PART II. ASSENT AND INFERENCE.

An Essay

In Aid Of

A Grammar Of Assent.

by

John Henry Newman,

Of the Oratory.

Non in dialecticà complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum.

ST. AMBROSE.

London:

Burns, Oates, & Co.

17 & 18, Portman Street, and 63, Paternoster Row.

1874

CONTENTS

Dedication.

Part I. Assent And Apprehension.

Chapter I. Modes Of Holding And Apprehending Propositions.

§ 1. Modes of Holding Propositions.

§ 2. Modes of apprehending Propositions.

Chapter II. Assent Considered As Apprehensive.

Chapter III. The Apprehension Of Propositions.

Chapter IV. Notional And Real Assent.

§ 1. Notional Assents.

§ 2. Real Assents.

§ 3. Notional and Real Assents Contrasted.

Chapter V. Apprehension And Assent In The Matter Of Religion.

§ 1. Belief in One God.

§ 2. Belief in the Holy Trinity.

§ 3. Belief in Dogmatic Theology.

Part II. Assent And Inference.

Chapter VI. Assent Considered As Unconditional.

§ 1. Simple Assent.

§ 2. Complex Assent.

Chapter VII. Certitude.

§ 1. Assent and Certitude Contrasted.

§ 2. Indefectibility of Certitude.

Chapter VIII. Inference.

§ 1. Formal Inference.

§ 2. Informal Inference.

§ 3. Natural Inference.

Chapter IX. The Illative Sense.

§ 1. The Sanction of the Illative Sense.

§ 2. The Nature of the Illative Sense.

§ 3. The Range of the Illative Sense.

Chapter X. Inference And Assent In The Matter Of Religion.

§ 1. Natural Religion.

§ 2. Revealed Religion.

Note.

Footnotes

DEDICATION.

To

Edward Bellasis,

Serjeant At Law,

In Remembrance

Of A Long, Equable, Sunny Friendship;

In Gratitude

For Continual Kindnesses Shown To Me,

For An Unwearied Zeal In My Behalf,

For A Trust In Me Which Has Never Wavered,

And A Prompt, Effectual Succour And Support

In Times Of Special Trial,

From His Affectionate

J. H. N.

_February 21, 1870._

PART I. ASSENT AND APPREHENSION.

Chapter I. Modes Of Holding And Apprehending Propositions.

§ 1. Modes of Holding Propositions.

1. Propositions (consisting of a subject and predicate united by the

copula) may take a categorical, conditional, or interrogative form.

(1) An interrogative, when they ask a Question, (e. g. Does Free-trade

benefit the poorer classes?) and imply the possibility of an

affirmative or negative resolution of it.

(2) A conditional, when they express a Conclusion (e. g. Free-trade

therefore benefits the poorer classes), and both imply, and imply their

dependence on, other propositions.

(3) A categorical, when they simply make an Assertion (e. g. Free-trade

does benefit), and imply the absence of any condition or reservation of

any kind, looking neither before nor behind, as resting in themselves

and being intrinsically complete.

These three modes of shaping a proposition, distinct as they are from

each other, follow each other in natural sequence. A proposition,

which starts with being a Question, may become a Conclusion, and

then be changed into an Assertion; but it has of course ceased to

be a question, so far forth as it has become a conclusion, and has

rid itself of its argumentative form—that is, has ceased to be a

conclusion,—so far forth as it has become an assertion. A question has

not yet got so far as to be a conclusion, though it is the necessary

preliminary of a conclusion; and an assertion has got beyond being a

mere conclusion, though it is the natural issue of a conclusion. Their

correlation is the measure of their distinction one from another.

No one is likely to deny that a question is distinct both from a

conclusion and from an assertion; and an assertion will be found to be

equally distinct from a conclusion. For, if we rest our affirmation on

arguments, this shows that we are not asserting; and, when we assert,

we do not argue. An assertion is as distinct from a conclusion, as a

word of command is from a persuasion or recommendation. Command and

assertion, as such, both of them, in their different ways, dispense

with, discard, ignore, antecedents of any kind, though antecedents may

have been a _sine quâ non_ condition of their being elicited. They both

carry with them the pretension of being personal acts.

In insisting on the intrinsic distinctness of these three modes

of putting a proposition, I am not maintaining that they may not

co-exist as regards one and the same subject. For what we have already

concluded, we may, if we will, make a question of; and what we are

asserting, we may of course conclude over again. We may assert, to

one man, and conclude to another, and ask of a third; still, when we

assert, we do not conclude, and, when we assert or conclude, we do not

question.

