This by no means implies that reason, in its own province, is to yield to the ‘feeling’ which so many cite as the infallible authority for their ‘convictions.’
We must not be asked to assent to contradictory propositions. We must not be asked to believe that injustice, cruelty, and implacable revenge, are not execrable because the Bible tells us they were habitually manifested by the tribal god of the Israelites. The fables of man’s fall and of the redemption are fraught with the grossest violation of our moral conscience, and will, in time, be repudiated accordingly. It is idle to say, as the Church says, ‘these are mysteries above our human reason.’ They are fictions, fabrications which modern research has traced to their sources, and which no unperverted mind would entertain for a moment. Fanatical belief in the truth of such dogmas based upon ‘feeling’ have confronted all who have gone through the severe ordeal of doubt. A couple of centuries ago, those who held them would have burnt alive those who did not. Now, they have to console themselves with the comforting thought of the fire that shall never be quenched. But even Job’s patience could not stand the self-sufficiency of his pious reprovers. The sceptic too may retort: ‘No doubt but ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you.’
Conviction of this kind is but the convenient substitute for knowledge laboriously won, for the patient pursuit of truth at all costs—a plea in short, for ignorance, indolence, incapacity, and the rancorous bigotry begotten of them.
The distinction is not a purely sentimental one—not a belief founded simply on emotion. There is a physical world—the world as known to our senses, and there is a psychical world—the world of feeling, consciousness, thought, and moral life.
Granting, if it pleases you, that material phenomena may be the causes of mental phenomena, that ‘la pensée est le produit du corps entier,’ still the two cannot be thought of as one. Until it can be proved that ‘there is nothing in the world but matter, force, and necessity,’—which will never be, till we know how we lift our hands to our mouths,—there remains for us a world of mystery, which reason never can invade.
It is a pregnant thought of John Mill’s, apropos of material and mental interdependence or identity, ‘that the uniform coexistence of one fact with another does not make the one fact a part of the other, or the same with it.’
A few words of Renan’s may help to support the argument. ‘Ce qui révèle le vrai Dieu, c’est le sentiment moral. Si l’humanité n’était qu’intelligente, elle serait athée. Le devoir, le dévouement, le sacrifice, toutes choses dont l’histoire est pleine, sont inexplicables sans Dieu.’ For all these we need help. Is it foolishness to pray for it? Perhaps so. Yet, perhaps not; for ‘Tout est possible, même Dieu.’
Whether possible, or impossible, this much is absolutely certain: man must and will have a religion as long as this world lasts. Let us not fear truth. Criticism will change men’s dogmas, but it will not change man’s nature.
CHAPTER XXVII
My confidence was restored, and with it my powers of endurance. Sleep was out of the question. The night was bright and frosty; and there was not heat enough in my body to dry my flannel shirt. I made shift to pull up some briar bushes; and, piling them round me as a screen, got some little shelter from the light breeze. For hours I lay watching Alpha Centauri—the double star of the Great Bear’s pointers—dipping under the Polar star like the hour hand of a clock. My thoughts, strange to say, ran little on the morrow; they dwelt almost solely upon William Nelson. How far was I responsible, to what extent to blame, for leading him, against his will, to death? I re-enacted the whole event. Again he was in my hands, still breathing when I let him go, knowing, as I did so, that the deed consigned him living to his grave. In this way I passed the night.