VIII.
RELIGIOUS TESTS AND SUBSCRIPTIONS.
Every man has an interest in arriving at truth for himself. However useful it may be to mislead other people, however sweet to look down from a height on the erring throng beneath, it is neither useful nor sweet to be ourselves at sea without a compass. We may not care to walk by the light we have, but we do not choose to exchange it for darkness.
This reflection is most obvious with reference to the order of Nature. Our life depends on adapting means to ends; which supposes that we know cause and effect in the world around us. A long story is cut short by the adage, "Knowledge is power"; otherwise rendered, "Truth is bliss".
The bearing of truth is free from all doubt when the problem is, how to gain certain ends—how to be fed, how to get from one place to another, how to cure disease. A new case is presented by the choice of ends. The tyrannical French minister, when appealed to by a starving peasantry in the terms, "We must live," replied, "I do not see the necessity". There was here no question of true and false, no problem for science to solve. It was a question of ends, and could not be reargued. The only possible retort was to ask, "What does your Excellency consider a necessity?" If the reply were, "That I and my King may rule France and be happy," then might the starving wretches find some aid from a political scientist who could show that, in the order of nature, ruler and people must stand or fall together. So, it is no question of true or false in the order of nature, whether I shall adopt, as the end of life, my own gratification purely, the good of others purely, or part of both. In like manner the Benthamite, who propounds happiness as the general end of human society, cannot prove this, as Newton could prove that gravity follows the inverse square of the distance; nor can his position be impugned in the way that Newton impugned the vortices of Descartes, by showing that they were at variance with fact.
There is a third case. Assertions are made out of the sphere of the sensible world, and beyond the reach of verification by the methods of science. There is a region of the supersensible or supernatural, where cause and effect may be affirmed and human interests involved, but where we cannot supply the same evidence or the same confutation as in sublunary knowledge. That all human beings shall have an existence after death is matter of truth or falsehood, but the evidence is of a kind that would not be adduced for proving that a caterpillar becomes a butterfly or that a seed turns to a plant. The reasoning employed, no doubt, makes references to facts of the order of nature; but it is circuitous and analogical, and is admitted merely because better cannot be had.
[THREE DIFFERENT CLASSES OF ASSERTIONS.]
The peculiarity of this last class of affirmations is that they give great room for the indulgence of our likings. So little being fixed with any precision, we can shape our beliefs to please ourselves. Even as regards the sensible world, we can sometimes accommodate our views to what we wish, as when we assume that our favourite foods and stimulants are wholesome; but such license soon meets with checks in the physical sphere, while there are no such checks in the realms of the superphysical.
Now, in all these three departments of opinion, the interest of mankind lies in obtaining the best views that can possibly be obtained. As regards the first and third—- the region of true and false, one in the sensible, the other in the supersensible world—we are clearly interested in getting the truth. As regards the second—the region of ends—if there be one class of ends preferable to another, we should find out that class.
The only doubt that can arise anywhere is, whether in the third case—the case of the supernatural,—truth is of the same consequence to us. Such a doubt, however, begs the whole question at issue. If the truth be of no consequence here, it is because we shall never be landed in any reality corresponding to what is declared: that the nature of the future life is purely imaginary and not to be converted into fact; in other words, that there is no future life; that there is merely a land of dreams and fiction, which can never be proved true and never proved false. It would then be a projection of thought from the present life, and would cease with that life. All that people could claim in the matter would be the liberty of imagination; and this being so, we are not to be committed to any one form. In short, we are to picture what we please in a world that cannot be made out to exist. The point is not, to be true or false; it is, to be well or ill imagined.