2. The internal act of holding propositions is for the most part

analogous to the external act of enunciating them; as there are three

ways of enunciating, so are there three ways of holding them, each

corresponding to each. These three mental acts are Doubt, Inference,

and Assent. A question is the expression of a doubt; a conclusion

is the expression of an act of inference; and an assertion is the

expression of an act of assent. To doubt, for instance, is not to see

one’s way to hold that Free-trade is or that it is not a benefit; to

infer, is to hold on sufficient grounds that Free-trade may, must, or

should be a benefit; to assent to the proposition, is to hold that

Free-trade is a benefit.

Moreover, propositions, while they are the material of these three

enunciations, are the objects of the three corresponding mental acts;

and as without a proposition, there cannot be a question, conclusion,

or assertion, so without a proposition there is nothing to doubt about,

nothing to infer, nothing to assent to. Mental acts of whatever kind

presuppose their objects.

And, since the three enunciations are distinct from each other,

therefore the three mental acts also, Doubt, Inference, and Assent,

are, with reference to one and the same proposition, distinct from each

other; else, why should their several enunciations be distinct? And

indeed it is very evident, that, so far forth as we infer, we do not

doubt, and that, when we assent, we are not inferring, and, when we

doubt, we cannot assent.

And in fact, these three modes of entertaining propositions,—doubting

them, inferring them, assenting to them, are so distinct in their

action, that, when they are severally carried out into the intellectual

habits of an individual, they become the principles and notes of three

distinct states or characters of mind. For instance, in the case of

Revealed Religion, according as one or other of these is paramount

within him, a man is a sceptic as regards it; or a philosopher,

thinking it more or less probable considered as a conclusion of

reason; or he has an unhesitating faith in it, and is recognized as a

believer. If he simply disbelieves, or dissents, he is assenting to the

contradictory of the thesis, viz. that there is no Revelation.

Many minds of course there are, which are not under the predominant

influence of any one of the three. Thus men are to be found of

irreflective, impulsive, unsettled, or again of acute minds, who do

not know what they believe and what they do not, and who may be by

turns sceptics, inquirers, or believers; who doubt, assent, infer, and

doubt again, according to the circumstances of the season. Nay further,

in all minds there is a certain coexistence of these distinct acts;

that is, of two of them, for we can at once infer and assent, though

we cannot at once either assent or infer and also doubt. Indeed, in a

multitude of cases we infer truths, or apparent truths, before, and

while, and after we assent to them.

Lastly, it cannot be denied that these three acts are all natural to

the mind; I mean, that, in exercising them, we are not violating the

laws of our nature, as if they were in themselves an extravagance or

weakness, but are acting according to it, according to its legitimate

constitution. Undoubtedly, it is possible, it is common, in the

particular case, to err in the exercise of Doubt, of Inference, and of

Assent; that is, we may be withholding a judgment about propositions

on which we have the means of coming to some definitive conclusion; or

we may be assenting to propositions which we ought to receive only on

the credit of their premisses, or again to keep ourselves in suspense

about; but such errors of the individual belong to the individual, not

to his nature, and cannot avail to forfeit for him his natural right,

under proper circumstances, to doubt, or to infer, or to assent. We

do but fulfil our nature in doubting, inferring, and assenting; and

our duty is, not to abstain from the exercise of any function of our

nature, but to do what is in itself right rightly.

3. So far in general:—in this Essay I treat of propositions only in

their bearing upon concrete matter, and I am mainly concerned with

Assent; with Inference, in its relation to Assent, and only such

inference as is not demonstration; with Doubt hardly at all. I dismiss

Doubt with one observation. I have here spoken of it simply as a

suspense of mind, in which sense of the word, to have “no doubt” about

a thesis is equivalent to one or other of the two remaining acts,

either to inferring it or else assenting to it. However, the word is

often taken to mean the deliberate recognition of a thesis as being

uncertain; in this sense Doubt is nothing else than an assent, viz. an

assent to a proposition at variance with the thesis, as I have already

noticed in the case of Disbelief.

Confining myself to the subject of Assent and Inference, I observe two

points of contrast between them.

The first I have already noted. Assent is unconditional; else, it is

not really represented by assertion. Inference is conditional, because

a conclusion at least implies the assumption of premisses, and still

more, because in concrete matter, on which I am engaged, demonstration

is impossible.

The second has regard to the apprehension necessary for holding

a proposition. We cannot assent to a proposition, without some

intelligent apprehension of it; whereas we need not understand it at

all in order to infer it. We cannot give our assent to the proposition

that “x is z,” till we are told something about one or other of the

terms; but we can infer, if “x is y, and y is z, that x is z,” whether

we know the meaning of x and z or no.

These points of contrast and their results will come before us in

due course: here, for a time leaving the consideration of the modes

of holding propositions, I proceed to inquire into what is to be

understood by apprehending them.

