Skeptic

“ And if we then look about us, we always find some skeptic saying, either that he does not feel sure of the existence of any such reality, or that he doubts whether it means what we say that it means, or, again, that in any case there are other people, who have found other realities, and whose moral principles, founded on these other realities, are in deadly opposition to ours. ”

“ The accumulated learning of the great centres of civilization, the patient investigation of plodding observers, the keen insight of subtile analysts, the jealous clairvoyance of dissentient theorists, the oblique glances of suspicious sister-sciences, the random flashes that skepticism throws from her faithless mirror to dazzle all eyes that seek for truth ”

“ The skeptic, in effect, that delicate creature, is far too easily frightened; his conscience is schooled so as to start at every Nay, and even at that sharp, decided Yea, and feels something like a bite thereby. ”

“ Then we have the skeptic, who inhales without inhaling, his back bent, shrugging his shoulders and rolling up his eyes. Then there are the discouraged ones, the people who are really sick and feel the uselessness and nothingness of all this. ”

“ Powerful and aggressive as skepticism undoubtedly is, its mission is drawing to a close—a fact of which the skeptics themselves are wholly unconscious. We see the beginning of the end. The means are already being prepared by which the whole human mind, including all its most conservative and radical elements, shall be lifted into higher and purer light. Difficulties will be removed, obscurities explained, reconciliations effected, the skeptic silenced, and the Christian enlightened, when revelation is seen as a perfected whole, and not viewed in part. ”

“ The skeptic doubts everything, and the dogmatist does not suffer his fundamental beliefs to be touched by any doubt. Neither of these two philosophies, the skeptical or the dogmatic, really needs to be taken too seriously. ”

“ Every new stage of our educational training provides some additional testimony on its behalf. Newspapers and novelists, orators and playwrights, even if they are little else, are at least loyal preachers of the Truth. The skeptic is not controverted; he is overlooked. It constitutes the kind of faith which is the implication, rather than the object, of thought, and consciously or unconsciously it enters largely into our personal lives as a formative influence. ”

“ This skepticism expresses an indifference that we feel when we contemplate two opposing aims in such a way as momentarily to share them both. For the moment we realize equally these warring aims. They are ours. The conflict is in us. The two wills here represented are our will. And for this reason, and for this only, can we feel the skeptical indecision. Had we the will to choose the one end alone, we should unhesitatingly choose it, and should not see enough of the opposing will to be skeptics. ”

“ I believe that it is, first of all, indifference—indifference to truth as truth; next, skepticism, by which I do not mean inability to believe this or that dogma, but the skepticism which refuses to believe that there is any power in the universe strong enough, large enough, good enough, to make the thorough search for truth safe in every line of investigation ”

“ Then for a time skepticism of all men's motives prevails, and we look around in vain for some one to trust. Sometimes in desperation all faith in human goodness is cast off, and the high resolves with which we had started to make it felt as a power for the accomplishment of some noble purpose are bitterly cast aside as a vain delusion. ”

“ And as it seems to me that credulity is a less desirable frame of mind than skepticism, I have set forth this collection of witch stories as landmarks of the excesses to which a blind belief may hurry and impel humanity, and perhaps as some slight aids to that much misused common sense which the holders of impossible theories generally consider it well to tread under foot, and loftily ignore. ”

“ The sufficient reply to the skeptic, who doubts the power and the furniture of man, is in that possibility of joyful intercourse with persons, which makes the faith and practice of all reasonable men. ”

“ Yet, as we near the end of the sixteenth century, some evidences of a healthful and fruitful skepticism begin to appear.
The old stream of travelers, commentators, and preachers, accepting tradition and repeating what they have been told, flows on; but here and there we are refreshed by the sight of a man who really begins to think and look for himself. ”

“ If there is truth absolute, we desire to know the same, and if we ever get a glimpse of it, doubtless it will need very little apology from us. But meanwhile we propose to doubt fearlessly and thoroughly. If our limits prevent here the proper exhaustive search for all the actual difficulties of the views that we present, still we want to have, and as far as may be to show, the spirit of honest, determined, conscientious skepticism. ”

“ Their propounders, if they are honest to the core and also if they have the power to analyze their own mental processes in constructing such so-called proofs, feel, though they may not know it, that they are really reasoning against their own profounder convictions or seeking to convince themselves against their own intuitions. They vilipend skepticism because they hope thus to drown its still small voice in themselves. ”

“ Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect. ”

“ But their sensual habit would fix the believer to his last position, whilst he as inevitably advances; and presently the unbeliever, for love of belief, burns the believer.
Great believers are always reckoned infidels, impracticable, fantastic, atheistic, and really men of no account. The spiritualist finds himself driven to express his faith by a series of skepticisms. ”

“ I play with the miscellany of facts, and take those superficial views which we call skepticism; but I know that they will presently appear to me in that order which makes skepticism impossible. A man of thought must feel the thought that is parent of the universe, that the masses of nature do undulate and flow.
This faith avails to the whole emergency of life and objects. The world is saturated with deity and with law. He is content with just and unjust, with sots and fools, with the triumph of folly and fraud. ”

“ And even skepticism must pause before the miracle of the continued existence of this strange people, wading through the ages, bearing on their shoulders the burden of their great trust, and pressing forward under the force of a perpetual and irresistible impulse. ”

“ To what, we say, does this skepticism lead? It leads a man to a shameful loneliness and selfishness, so to speak—the more shameful, because it is so good-humored and conscienceless and serene. Conscience! What is conscience? ”

