Shelburne Essays, Third Series

by Paul Elmer More

The spectacle of division and mutation became to them at last a mere phantasmagoria, like the morning mists that melt away beneath the upspringing day-star.

Again, we may find a race, like the Greeks, in whom the imperturbable stillness of the Orient and the restless activity of the Occident meet together in intimate union and produce that peculiar repose in action, that unity in variety, which we call harmony or beauty and which is the special field of art. But if this harmonious union was a source of the artistic sense among the Greeks, their logicians, like logicians everywhere, were not content until the divergent tendencies were drawn out to the extreme; and nowhere is the conflict between the two principles more vividly displayed than in that battle between the followers of Xenophanes, who sought to adapt the world of change to their haunting desire for peace by denying motion altogether, and the disciples of Heraclitus, who saw only motion and mutation in all things and nowhere rest. "All things flow and nothing abides," said the Ephesian, and looked upon man in the midst of the universe as upon one who stands in the current of a ceaselessly gliding river. The brood of Sophists, carrying this law into human consciousness, disclaimed the possibility of truth altogether; and it is no wonder that Plato, while avoiding the other extreme of motionless pantheism, regarded the sophistic acceptance of this law of universal flux as the last irreconcilable enemy of philosophy and morality alike. "The war over this point is indeed no trivial matter and many are concerned therein," said he, not without bitterness.

It is, when rightly considered, this same question that lends dramatic unity and human value to the long debate of the mediæval schoolmen. Their dispute may be regarded from more than one point of view,—as a struggle of the reason against the bondage of authority, as an attempt to lay bare the foundation of philosophy, as a contest between science and mysticism; but above all it seems to me a long conflict in words between these two warring members within us. The desire of infinite peace was the impulse, I think, which drove on the realists to that "abyss of pantheism," from the brink of which the vision of most men recoils as from the horror of shoreless vacuity. In this way Erigena, the greatest of realists, spoke of God as that which neither acts nor is acted upon, neither loves nor is loved; and then, as if frightened by these blank words, avowed that God though he does not love is in a way Love itself, defining love as the finis quietaque statio of the natural motion of all things that move. On the other hand it was the impulse toward unresting activity which led the nominalists to deny reality to the stationary ideas of genera and species, and to fix the mind upon the shifting combinations of individual objects. In this direction lay the labour of accurate observation and experimental classification, and it is with prefect justice that Hauréau, the historian of scholastic philosophy, closes his chapter on William of Occam, the last of the schoolmen, with these words: "It is then in truth on this soil so well prepared by the prince of the nominalists that Francis Bacon founded his eternal monument,"—and that monument is the scientific method as we see it developed in the nineteenth century.

The justification of scholastic philosophy, as I understand it, was the hope of finding in the dictates of pure reason an immovable resting-place for the human spirit; the recoil from the abyss of pantheism and absolute quietism was the work of the nominalists who in William of Occam finally won the day; and with him scholastic philosophy brought an end to its own activity. But a greater champion than William was needed to wipe away what seems to the world the cobwebs of mediæval logomachy. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason accomplished what the nominalistic schoolmen failed to achieve: it showed the impossibility of establishing by means of logic the dogma of God or any absolute conception of the universe. Henceforth the real support of metaphysics was taken away, and the study fell more and more into disrepute as the nineteenth century waxed old. Not many men to-day look to the pure reason for aid in attaining the consummation of faith. That consummation, if it be derived at all from external aid, must come henceforth by way of the imagination and of the moral sense. We say with Kant: "Two things fill the mind with ever-new and increasing admiration and reverence, the oftener and the more persistently they are reflected on: the starry heaven above me, and the moral law within me."

But neither the imagination nor the conscience alone, any more than reason, can create faith. They may prepare the soil for the growth of that perfect flower of joy, but they cannot plant the seed or give the increase; for they, both the imagination and the conscience, are concerned in the end with the light of this life, and faith looks for guidance to a different and rarer illumination. Faith is a power of itself; fidem rem esse, non scientiam, non opinionem vel imaginationem, said Zwingle. It is that faculty of the will, mysterious in its source and inexplicable in its operation, which turns the desire of a man away from contemplating the fitful changes of the world toward an ideal, an empty dream it may be, or a shadow, or a mere name, of peace in absolute changelessness. Reason and logic may have no words to express the object of this desire, but experience is rich with the influence of such an aspiration on human character. To the saints it was that peace of God which passeth all understanding; to the mystics it was figured as the raptures of a celestial love, as the yearning for that

Passionless bride, divine Tranquillity.

To the ignorant it was the unquestioning trust in those who seemed to them endowed with a grace beyond their untutored comprehension.

Even if the imagination or the conscience could lift us to this blissful height, they would avail us little to-day; for we have put away the imagination as one of the pleasant but unfruitful play-things of youth, and the conscience in this age of humanitarian pity has become less than ever a sense of man's responsibility to the supermundane powers and more than ever a feeling of brotherhood among men. Of faith, speaking generally, the past century had no recking, for it turned deliberately to observe and study the phenomena of change. We call that time, which is still our own time, the age of reason, but scarcely with justice. The Middle Ages, despite the obscurantism of the Church, had far better claim to that title. One needs but to turn the pages of the doctors, even before the day of Abelard who is supposed first to have been the champion of reason against authority, to see how profound was their conviction that in reason might be discovered a justification of the faith they held. And indeed Abelard is styled the champion of reason because only with him do men begin to perceive the inability of reason to establish faith. Better we should call ours an age of observation, for never before have men given themselves with such complete abandon to observing and recording systematically. By long and intent observation of the phenomenal world the eye has discovered a seeming order in disorder, the shifting visions of time have assumed a specious regularity which we call law, and the mind has made for itself a home on this earth which to the wise of old seemed but a house of bondage.