§ 2. Modes of apprehending Propositions.

By our apprehension of propositions I mean our imposition of a sense

on the terms of which they are composed. Now what do the terms of a

proposition, the subject and predicate, stand for? Sometimes they stand

for certain ideas existing in our own minds, and for nothing outside of

them; sometimes for things simply external to us, brought home to us

through the experiences and informations we have of them. All things in

the exterior world are unit and individual, and are nothing else; but

the mind not only contemplates those unit realities, as they exist, but

has the gift, by an act of creation, of bringing before it abstractions

and generalizations, which have no existence, no counterpart, out of it.

Now there are propositions, in which one or both of the terms

are common nouns, as standing for what is abstract, general, and

non-existing, such as “Man is an animal, some men are learned, an

Apostle is a creation of Christianity, a line is length without

breadth, to err is human, to forgive divine.” These I shall call

notional propositions, and the apprehension with which we infer or

assent to them, notional.

And there are other propositions, which are composed of singular nouns,

and of which the terms stand for things external to us, unit and

individual, as “Philip was the father of Alexander,” “the earth goes

round the sun,” “the Apostles first preached to the Jews;” and these I

shall call real propositions, and their apprehension real.

There are then two apprehensions or interpretations to which

propositions may be subjected, notional and real.

Next I observe, that the same proposition may admit of both of these

interpretations at once, having a notional sense as used by one

man, and a real as used by another. Thus a schoolboy may perfectly

apprehend, and construe with spirit, the poet’s words, “Dum Capitolium

scandet cum tacitâ Virgine Pontifex;” he has seen steep hills, flights

of steps, and processions; he knows what enforced silence is; also he

knows all about the Pontifex Maximus, and the Vestal Virgins; he has

an abstract hold upon every word of the description, yet without the

words therefore bringing before him at all the living image which they

would light up in the mind of a contemporary of the poet, who had seen

the fact described, or of a modern historian who had duly informed

himself in the religious phenomena, and by meditation had realized the

Roman ceremonial, of the age of Augustus. Again, “Dulce et decorum

est pro patriâ mori,” is a mere common-place, a terse expression of

abstractions in the mind of the poet himself, if Philippi is to be the

index of his patriotism, whereas it would be the record of experiences,

a sovereign dogma, a grand aspiration, inflaming the imagination,

piercing the heart, of a Wallace or a Tell.

As the multitude of common nouns have originally been singular, it

is not surprising that many of them should so remain still in the

apprehension of particular individuals. In the proposition “Sugar

is sweet,” the predicate is a common noun as used by those who have

compared sugar in their thoughts with honey or glycerine; but it may be

the only distinctively sweet thing in the experience of a child, and

may be used by him as a noun singular. The first time that he tastes

sugar, if his nurse says, “Sugar is sweet” in a notional sense, meaning

by sugar, lump-sugar, powdered, brown, and candied, and by sweet, a

specific flavour or scent which is found in many articles of food and

many flowers, he may answer in a real sense, and in an individual

proposition “Sugar is sweet,” meaning “this sugar is this sweet thing.”

Thirdly, in the same mind and at the same time, the same proposition

may express both what is notional and what is real. When a lecturer in

mechanics or chemistry shows to his class by experiment some physical

fact, he and his hearers at once enunciate it as an individual thing

before their eyes, and also as generalized by their minds into a law of

nature. When Virgil says, “Varium et mutabile semper fœmina,” he both

sets before his readers what he means to be a general truth, and at the

same time applies it individually to the instance of Dido. He expresses

at once a notion and a fact.

Of these two modes of apprehending propositions, notional and real,

real is the stronger; I mean by stronger the more vivid and forcible.

It is so to be accounted for the very reason that it is concerned with

what is either real or taken for real; for intellectual ideas cannot

compete in effectiveness with the experience of concrete facts. Various

proverbs and maxims sanction me in so speaking, such as, “Facts are

stubborn things,” “Experientia docet,” “Seeing is believing;” and

the popular contrast between theory and practice, reason and sight,

philosophy and faith. Not that real apprehension, as such, impels to

action, any more than notional; but it excites and stimulates the

affections and passions, by bringing facts home to them as motive

causes. Thus it indirectly brings about what the apprehension of large

principles, of general laws, or of moral obligations, never could

effect.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

Reverting to the two modes of holding propositions, conditional and

unconditional, which was the subject of the former Section, that

is, inferences and assents, I observe that inferences, which are

conditional acts, are especially cognate to notional apprehension, and

assents, which are unconditional, to real. This distinction, too, will

come before us in the course of the following chapters.

And now I have stated the main subjects of which I propose to treat;

viz., the distinctions in the use of propositions, which I have been

drawing, and the questions which those distinctions involve.

