It will be observed that for the purposes of this discussion we are on
'dogmatic' ground,--ground, I mean, which leaves systematic
philosophical scepticism altogether out of account. The postulate that
there is truth, and that it is the destiny of our minds to attain it,
we are deliberately resolving to make, though the sceptic will not make
it. We part company with him, therefore, absolutely, at this point.
But the faith that truth exists, and that our minds can find it, may be
held in two ways. We may talk of the _empiricist_ way and of the
_absolutist_ way of believing in truth. The absolutists in this matter
say that we not only can attain to knowing truth, but we can _know
when_ we have attained to knowing it; while the empiricists think that
although we may attain it, we cannot infallibly know when. To _know_
is one thing, and to know for certain _that_ we know is another. One
may hold to the first being possible without the second; hence the
empiricists and the absolutists, although neither of them is a sceptic
in the usual philosophic sense of the term, show very different degrees
of dogmatism in their lives.
If we look at the history of opinions, we see that the empiricist
tendency has largely prevailed in science, while in philosophy the
absolutist tendency has had everything its own way. The characteristic
sort of happiness, indeed, which philosophies yield has mainly
consisted in the conviction felt by each successive school or system
that by it bottom-certitude had been attained. "Other philosophies are
collections of opinions, mostly false; _my_ philosophy {13} gives
standing-ground forever,"--who does not recognize in this the key-note
of every system worthy of the name? A system, to be a system at all,
must come as a _closed_ system, reversible in this or that detail,
perchance, but in its essential features never!
Scholastic orthodoxy, to which one must always go when one wishes to
find perfectly clear statement, has beautifully elaborated this
absolutist conviction in a doctrine which it calls that of 'objective
evidence.' If, for example, I am unable to doubt that I now exist
before you, that two is less than three, or that if all men are mortal
then I am mortal too, it is because these things illumine my intellect
irresistibly. The final ground of this objective evidence possessed by
certain propositions is the _adaequatio intellectûs nostri cum rê_.
The certitude it brings involves an _aptitudinem ad extorquendum certum
assensum_ on the part of the truth envisaged, and on the side of the
subject a _quietem in cognitione_, when once the object is mentally
received, that leaves no possibility of doubt behind; and in the whole
transaction nothing operates but the _entitas ipsa_ of the object and
the _entitas ipsa_ of the mind. We slouchy modern thinkers dislike to
talk in Latin,--indeed, we dislike to talk in set terms at all; but at
bottom our own state of mind is very much like this whenever we
uncritically abandon ourselves: You believe in objective evidence, and
I do. Of some things we feel that we are certain: we know, and we know
that we do know. There is something that gives a click inside of us, a
bell that strikes twelve, when the hands of our mental clock have swept
the dial and meet over the meridian hour. The greatest empiricists
among us are only empiricists on reflection: when {14} left to their
instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes. When the Cliffords
tell us how sinful it is to be Christians on such 'insufficient
evidence,' insufficiency is really the last thing they have in mind.
For them the evidence is absolutely sufficient, only it makes the other
way. They believe so completely in an anti-christian order of the
universe that there is no living option: Christianity is a dead
hypothesis from the start.