[166] Within the few last months, Steinmeyer has published a treatise on the history of the resurrection, with reference to the latest criticisms, which I would commend to readers of German. Serious attempts have been made in England to disjoin this cardinal truth from the doctrinal system of St. Paul, attempts which seem passing strange on the part of critics who accept him as a thoroughly truthful man, nay, as an inspired apostle, and who must know that he makes the resurrection the very centre or foundation of his teaching. Even Hegel, the very Corypheus of idealism, declares "Die Auferstehung gehört wesentlich dem Glauben an;" i.e., the resurrection belongs essentially to the faith. See "Die Philosophie der Religion," p. 300. In a note on the same page, Hegel shows that he takes it as a real objective event: "wie alles Bisherige in der Weise der Wirklichkeit für das unmittelbare Bewusstsein zur Erscheinung gekommen, so auch diese Erhebung."
[167] Christian Dogmatics, § 63. (Clark.)
NOTES TO
MODERN SCEPTICISM.
NOTES.
ON POSITIVISM.
[168] "Does any one fancy that he sees a solid cube? It is easy to show that the solidity of the figure, the relative position of its faces and edges to each other, are inferences of the spectator—no more conveyed to his conviction by the eye alone than they would be if he were looking at a painted representation of a cube. The scene of nature is a picture without depth of substance, no less than the scene of art; and in the one case, as in the other, it is the mind which, by an act of its own, discovers that colour and shape denote distance and solidity. Most men are unconscious of this perpetual habit of reading the language of the external world, and translating as they read. The draughtsman, indeed, is compelled, for his purposes, to return back in thought from the solid bodies which he has inferred, to the shapes of surface which he really sees. He knows that there is a mask of theory over the whole face of nature, if it be theory to infer more than we see. But other men, unaware of this masquerade, hold it to be a fact that they see cubes and spheres, spacious apartments, and winding avenues. And these things are facts to them, because they are unconscious of the mental operation by which they have penetrated nature's disguise....