Chapter II. Assent Considered As Apprehensive.

I have already said of an act of Assent, first, that it is in itself

the absolute acceptance of a proposition without any condition; and

next that, in order to its being made, it presupposes the condition,

not only of some previous inference in favour of the proposition, but

especially of some concomitant apprehension of its terms. I proceed

to the latter of these two subjects; that is, of Assent considered as

apprehensive, leaving the discussion of Assent as unconditional for a

later place in this Essay.

By apprehension of a proposition, I mean, as I have already said, the

interpretation given to the terms of which it is composed. When we

infer, we consider a proposition in relation to other propositions;

when we assent to it, we consider it for its own sake and in its

intrinsic sense. That sense must be in some degree known to us; else,

we do but assert the proposition, we in no wise assent to it. Assent

I have described to be a mental assertion; in its very nature then it

is of the mind, and not of the lips. We can assert without assenting;

assent is more than assertion just by this much, that it is accompanied

by some apprehension of the matter asserted. This is plain; and the

only question is, what measure of apprehension is sufficient.

And the answer to this question is equally plain:—it is the predicate

of the proposition which must be apprehended. In a proposition one term

is predicated of another; the subject is referred to the predicate,

and the predicate gives us information about the subject;—therefore

to apprehend the proposition is to have that information, and to

assent to it is to acquiesce in it as true. Therefore I apprehend a

proposition, when I apprehend its predicate. The subject itself need

not be apprehended _per se_ in order to a genuine assent: for it is

the very thing which the predicate has to elucidate, and therefore

by its formal place in the proposition, so far as it is the subject,

it is something unknown, something which the predicate makes known;

but the predicate cannot make it known, unless it is known itself.

Let the question be, “What is Trade?” here is a distinct profession

of ignorance about “Trade;” and let the answer be, “Trade is the

interchange of goods;”—trade then need not be known, as a condition of

assent to the proposition, except so far as the account of it which

is given in answer, “the interchange of goods,” makes it known; and

that must be apprehended in order to make it known. The very drift of

the proposition is to tell us something about the subject; but there

is no reason why our knowledge of the subject, whatever it is, should

go beyond what the predicate tells us about it. Further than this the

subject need not be apprehended: as far as this it must; it will not be

apprehended thus far, unless we apprehend the predicate.

If a child asks, “What is Lucern?” and is answered, “Lucern is medicago

sativa, of the class Diadelphia and order Decandria;” and henceforth

says obediently, “Lucern is medicago sativa, &c.,” he makes no act

of assent to the proposition which he enunciates, but speaks like

a parrot. But, if he is told, “Lucern is food for cattle,” and is

shown cows grazing in a meadow, then though he never saw lucern, and

knows nothing at all about it, besides what he has learned from the

predicate, he is in a position to make as genuine an assent to the

proposition “Lucern is food for cattle,” on the word of his informant,

as if he knew ever so much more about lucern. And as soon as he has got

as far as this, he may go further. He now knows enough about lucern,

to enable him to apprehend propositions which have lucern for their

predicate, should they come before him for assent, as, “That field is

sown with lucern,” or “Clover is not lucern.”

Yet there is a way, in which the child can give an indirect assent even

to a proposition, in which he understood neither subject nor predicate.

He cannot indeed in that case assent to the proposition itself, but he

can assent to its truth. He cannot do more than assert that “Lucern is

medicago sativa,” but he can assent to the proposition, “That lucern is

medicago sativa is true.” For here is a predicate which he sufficiently

apprehends, what is inapprehensible in the proposition being confined

to the subject. Thus the child’s mother might teach him to repeat a

passage of Shakespeare, and when he asked the meaning of a particular

line, such as “The quality of mercy is not strained,” or “Virtue itself

turns vice, being misapplied,” she might answer him, that he was too

young to understand it yet, but that it had a beautiful meaning, as he

would one day know: and he, in faith on her word, might give his assent

to such a proposition,—not, that is, to the line itself which he had

got by heart, and which would be beyond him, but to its being true,

beautiful, and good.

