  i. Reality1. Absolute reality cannot be comprehended by men, and can only be apprehended as God or in God by a combination of Desire and Imagination, to which we give the name of Faith. 2. Among objects of sensation those are (relatively) real which present similar sensations in similar circumstances. ii. Force“Imagined” is inserted, throughout these Definitions, as a reminder that the existence of all these objects of definition, however real, is suggested to us by the Imagination. Force is that which is imagined to immediately produce, or tend to produce, motion. Why “immediately”? Because a particle of “matter”—attracting, as it does, every other particle of “matter”—may be said to “tend to produce motion.” Yet “matter” is not said to be force, but to “exert” force. “Matter” is imagined to attract “matter” through the medium of force, or “mediately.” But force is imagined to act “immediately.” Hence the insertion of the word. iii. Cause and EffectWhen one thing is imagined to produce, or tend to produce, a second, the first is called the Cause of the second, and the second the Effect of the first. iv. SpiritSpirit, i.e. Breath or Wind, is a metaphorical name—implying subtleness, invisibility, ubiquitousness and life-giving power—given to the ultimate Cause of Force; and hence sometimes to the Cause of beneficent Force in the Universe, i.e. God; sometimes to the Cause of Force in the human individual; more rarely to the Cause or Causes of maleficent Forces in the Universe. v. MatterThe existence of Matter has never been proved; and it is nothing but a hypothesis. All the phenomena called “material” might be explained, without Matter, by the hypothesis of a number of centres of force. The raison d’Être of Matter is the notion of tangibility. But scientific men now tell us that no atom ever touches another. If this be so, scientific tangibility disappears and the raison d’Être of Matter disappears, with it. But it is so natural a figment that we shall all probably talk about it, and most of us probably will believe in it, until human nature is very much changed. Matter cannot be defined positively except by repeating, in some disguise, the word to be defined, as thus:— Material, or Matter, is a name given to an unascertained and hypothetical “material,” “matter,” vi. Nature1. Nature means sometimes the (1) ordinary, or (2) orderly course of things apart from the present and direct intervention of human Will; sometimes the (3) ordinary or (4) orderly course of humanity; sometimes the (5) ordinary or (6) orderly course of all things. 2. Law of Nature is a metaphorical name for a frequently observed sequence of phenomena (apart from human Will) implying, to some minds, regularity; to others, absolute invariability. 3. Miracle means a supposed suspension of a Sequence, or Law, of Nature; Marvel, or Mighty Work, means a rare Sequence of Nature, in which great Effects are produced by Causes seemingly, but not really, inadequate. 4. “Supernatural” is the name given, in these letters, to the existence of a God; and to His creation and continuous development of all things: the divine action being regarded, not as contrary to Nature, but as above Nature; not as suspending the sequences of Nature, but as originating and supporting them. vii. WillThe Will is the power of giving to some one of our desires, or to some one group of compatible desires, permanent predominance over the rest. viii. AttentionAttention is the power by which we impress upon our mind that which is present. ix. MemoryMemory is the power by which we retain or recall to our mind that which is past. x. ImaginationImagination is the power by which we combine or vary the mental images retained by Memory, often with a view to finding some unity in them; and by which we are enabled to image forth the future through anticipating its harmony with the past and present. xi. ReasonReason (or, as some prefer to call it in this limited sense, Understanding) is the power by which we compare, and, from our comparisons, draw inferences or conclusions. By means of it we compare the suggestions of the Imagination with the suggestions of Experience, and accept or reject the former in accordance with the result of our comparison. xii. HopeHope is desire, of which we imagine the fulfilment, while recognizing the presence of doubt. xiii. FaithThe following Definition appears to me to be the basis of all theology. It is no more than an emphatic restatement of the old saying, “Faith is the assurance of (or giving substance to) things hoped for.” Since hope is but a weaker and more hesitant form of desire, the imaging forth of (or giving substance to) things earnestly hoped for must imply the vivid imagination of the fulfilment of things desired. Faith (when not loosely used for Belief) is desire (approved by the Conscience) of which we imagine the fulfilment, while putting doubt at a distance. “Faith in a friend” means a desire as well as a belief—that he will do what you think he ought to do. “Faith” should never be used to express a belief that something undesirable or wrong will happen, e.g. “I have great faith that the boy will go wrong.” “Faith” in the uniformity of Nature implies a desire that Nature should be uniform, and a feeling that it is God’s will. In moments when we dread the uniformity of Nature we should say that we have a “conviction” or “expectation” of it, not that we have “faith” in it. “Putting doubt at a distance is intended to include the different degrees of faith: in the highest faith, the ‘distance’ is infinite. xiv. BeliefBelief (when it is not used for Faith) means a sense, mixed with doubt, that the affirmations of our mind will harmonize with Experience. xv. Certainty, or ConvictionCertainty, or Conviction, is a sense, unmixed with doubt, that the affirmations of our mind will harmonize with Experience. xvi. Knowledge1. Absolute knowledge, which is possessed by no man, would be an identity between our mental affirmations and those of the Creator; who knows all things in their Essence and Causes. 