Dogmatism

“ Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules, and history records that whenever science and dogmatism have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed, if not annihilated; ”

“ But if a philosophical sect is a leaning toward dogmas, or, according to some, a leaning to a number of dogmas which have consistency with one another and with phenomena, tending to a right life; and dogma is a logical conception; and conception is a state and assent of the mind: not merely sceptics, but every one who dogmatizes is accustomed in certain things to suspend his judgment, either through want of strength of mind, or want of clearness in the things, or equal force in the reasons. ”

“ Then, as we advance still higher in the world of letters, we find metaphysicians and philosophers assuming that a belief in certain truths is implanted in all rational minds by the Creator as a necessary part of their constitution, and that these truths are the foundation of most of our acquired knowledge. The truths or principles of mind thus recognized are called by various names, such as reason, the principles of reason, the primary truths, the intuitions, the intuitive truths, the fundamental truths, the principles of common sense, the categories, etc. ”

“ We evidently must, in the first instance, guard against any attempt at doing a doctrinaire violence to the undeniable facts of our consciousness or of its docile analysis, by explaining all our knowledge, or only even all our knowledge of any single thing, as either of purely subjective or of purely objective provenance; for everywhere and always these two elements co-exist in all human apprehension, reason, feeling, will, and faith. ”

“ In their opinion every system of philosophy, science, or ethics which does not inculcate some particular doctrine with respect to the problems in question is necessarily imperfect. The importance of every religious movement, the usefulness of every association and the value of every philosophical system, is always estimated by them in connection with such belief or doctrine. ”

“ As human reason is placed on a level with religion itself, so theological must be treated in the same manner as philosophical sciences.
Allocution Singulari quadam, Dec. 9th, 1854.
9. All the dogmas of the Christian religion are indiscriminately the object of natural science or philosophy; and human reason, enlightened solely in an historical way, is able by its own natural strength and principles, to attain to the true science of even the most abstruse dogmas; provided only that such dogmas be proposed to reason itself as its object. ”

“ At the root of all our science, all our philosophy, and all our literature, the three fundamental doctrines of Christianity: the equality of all souls, the insuperable depravity of human nature, and the insistence upon Truth, are the ruling influences. ”

“ Mark the underlying conception that Authority merely means force and that Dogma is necessarily a falsehood; mark the characteristic inability to grasp what should be, to the thinking mind, an obvious truth: that all teaching is dogmatic, all acceptation of all truth necessarily under some authority, of reason, of judgment, of sense, or of accepted experience in others. ”

“ But in the case of such doctrines as the human intelligence may perceive, it is equally just that philosophy should make use of its own method, principles, and arguments-not, indeed, in such fashion as to seem rashly to withdraw from the divine authority. ”

“ Conceptions and constructions are thus a necessary part of our religion; and as moderator amid the clash of hypotheses, and mediator among the criticisms of one man's constructions by another, philosophy will always have much to do. It would be strange if I disputed this, when these very lectures which I am giving are (as you will see more clearly [pg 433] from now onwards) a laborious attempt to extract from the privacies of religious experience some general facts which can be defined in formulas upon which everybody may agree. ”

“ How could modern philosophers who, being threatened with the most cruel persecution, were called upon to renounce reason and to submit to faith—that is to say, to priestly authority—I say, how could men thus fettered give free flight to their genius, perfect reason, or hasten human progress? ”

“ There can be no free philosophy if we must always remember dogma. [358] Philosophy includes in its sphere all the dogmas of revelation, as well as those of natural religion. It examines by its own independent light the substance of every Christian doctrine, and determines in each case whether it be divine truth. ”

“ But what classes of things are right or wrong, we learn by the exercise of our logical intelligence, in connection with experiences of utility, influences of society and tradition, and positive divine revelation. Thus our moral reason, through a combination of intuition and education, of internal and external information as to general principles of right and wrong, furnishes the standard according to which conscience may judge the particular cases which come before it. ”

“ This he calls laying aside our senses and our reason, to believe by a blind and implicit faith, the doctrines and opinions of a certain number of men, pretending to be divinely inspired; and not only so, but believing doctrines diametrically opposite to our reason, and the common sense and experience of the whole world. ”

“ There is therefore a natural hostility between him and a philosophy which discourages the explanation of feelings and moral facts by circumstances and association, and prefers to treat them as ultimate elements of human nature; a philosophy which is addicted to holding up favourite doctrines as intuitive truths, and deems intuition to be the voice of Nature and of God, speaking with an authority higher than that of our reason. ”

“ And to sum up, let us overcome all our difficulties by declaring that all the many Beyonds, which single significant judgments seem vaguely and separately to postulate, are present as fully realized intended objects to the unity of an all-inclusive, absolutely clear, universal, and conscious thought, of which all judgments, true or false, are but fragments, the whole being at once Absolute Truth and Absolute Knowledge. ”

“ Raise the edifice of your virtue and happiness upon the fire foundation of religion. Think it not sufficient that, in consequence of early education and subsequent enquiry, you admit the doctrines of the existence, providence, and moral government of Almighty God as articles of belief; but by frequently recollecting them as truths in which every rational being is deeply interested, deduce from them practical principles, to guide you in the conduct of life. ”