Of course I am speaking of assent itself, and its intrinsic conditions,

not of the ground or motive of it. Whether there is an obligation upon

the child to trust his mother, or whether there are cases where such

trust is impossible, are irrelevant questions, and I notice them in

order to put them aside. I am examining the act of assent itself, not

its preliminaries, and I have specified three directions, which among

others the assent may take, viz. assent immediately to a proposition,

assent to its truth, and assent both to its truth and to the ground

of its being true together,—“Lucern is food for cattle,”—“That lucern

is medicago sativa is true,”—and “My mother’s word, that lucern is

medicago sativa, and is food for cattle, is the truth.” Now in each of

these there is one and the same absolute adhesion of the mind to the

proposition, on the part of the child; he assents to the apprehensible

proposition, and to the truth of the inapprehensible, and to the

veracity of his mother in her assertion of the inapprehensible. I say

the same absolute adhesion, because, unless he did assent without any

reserve to the proposition that lucern was food for cattle, or to the

accuracy of the botanical name and description of it, he would not be

giving an unreserved assent to his mother’s word: yet, though these

assents are all unreserved, still they certainly differ in strength,

and this is the next point to which I wish to draw attention. It is

indeed plain, that, though the child assents to his mother’s veracity,

without perhaps being conscious of his own act, nevertheless that

particular assent of his has a force and life in it which the other

assents have not, insomuch as he apprehends the proposition, which is

the subject of it, with greater keenness and energy than belongs to

his apprehension of the others. Her veracity and authority is to him

no abstract truth or item of general knowledge, but is bound up with

that image and love of her person which is part of himself, and makes a

direct claim on him for his summary assent to her general teachings.

Accordingly, by reason of this circumstance of his apprehension

he would not hesitate to say, did his years admit of it, that he

would lay down his life in defence of his mother’s veracity. On the

other hand, he would not make such a profession in the case of the

propositions, “Lucern is food for cattle,” or “That lucern is medicago

sativa is true;” and yet it is clear too, that, if he did in truth

assent to these propositions, he would have to die for them also,

rather than deny them, when it came to the point, unless he made up

his mind to tell a falsehood. That he would have to die for all three

propositions severally rather than deny them, shows the completeness

and absoluteness of assent in its very nature; that he would not

spontaneously challenge so severe a trial in the case of two out of the

three particular acts of assent, illustrates in what sense one assent

may be stronger than another.

It appears then, that, in assenting to propositions, an apprehension

in some sense of their terms is not only necessary to assent, as such,

but also gives a distinct character to its acts. If therefore we would

know more about Assent, we must know more about the apprehension which

accompanies it. Accordingly to the subject of Apprehension I proceed.

Chapter III. The Apprehension Of Propositions.

I said in my Introductory Chapter that there can be no assent to a

proposition, without some sort of apprehension of its terms; next that

there are two modes of apprehension, notional and real; thirdly, that,

while assent may be given to a proposition on either apprehension of

it, still its acts are elicited more heartily and forcibly, when they

are made upon real apprehension which has things for its objects,

than when they are made in favour of notions and with a notional

apprehension. The first of these three points I have just been

discussing; now I will proceed to the second, viz. the two modes of

apprehending propositions, leaving the third for the Chapters which

follow.

I have used the word _apprehension_, and not _understanding_,

because the latter word is of uncertain meaning, standing sometimes

for the faculty or act of conceiving a proposition, sometimes for

that of comprehending it, neither of which come into the sense of

_apprehension_. It is possible to apprehend without understanding.

I apprehend what is meant by saying that John is Richard’s wife’s

father’s aunt’s husband, but, if I am unable so to take in these

successive relationships as to understand the upshot of the whole,

viz. that John is great-uncle-in-law to Richard, I cannot be said to

understand the proposition. In like manner, I may take a just view

of a man’s conduct, and therefore apprehend it, and yet may profess

that I cannot understand it; that is, I have not the key to it, and

do not see its consistency in detail: I have no just conception of

it. Apprehension then is simply an intelligent acceptance of the idea

or of the fact which a proposition enunciates. “Pride will have a

fall;” “Napoleon died at St. Helena;” I have no difficulty in entering

into the sentiment contained in the former of these, or into the fact

declared in the latter; that is, I apprehend them both.

Now apprehension, as I have said, has two subject-matters:—according

as language expresses things external to us, or our own thoughts, so

is apprehension real or notional. It is notional in the grammarian, it

is real in the experimentalist. The grammarian has to determine the

force of words and phrases; he has to master the structure of sentences

and the composition of paragraphs; he has to compare language with

language, to ascertain the common ideas expressed under different

idiomatic forms, and to achieve the difficult work of recasting the

mind of an original author in the mould of a translation. On the

other hand, the philosopher or experimentalist aims at investigating,

questioning, ascertaining facts, causes, effects, actions, qualities:

these are things, and he makes his words distinctly subordinate to

these, as means to an end. The primary duty of a literary man is to

have clear conceptions, and to be exact and intelligible in expressing

them; but in a philosopher it is even a merit to be not altogether

vague, inchoate and obscure in his teaching, and if he fails even of

this low standard of language, we remind ourselves that his obscurity

perhaps is owing to his depth. No power of words in a lecturer would

be sufficient to make psychology easy to his hearers; if they are

to profit by him, they must throw their minds into the matters in

discussion, must accompany his treatment of them with an active,

personal concurrence, and interpret for themselves, as he proceeds,

the dim suggestions and adumbrations of objects, which he has a

right to presuppose, while he uses them, as images existing in their

apprehension as well as in his own.

