as was pointed out by Professor Ferrier in his general Law of
consciousness.[20-1] When emotion and sensation are at their minimum,
one is most conscious of the solidarity of one’s thoughts; and just in
proportion to the vividness of self-consciousness is thought lucid and
strong. In an ideal intelligence, self-consciousness would be
infinite, sensation infinitesimal.
Yet there is a parallelism between feeling and thought, as well as a
contrast. As pain and pleasure indicate opposite tendencies in the
forces which guide sensation and emotion, so do the true and the untrue
direct thought, and bear the same relation to it. For as pain is the
warning of death, so the untrue is the detrimental, the destructive. The
man who reasons falsely, will act unwisely and run into danger thereby.
To know the truth is to be ready for the worst. Who reasons correctly
will live the longest. To love pleasure is not more in the grain of man
than to desire truth. “I have known many,” says St. Augustine, “who like
to deceive; to be deceived, none.” Pleasure, joy, truth, are the
respective measures of life in sensation, emotion, intellect; one or the
other of these every organism seeks with all its might, its choice
depending on which of these divisions of mind is prominently its own. As
the last mentioned is the climax, truth presents itself as in some way
the perfect expression of life.
We have seen what pleasure is, but what is truth? The question of Pilate
remains, not indeed unanswered, but answered vaguely and
discrepantly.[21-1] We may pass it by as one of speculative interest
merely, and turn our attention to its practical paraphrase, what is
true?
The rules of evidence as regards events are well known, and also the
principles of reaching the laws of phenomena by inductive methods. Many
say that the mind can go no further than this, that the truth thus
reached, if not the highest, is at least the highest for man. It is at
best relative, but it is real. The correctness of this statement may be
tested by analyzing the processes by which we acquire knowledge.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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