2. Knowledge (relative and ordinary) is (very often) a name loosely given to a harmony between our mental affirmations and the affirmations of the vast majority of those who have (or are thought by the majority to have) the best opportunities for observation and judgement. It might be more usefully defined as those mental xvii. Illusions and DelusionsIllusions are mental affirmations not harmonizing with immediate experience, but preparatory for absolute knowledge. Delusions are mental affirmations not harmonizing with experience, nor preparatory for absolute knowledge. THE END RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LONDON AND BUNGAY. Footnotes 1.That children, even at a much younger age than ten, do sometimes exercise their young minds to very ill purpose about these subtle metaphysical questions is probably within the experience of all who know anything about children, and it is amusingly illustrated by the following answer (which I have on the authority of an intimate friend) from a seven-years-old to his mother when blaming him for some misconduct: “Why did you born me then? I didn’t want to be borned. You should have asked me before you borned me.” 2.See the 3.“Reason” is used, in these letters, in a sense for which Coleridge (I believe) preferred to use “Understanding.” But as long as we have a verb “reason,” commonly used of mathematical, logical, and ordinary processes of arguing, so long it will be inexpedient, in a popular treatise, to use the word in any but its popular sense. Perhaps some might give the name of “higher Reason” to what I call Imagination. 4.Faith is “desire (approved by the Conscience) of which we imagine the fulfilment, while putting doubt at a distance”: see the 5.Some passages in the Old Testament (notably Isaiah xlv. 7) state that God “created evil;” and results attributed by one author to Satan (1 Chron. xxi. 1) are attributed by another to “the anger of the Lord” (2 Sam. xxiv. 1). Much of course depends upon the meaning of the word “evil;” and I am knowingly guilty of talking absurdly when I first define evil as “that which is not in accordance with God’s intention,” and then proceed to say that “God did not create evil.” But all people who discourse philosophically on this subject talk far more absurdly than I do: for I am consciously, but they are unconsciously, illogical. The belief that God “created evil,” whether held or not by the authors of any of the books of the Old Testament, is against the whole tenour of the teaching of Christ. 6. “Naught is on earth, O God, without thy hand, Save deeds of folly wrought by evil men.” 7.Advancement of Learning, ii, 4, 5. 8.It is a strange but common mistake to expect a purer morality from a conventional Christian than from a heathen or an atheist. One ought to expect less, much less. The man who can be familiar with the character, and acknowledge the claims, of Christ, without really loving Him or serving Him, and who can believe all that the Church teaches about Him, without at all believing in Him, must surely be far below the atheist who now and then does a good turn for humanity, out of mere pity and without the least hope of any ultimate triumph of goodness. For my part, I am quite surprised at the apparent goodness of conventional Christians: but I think they are not so good as their actions would imply. They are forced, by tradition and the example of a few, to keep up an artificial standard of morality in some departments of life. 9.Habakkuk iii. 11. 10.“The legend of the victory gained by Guy of Warwick over the dun cow most probably originated in a misunderstood tradition of his conquest of the Dena gau or Danish settlement in the neighbourhood of Warwick.”—Taylor’s Words and Places, p. 269. 11.Page 206. 12.The italics are in the text. In the next sentence, the italics are mine. 13.A more plausible argument might be derived from any expressions of Jesus which might appear to imply a belief in the historical nature of the Old Testament miracles. This argument appeals strongly to our sense of reverence. We do not like to think that Jesus was mistaken even in a purely intellectual matter. Yet do we really suppose that Jesus, in His humanity, was exempt from the popular intellectual and scientific errors of contemporary humanity? For example, do we really suppose that Jesus was exempt from the popular belief that the sun moves? For those who realize His humanity it is hard to think that He was intended to be so far separated from the men and women around Him; and, if He was not so separated, I find little more difficulty in supposing that He would have had the same belief as was held by all His countrymen concerning the historical character of the Old Testament. 14.St. Matthew ix. 58, “And he did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief.” For a demonstrative proof that the Gospel of St. Mark contains the earliest tradition, see the beginning of the article “Gospels” in the EncyclopÆdia Britannica. 15.To the same effect is James V. 14, 15: “Is any among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: and the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up.” There can he no doubt that this refers to literal healing; and it is interesting as an indication that probably these early Christian attempts at healing were often tentative. For it will hardly be maintained that all who were thus anointed were healed: otherwise death would have been exterminated in the early Christian church. 16.Bishop Temple excepts only the Resurrection, which is not here under consideration. His words are “It is true too that, if we take each miracle by itself, there is but one miracle, namely our Lord’s Resurrection, for which clear, and unmistakeable, and sufficient evidence is given.”—Bampton Lectures, p. 154. 17.In the early apocryphal work called Christ’s Descent into Hell, a striking description is given of the joy of the saints and the terror of Satan, when Christ descends to Hades and rescues the dead, leading them up to Paradise. In one of the versions of this work, the number of those “risen with the Lord” is mentioned as “twelve thousand men.” 18.If 1 Tim. v. 18 were an exception, it would shew that that letter, quoting a Gospel as “Scripture,” was later than St. Paul. But it is possibly not an exception. 