In something of a parallel way it is the least pardonable fault in an

Orator to fail in clearness of style, and the most pardonable fault of

a Poet.

So again, an Economist is dealing with facts; whatever there is of

theory in his work professes to be founded on facts, by facts alone

must his sense be interpreted, and to those only who are well furnished

with the necessary facts does he address himself; yet a clever

schoolboy, from a thorough grammatical knowledge of both languages,

might turn into English a French treatise on national wealth, produce,

consumption, labour, profits, measures of value, public debt, and the

circulating medium, with an apprehension of what it was that his author

was stating sufficient for making it clear to an English reader, while

he had not the faintest conception himself what the treatise, which he

was translating really determined. The man uses language as the vehicle

of things, and the boy of abstractions.

Hence in literary examinations, it is a test of good scholarship to

be able to construe aright, without the aid of understanding the

sentiment, action, or historical occurrence conveyed in the passage

thus accurately rendered, let it be a battle in Livy, or some subtle

train of thought in Virgil or Pindar. And those who have acquitted

themselves best in the trial, will often be disposed to think they

have most notably failed, for the very reason that they have been too

busy with the grammar of each sentence, as it came, to have been able,

as they construed on, to enter into the facts or the feelings, which,

unknown to themselves, they were bringing out of it.

To take a very different instance of this contrast between notions and

facts;—pathology and medicine, in the interests of science, and as a

protection to the practitioner, veil the shocking realities of disease

and physical suffering under a notional phraseology, under the abstract

terms of debility, distress, irritability, paroxysm, and a host of

Greek and Latin words. The arts of medicine and surgery are necessarily

experimental; but for writing and conversing on these subjects they

require to be stripped of the association of the facts from which they

are derived.

Such are the two modes of apprehension. The terms of a proposition do

or do not stand for things. If they do, then they are singular terms,

for all things that are, are units. But if they do not stand for things

they must stand for notions, and are common terms. Singular nouns come

from experience, common from abstraction. The apprehension of the

former I call real, and of the latter notional. Now let us look at this

difference between them more narrowly.

1. Real Apprehension, is, as I have said, in the first instance

an experience or information about the concrete. Now, when these

informations are in fact presented to us, (that is, when they are

directly subjected to our bodily senses or our mental sensations,

as when we say, “The sun shines,” or “The prospect is charming,” or

indirectly by means of a picture or even a narrative,) then there is no

difficulty in determining what is meant by saying that our enunciation

of a proposition concerning them implies an apprehension of things;

because we can actually point out the objects which they indicate. But

supposing those things are no longer before us, supposing they have

passed beyond our field of view, or the book is closed in which the

description of them occurs, how can an apprehension of things be said

to remain to us? It remains on our minds by means of the faculty of

memory. Memory consists in a present imagination of things that are

past; memory retains the impressions and likenesses of what they were

when before us; and when we make use of the proposition which refers to

them, it supplies us with objects by which to interpret it. They are

things still, as being the reflections of things in a mental mirror.

Hence the poet calls memory “the mind’s eye.” I am in a foreign country

among unfamiliar sights; at will I am able to conjure up before me

the vision of my home, and all that belongs to it, its rooms and

their furniture, its books, its inmates, their countenances, looks

and movements. I see those who once were there and are no more; past

scenes, and the very expression of the features, and the tones of

the voices, of those who took part in them, in a time of trial or

difficulty. I create nothing; I see the facsimiles of facts; and of

these facsimiles the words and propositions which I use concerning them

are from habitual association the proper or the sole expression.

And so again, I may have seen a celebrated painting, or some great

pageant, or some public man; and I have on my memory stored up and

ready at hand, but latent, an impress more or less distinct of

that experience. The words “the Madonna di S. Sisto,” or “the last

Coronation,” or “the Duke of Wellington,” have power to revive that

impress of it. Memory has to do with individual things and nothing that

is not individual. And my apprehension of its notices is conveyed in a

collection of singular and real propositions.

I have hitherto been adducing instances from (for the most part)

objects of sight; but the memory preserves the impress, though not so

vivid, of the experiences which come to us through our other senses

also. The memory of a beautiful air, or the scent of a particular

flower, as far as any remembrance remains of it, is the continued

presence in our minds of a likeness of it, which its actual presence

has left there. I can bring before me the music of the _Adeste

Fideles_, as if I were actually hearing it; and the scent of a clematis

as if I were in my garden; and the flavour of a peach as if it were

in season; and the thought I have of all these is as of something

individual and from without,—as much as the things themselves, the

tune, the scent, and the flavour, are from without,—though, compared

with the things themselves, these images (as they may be called) are

faint and intermitting.

