The Three Devils: Luther's, Milton's, and Goethe's; With Other EssaysMasson, David
History
The Three Devils: Luther's, Milton's, and Goethe's; With Other Essays
Masson, David
Devil in literature; Literature -- History and criticism
suggested that the belief in the supernatural is always strongest at the
moment of this experience? Scenes and situations our ancestors were in
every day are strange to us. We have not now to travel through forests at
the dead of night, nor to pass a lonely spot on a moor where a murderer's
body is swinging from a gibbet. Tam o' Shanter, even before he came to
Allowa' Kirk, saw more than many of us see in a life-time.
"By this time he was 'cross the ford
Whaur in the snaw the chapman smoored,
And past the birks and muckle stane
Whaur drunken Charlie brak's neck-bane,
And through the whins and by the cairn
Whaur hunters fand the murdered bairn,
And near the thorn aboon the well
Whaur Mungo's mither hanged hersel'."
This effect of civilization in reducing all our sensations to those of
comfort is a somewhat alarming circumstance in the point of view we are
now taking. It is necessary, for many a reason, to resist the universal
application of the "Positive Philosophy," even if we adopt and adore it as
an instrument of explication. The "Positive Philosophy" commands us to
forbear all speculation into the inexplicable. For the sake of many things
this order must be disregarded. Speculation into the metaphysical is the
invariable accompaniment of strong feeling; and the moral nature of man
would starve upon such chopped straw as the mere intellectual relations of
similitude and succession. Nor does it meet the demands of the case to say
that the "Positive Philosophy" would be always far in arrear of the known
phenomena, and that here would be mystery enough. No! the "Positive
Philosophy" would require to strike a chasm in itself under the title of
the Liberty of Hypothesis. We do not mean the liberty of hypothesis merely
as a means of anticipating theory, but for spiritual and imaginative
purposes. It is in this light that one would welcome Animal Magnetism, or
any thing else whatever that would but knock a hole through the paper wall
that incloses our mode of being, snub the self-conceit of our present
knowledge, and give us other and more difficult phenomena to explain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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