19.“Attested” is not the same as “originated.” The tradition may (possibly) have been originated by a single author: but witness, or “attestation”, was borne to its authoritative character by the three earliest Gospels, whose authors, or compilers, independently adopted it. It is therefore ‘triply attested’. 20.“The Fragment of Muratori,” Westcott, Introduction to the Gospels, p. 255. 21.Of course its omission by the other Evangelists might indicate that the words were not uttered by Jesus; but it might also indicate that the precept, being generally misunderstood, was considered so strange and at variance with facts that it had come to be discredited and considered spurious. 22.Page 153. 24.i.e. the Powers of Heaven. 25.Two different kinds of baskets appear to be denoted by the two different Greek words. A similar difference is also found in the narratives of the feeding of the Four Thousand and the Five Thousand: but it would be easy to shew that no inference of importance can be drawn from this distinction. 26.Pp. 275-6. 27.“And the men that journeyed with him stood speechless hearing the voice but beholding no man,” Acts ix 7: “And they that were with me beheld indeed the light but they heard not the voice of him that spake to me,” ib. xxii. 9. Whether Saul’s companions saw and heard nothing except subjectively, through force of sympathy, or whether (comp. John xii. 29) some natural phenomenon may have been interpreted in one way by Saul and in another way by his companions, cannot now be determined; but I have confined myself to indisputable fact in stating that Saul “saw a sight and heard words which other people, his companions, with the same opportunities for seeing and hearing, did not see and did not hear.” 28.Mark xvi. 7; Matthew xxviii. 7: “He goeth before you into Galilee.” 29.Luke xxiv. 6: “Remember how he spake unto you while he was yet in Galilee.” 30.See 31.“A Romance of the Fourth Dimension,” Swan & Sonnenschein. 32.Yet I have heard it said, “So far as evidence goes, you have no more reason for rejecting the Miraculous Conception than for rejecting the story that Jesus washed the feet of the Apostles: for two witnesses attest the former; but only one, the latter. Your objection is a priori.” Such arguments seem to me to fail to recognize the first principles of evidence. The omission of a stupendous marvel, an integral part (and is not the parentage an integral part?) of a biography, by biographers who have no motive for omitting it and every motive for inserting it, is a strong proof that they did not know it. For a similar instance, see above, p. 167. 33.You remember that the two accounts of the Miraculous Conception differ in respect of the “annunciation”; which St. Matthew describes as being made to Joseph, St. Luke as being made to Mary. It is interesting to note how these two variations correspond to two variations in the ancient prophecy. In the LXX the name is to be given to the child, not by the mother, but by the future husband: “The virgin shall be with child and bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name Immanuel”. In the Hebrew, the “virgin,” or “maiden,” is herself to name the child; “A virgin shall ... bring forth and shall call, &c.” Adopting the former version, a narrator would infer that the announcement of the birth was to be made to Joseph, as the first Gospel does: “She shall bring forth a child and thou (Joseph) shalt call his name Jesus.” Adopting the latter version, and changing the third into the second person for the purpose of an “annunciation,” the narrator would infer that since the name was to be given by the mother, the announcement was made to the mother, as the third Gospel does; “Thou shalt be with child, and shalt bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus.” Note also that afterwards, when St. Matthew actually quotes the whole prophecy with the name “Immanuel” (i. 23), he alters the verb into the third person plural: “That it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Behold the virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a child, and they shall call his name Immanuel.” The reason is obvious. It would not be true to say that Mary called her son “Immanuel”; it would only be possible to suggest that men in general (“they”), looking on the Child as the token of God’s presence among them, might bestow on him some such title (not name) as “God with us.” Consequently St. Matthew here alters “thou” into “they”. 34.Contemporary Review, Feb. 1886, p. 193. 35.I must admit that a more serious difficulty is presented to Sponsors by the interrogative form of the Creed in the Baptismal service, to which they are expected to reply in the affirmative: “Dost thou believe in the Resurrection of the flesh?” But I can hardly think that many clergymen would wish to reject an otherwise eligible Sponsor who confided to them that he could only accept “flesh” in the sense of “body,” and that too in the Pauline sense of “spiritual body.” 36.Has not some confusion of thought arisen from a habit of confusing “just” with “severe”? I believe some men would feel more reverently towards God, if they would speak, not of His “justice,” but of His “fairness.” 37.“Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” 38.Rom. i. 17. 40.You should look at a most interesting and instructive article by Dr. Martineau in the Christian Reformer (vol. i. p. 78), in which he points out that, in a certain sense, the faith professed by Trinitarians “in the Son, is so far from being an idolatry, that it is identical, under change of name, with the Unitarian worship of Him who dwelt in Christ. He who is the Son in one creed is the Father in the other; and the two are agreed, not indeed by any means throughout, but in that which constitutes the pith and kernel of both faiths.” 41.Some might prefer “harmonize with experience or with fact.” But “harmony with fact” can never be proved: you can only prove harmony with your experience, or with the general experience, of the fact; or with experience of what others say about the fact.
|
|