Nor need such an image be in any sense an abstraction, though I may

have eaten a hundred peaches in times past, the impression, which

remains on my memory of the flavour, may be of any of them, of the

ten, twenty, thirty units, as the case may be, not a general notion,

distinct from every one of them, and formed from all of them by a

fabrication of my mind.

And so again the apprehension which we have of our past mental acts of

any kind, of hope, inquiry, effort, triumph, disappointment, suspicion,

hatred, and a hundred others, is an apprehension of the memory of those

definite acts, and therefore an apprehension of things; not to say

that many of them do not need memory, but are such as admit of being

actually summoned and repeated at our will. Such an apprehension again

is elicited by propositions embodying the notices of our history, of

our pursuits and their results, of our friends, of our bereavements,

of our illnesses, of our fortunes, which remain imprinted upon our

memory as sharply and deeply as is any recollection of sight. Nay, and

such recollections may have in them an individuality and completeness

which outlives the impressions made by sensible objects. The memory of

countenances and of places in times past may fade away from the mind;

but the vivid image of certain anxieties or deliverances never.

And by means of these particular and personal experiences, thus

impressed upon us, we attain an apprehension of what such things are

at other times when we have not experience of them; an apprehension

of sights and sounds, of colours and forms, of places and persons,

of mental acts and states, parallel to our actual experiences, such,

that, when we meet with definite propositions expressive of them, our

apprehension cannot be called abstract and notional. If I am told

“there is a raging fire in London,” or “London is on fire,” “fire” need

not be a common noun in my apprehension more than “London.” The word

may recall to my memory the experience of a fire which I have known

elsewhere, or of some vivid description which I have read. It is of

course difficult to draw the line and to say where the office of memory

ends, and where abstraction takes its place; and again, as I said in my

first pages, the same proposition is to one man an image, to another a

notion; but still there is a host of predicates, of the most various

kinds, “lovely,” “vulgar,” “a conceited man,” “a manufacturing town,”

“a catastrophe,” and any number of others, which, though as predicates

they would be accounted common nouns, are in fact in the mouths of

particular persons singular, as conveying images of things individual,

as the rustic in Virgil says,—

“Urbem, quam dicunt Romam, Melibœe, putavi,

Stultus ego, huic nostræ similem.”

And so the child’s idea of a king, as derived from his picture-book,

will be that of a fierce or stern or venerable man, seated above a

flight of steps, with a crown on his head and a sceptre in his hand.

In these two instances indeed the experience does but mislead, when

applied to the unknown; but it often happens on the contrary, that it

is a serviceable help, especially when a man has large experiences and

has learned to distinguish between them and apply them duly, as in the

instance of the hero “who knew many cities of men and many minds.”

Further, we are able by an inventive faculty, or, as I may call it, the

faculty of composition, to follow the descriptions of things which have

never come before us, and to form, out of such passive impressions as

experience has heretofore left on our minds, new images, which, though

mental creations, are in no sense abstractions, and though ideal, are

not notional. They are concrete units in the minds both of the party

describing and the party informed of them. Thus I may never have seen a

palm or a banana, but I have conversed with those who have, or I have

read graphic accounts of it, and, from my own previous knowledge of

other trees, have been able with so ready an intelligence to interpret

their language, and to light up such an image of it in my thoughts,

that, were it not that I never was in the countries where the tree

is found, I should fancy that I had actually seen it. Hence again it

is the very praise we give to the characters of some great poet or

historian that he is so individual. I am able as it were to gaze on

Tiberius, as Tacitus draws him, and to figure to myself our James the

First, as he is painted in Scott’s Romance. The assassination of Cæsar,

his “Et tu, Brute?” his collecting his robes about him, and his fall

under Pompey’s statue, all this becomes a fact to me and an object

of real apprehension. Thus it is that we live in the past and in the

distant; by means of our capacity of interpreting the statements of

others about former ages or foreign climes by the lights of our own

experience. The picture, which historians are able to bring before us,

of Cæsar’s death, derives its vividness and effect from its virtual

appeal to the various images of our memory.

This faculty of composition is of course a step beyond experience, but

we have now reached its furthest point; it is mainly limited as regards

its materials, by the sense of sight. As regards the other senses,

new images cannot well be elicited and shaped out of old experiences.

No description, however complete, could convey to my mind an exact

likeness of a tune or an harmony, which I have never heard; and still

less of a scent, which I have never smelt. Generic resemblances and

metaphorical substitutes are indeed producible; but I should not

acquire any real knowledge of the Scotch air “There’s nae luck” by

being told it was like “Auld lang syne,” or “Robin Gray;” and if I said

that Mozart’s melodies were as a summer sky or as the breath of Zephyr,

I should be better understood by those who knew Mozart than by those

who did not. Such vague illustrations suggest intellectual notions, not

images.