“ Let us listen to the philosopher himself, who says, indeed, many good things, but does not show how they may tend to the overthrow of skepticism: "Skeptics are always repeating that things seem to them, but that they do not know what they really are. ”

“ What ought we to think of the minds of those who even here still scent the escape of a critical and transcendental skepticism, and who believe that they can doubt whether they really must know whereof they speak, and who hold this doubt to be the true philosophical enlightenment. ”

“ The deadly attacks of skepticism may, no doubt, be directed successfully enough against an unconditional science of reason, where its action or reaction, which brings out the intrinsic contradiction of such a system, is both salutary and desirable, in order to destroy the false semblance of a spurious necessity. All its blows, however, glance off from a real and solid experience, and soon cease entirely. ”

“ What! do they not perceive that this pretension is nothing less than the pretension of demonstrating the human intelligence by the human intelligence, which has been, is, and will be eternally impossible? We believe skepticism forever invincible, because we regard skepticism as the final word of the reason concerning the reason itself. ”

“ Skeptics, who, in order to render their philosophy more solid, begin by doubting every thing, resemble the man, who, desirous of ascertaining, and exactly determining the phenomena of life, should bare his bosom, and thrust the knife into his heart. ”

“ In barbaric and half-civilized countries, where superstition and despotism reign, there are no skeptics. The undeveloped reason lies impotent at the feet of a childish imagination. Skepticism is a necessary and salutary phase in the ordinary evolution of the mind. ”

“ The ever widening effect of skepticism, which, whether masked under traditional forms or no, was from the beginning a spirit of complete negation and led at last to the questioning not only of any human institutions, but of the very forms of thought and of the mathematical truths. ”

“ Let us conclude, then, that religious skepticism can be but the effect of a superficial examination of theological principles, which are in a perpetual contradiction of the clearest and best demonstrated principles! To doubt is to deliberate upon the judgment which we should pass. ”

“ The extraordinary turn is accordingly made that the factor the action of which breeds skepticism as to our possession of objective truth, viz., our will to power and exercise of it, is that about which skepticism is impossible; the very changing of things which it works, a change so complete that we hardly know whether any of the original lineaments of things are left, is a proof of its reality. ”

“ The traps and snares that are being set for the young and unwary the theological schools of our times are among the great evils of the century, and if we look not well to ourselves we shall be carried down to oblivion with the great destructive popular wave of skepticism. ”

“ Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married some one else? Skepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than chance of error—that is your faith-vetoer’s exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field. ”

“ If the various arguments I have rehearsed indicate conclusively that in the laws of thought we have the norms of absolute truth—and skepticism on this point can be skepticism and not belief only by virtue of the very law which it doubts—some important corollaries present themselves. ”

“ You can afford to laugh at the skeptics and these smart-Alecs who pretend to know it all. What we claim can be proved and you've proved it. Lord, I'd like to know where you'd be now if you hadn't. I've always said: 'Investigate it for yourself, and if you don't get satisfaction, leave it alone for them that do. Go at it in a frank and honest spirit and try to find out the truth, and you'll generally come out convinced.' I don't believe in no underhanded ways of going to work at it neither. ”

“ Skepticism, riddling the faith of yesterday, prepares the way for the faith of to-morrow.... ”

“ Now in these definite limits, both for the exclusion of absolute skepticism and for the recognition and correct application at all times of a genuine and salutary doubt, we have, we think, found a satisfactory answer to the great question of truth and of the possibility of man’s attaining to a knowledge of it. And if so, we have at the same time shown completely that doubt forms a decisive crisis in the human mind, and thereby happily solved the problem which at an earlier period we propounded with regard to it. ”

“ Such facts show, too, that scientific hypotheses will be established or refuted by scientific men and scientific methods alone, and that no conscientious citation of texts or outcries as to consequences of scientific truths, from any other quarter, can do any thing save retard truth and cause needless anxiety. [41]
Is skepticism feared? All history shows that the only skepticism which does permanent harm is skepticism as to the value and safety of truth as truth. No skepticism has proved so corrosive to religion, none so cancerous in the human brain and heart. ”

“ Long ago this skepticism was refuted, and at all its points; long ago the unity of human truth was demonstrated, after having been admitted à priori in all ages by their leading minds. {352} This kind of skepticism is a theme upon which men will long continue to dilate; the darling subject for wits, it merits not to arrest the attention of philosophers. ”

“ The new truths, being found to be opposed to received opinions, cause a doubt concerning those opinions to arise in the mind. Skepticism, therefore, may easily follow, but does not precede inquiry.
Skepticism, being a negative principle, is necessarily unproductive and barren. ”

“ These men value themselves upon a perpetual skepticism, upon believing nothing but their own senses, upon calling for demonstration where it cannot possibly be obtained, and, sometimes, upon holding out against it, when it is laid before them ”

“ I never thought of it in that light before.” 2 Cor. iv. 3, 4, is very useful in showing the trifler that he is lost and that his skepticism arises from the fact that the “god of this world hath blinded his mind.” 2 Thes. ii. 10‒12, is useful in showing the origin of skepticism, “because they received not the love of the truth” and the consequences of skepticism—delusion and damnation. John viii. 21, 24, is also very searching in dealing with this class of skeptics, showing the terrible consequences of unbelief. ”

“ Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had? ”

“ Nay, we have seen that there is a time coming when all skeptics will become believers like the devils themselves, and will tremble at the ocular demonstration of truths which they have heretofore denied. ”

“ To have a solid foundation of skepticism,—that is to say, the faculty of changing at any moment, of turning back, of facing successively the metamorphoses of life. ”