The will to doubt : $b An essay in philosophy for the general thinkerLloyd, Alfred H. (Alfred Henry)
Philosophy
The will to doubt : $b An essay in philosophy for the general thinker
Lloyd, Alfred H. (Alfred Henry)
Belief and doubt; Philosophy -- Introductions
Even the soul, a something, an entity, that each one of us has been in
the habit of claiming for himself [p.036] and of holding very sacred and
inviolate too, has been subjected to the same way of thinking.
Doubtless, since God has not been spared, we should hardly expect the
soul to escape. We view the soul so materialistically, even while we
insist that it is not material. We say, we think, that it is something
in the body; yet, of course, we are at our wit's end to tell just what
particular place it occupies there. Similarly, God is supposed to be
somewhere in the Universe, yet in no assignable place, and the chemist's
universal atom is somewhere also, though surely not in the same place,
and, wherever it be, waiting with its own, yet certainly a divine
patience that ought to be inspiring, for experimental discovery. But
with regard to the soul, although the life and unity of the body,
although one of the things in the body, the soul itself is not bodily at
all; it can enter the body and is important--who dares say how
important?--to the body, and it can, as at death, leave the body, but
though for a time in, it never is of the body. A strange standpoint
certainly, but men insist that it is quite as true as it is strange. It
seems very much like saying that when you build a house, in order to
ensure it real solidarity, to give it real permanence and integrity, you
should make a special point of putting your bricks or your lumber
together, not with clinging, well-set mortar, or strong pins and
straight-driven nails, but so much more sensibly, because so much
further from what would be like the material bricks or lumber, or like
the equally material mortar or nails, with those real and really compact
things, absolutely continuous or indivisible, or at least indestructible
[p.037] even when disintegrated, empty space and pure uneventful time.
With such space and time there would be union indeed I But, again,
strange as such a procedure in building a house would be, men insist or
at least I can readily imagine their insistence, that houses are built
in that way, and built successfully. The method may seem absurd, but
they insist that it is not madness. Are not abstract plans and such
seemingly unsubstantial things as mathematical formulæ, which are very
near to being made of empty space and time, the real strength and
integrity of all our great modern structures? And the soul, whatever be
said of its being an immaterial thing, is nevertheless, even for being
both immaterial and thing, the very sinew of the body.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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