“ Feeling valid only for the individual is pitted against reason valid universally. The test is a perfectly plain one of fact. Theology based on pure reason must in point of fact convince men universally. If it did not, wherein would its superiority consist? If it only formed sects and schools, even as sentiment and mysticism form them, how would it fulfill its programme of freeing us [pg 436] from personal caprice and waywardness? This perfectly definite practical test of the pretensions of philosophy to found religion on universal reason simplifies my procedure to-day. ”

“ To the objectivity of action, that is, to action which originates in the truly substantial element, subjectivity opposes feeling, and to this substantial element and to the thinking knowledge of it it opposes immediate knowledge. Here, however, we do not stay to consider the nature of action, but simply remark that it is just this substantial element, represented by the laws of justice and morality and the commandments of God, which is by its very nature the true Universal, and has consequently its root and basis in the region of thought. ”

“ In all religious feeling, as in morality, art, and other spheres of human activity, there is the underlying element of reason which is the characteristic of all the activities of a self-conscious intelligence. To endeavour to elicit that element, to infuse into the spontaneous and unsifted conceptions of religious experience the objective clearness, necessity and organic unity of thought—is the legitimate aim of science, in religion as in other spheres. ”

“ This is the meaning of the words: “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God.” The criterion of truth is how it is confirmed in my heart; the fact that I judge and know rightly—or that what I hold to be true is the truth—must be revealed to my heart. ”

“ Every time that we undertake to explain something human, taken at a given moment in history—be it a religious belief, a moral precept, a legal principle, an æsthetic style or an economic system—it is necessary to commence by going back to its most primitive and simple form, to try to account for the characteristics by which it was marked at that time, and then to show how it developed and became complicated little by little, and how it became that which it is at the moment in question. ”

“ The judgment which discriminates and decides between a simple universal belief in God, and the connection of such a faith with all natural and sublimely true philosophy on the one hand, and unbelief, false science, and the various systems of error on the other, forms the second term or step in the gradual progress of truth and the spirit of truth in the human consciousness, whether of individuals, or of the whole human race, or of any particular period of its development. ”

“ Some direct mark, by noting which we can be protected immediately and absolutely, now and forever, against all mistake—such has been the darling dream of philosophic dogmatists. It is clear that the origin of the truth would be an admirable criterion of this sort, if only the various origins could be discriminated from one another from this point of view, and the history of dogmatic opinion shows that origin has always been a favorite test. ”

“ For can we shew from the reason and nature of things, that it was fit and reasonable, for the providence of God to suffer sin to enter, and continue in the world? Here therefore the man of natural religion must drop his method of reasoning from the fitness of things, and that in an article of the highest concern to the moral world, and be as mere a believer, as he that believes the most incomprehensible mystery of revealed religion. ”

“ Surely only omniscience and omnipotence can dispense with the moral and religious venture of our inspired common sense and its implied theistic faith, as the root of reason in man—in his intermediate place and office, between perfect knowledge and total ignorance. ”

“ Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely knows that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it. This inferiority of the rationalistic level in founding belief is just as manifest when rationalism argues for religion as when it argues against it. ”

“ Just as before, it remains true of us finite beings that our finite external world is at each instant the product of our activity, working with the postulates, upon the material of our sensations. And that activity remains as before the proper object of a moral judgment. Only now we see that the highest form of our activity is likely to be the one most conforming to the truth. What remains true of the scientific postulates, remains true of the religious postulates. ”

“ Though at first glance they might seem to belong to a different sphere, that of the soul rather than the intellect, and to possess a different function, explaining duties rather than discovering truth; yet in deep problems of physical or moral history, such as Providence, Sin, Reconciliation, they supply materials for limiting belief in the very class of subjects which is embraced in the compass of human philosophy. ”

“ But when the heavy-handed dogmatist requires a categorical assent to the literal truth of the miraculous, in exactly the same sense in which physical facts are true, a tension between faith and reason cannot be avoided. ”

“ Divested, for the public gaze, of its darkest ingredients, and dressed up, in their theological works, in false and meretricious pretentions to truth and purity, it exhibited a dogma only calculated to exert a beneficial influence on mankind, and to prove a source of morality and usefulness. ”

“ He is primarily a doctor of the faith: dogma first, determined by authority, and commending itself to human reason; morality, not independent, but proceeding from or connected with dogma, and while truly human yet resting upon divine foundations. ”

“ The movement from morality and religion to moral philosophy and the philosophy of religion, is thus a movement from reason to reason, from the implicit to the explicit, from the germ to the developed fulness of life and structure. ”

“ And thus also it is that so many doctrines of religion, ethics, and even politics, so full of meaning and reality to first converts, have manifested (after the association of that meaning with the verbal formulas has ceased to be kept up by the controversies which accompanied their first introduction) a tendency to degenerate rapidly into lifeless dogmas; which tendency, all the efforts of an education expressly and skillfully directed to keeping the meaning alive, are barely sufficient to counteract. ”

“ The firm assent to its really sound and rational principles and their logical conclusions, inexorably demands a further assent, to the physical, moral, and metaphysical demonstration by which the certain truth of Christianity is made evident to reason. A consistent and thorough rejection of Christianity reacts with irresistible logical violence against the first premises of natural theology. The prevailing rationalism is materialistic and atheistic. ”

“ The doctrine, that the theological explanation of phenomena belongs only to the infancy of our knowledge of them, ought not to be construed as if it was equivalent to the assertion, that mankind, as their knowledge advances, will necessarily cease to believe in any kind of theology. ”