And quite as difficult is it to create or to apprehend by description

images of mental facts, of which we have no direct experience. I may

indeed, as I have already said, bring home to my mind so complex a fact

as an historical character, by composition out of my experiences about

character generally; Tiberius, James the First, Louis the Eleventh, or

Napoleon; but who is able to infuse into me, or how shall I imbibe, a

sense of the peculiarities of the style of Cicero or Virgil, if I have

not read their writings? or how shall I gain a shadow of a perception

of the wit or the grace ascribed to the conversation of the French

salons, being myself an untravelled John Bull? And so again, as regards

the affections and passions of our nature, they are _sui generis_

respectively, and incommensurable, and must be severally experienced

in order to be apprehended really. I can understand the _rabbia_ of

a native of Southern Europe, if I am of a passionate temper myself;

and the taste for speculation or betting found in great traders or

on the turf, if I am fond of enterprise or games of chance; but on

the other hand, not all the possible descriptions of headlong love

will make me comprehend the _delirium_, if I have never had a fit of

it; nor will ever so many sermons about the inward satisfaction of

strict conscientiousness create in my mind the image of a virtuous

action and its attendant sentiments, if I have been brought up to

lie, thieve and indulge my appetites. Thus we meet with men of the

world who cannot enter into the very idea of devotion, and think,

for instance, that, from the nature of the case, a life of religious

seclusion must be either one of unutterable dreariness or abandoned

sensuality, because they know of no exercise of the affections but what

is merely human; and with others again, who, living in the home of

their own selfishness, ridicule as something fanatical and pitiable the

self-sacrifices of generous high-mindedness and chivalrous honour. They

cannot create images of these things, any more than children can on the

contrary of vice, when they ask whereabouts and who the bad men are;

for they have no personal memories, and have to content themselves with

notions drawn from books or from what others tell them.

So much on the apprehension of things and on the real sense in our use

of language; now let us pass on to the notional sense.

2. Experience tells us only of individual things, and these things are

innumerable. Our minds might have been so constructed as to be able to

receive and retain an exact image of each of these various objects,

one by one, as it came before us, but only in and for itself, without

the power of comparing it with any of the others. But this is not our

case: on the contrary, to compare and to contrast are among the most

prominent and busy of our intellectual functions. Instinctively, even

though unconsciously, we are ever instituting comparisons between

the manifold phenomena of the external world, as we meet with them,

criticizing, referring to a standard, collecting, analyzing them. Nay,

as if by one and the same action, as soon as we perceive them, we

also perceive that they are like each other or unlike, or rather both

like and unlike at once. We apprehend spontaneously, even before we

set about apprehending, that man is like man, yet unlike; and unlike

a horse, a tree, a mountain, or a monument, yet in some, though not

the same respects, like each of them. And in consequence, as I have

said, we are ever grouping and discriminating, measuring and sounding,

framing cross classes and cross divisions, and thereby rising from

particulars to generals, that is from images to notions.

In processes of this kind we regard things, not as they are in

themselves, but mainly as they stand in relation to each other. We

look at nothing simply for its own sake; we cannot look at any one

thing without keeping our eyes on a multitude of other things besides.

“Man” is no longer what he really is, an individual presented to us by

our senses, but as we read him in the light of those comparisons and

contrasts which we have made him suggest to us. He is attenuated into

an aspect, or relegated to his place in a classification. Thus his

appellation is made to suggest, not the real being which he is in this

or that specimen of himself, but a definition. If I might use a harsh

metaphor, I should say he is made the logarithm of his true self, and

in that shape is worked with the ease and satisfaction of logarithms.

It is plain what a different sense language will bear in this system

of intellectual notions from what it has when it is the representative

of things: and such a use of it is not only the very foundation of

all science, but may be, and is, carried out in literature and in the

ordinary intercourse of man with man. And then it comes to pass that

individual propositions about the concrete almost cease to be, and are

diluted or starved into abstract notions. The events of history and

the characters who figure in it lose their individuality. States and

governments, society and its component parts, cities, nations, even the

physical face of the country, things past, and things contemporary, all

that fulness of meaning which I have described as accruing to language

from experience, now that experience is absent, necessarily becomes

to the multitude of men nothing but a heap of notions, little more

intelligible than the beauties of a prospect to the short-sighted, or

the music of a great master to a listener who has no ear.

I suppose most men will recollect in their past years how many mistakes

they have made about persons, parties, local occurrences, nations and

the like, of which at the time they had no actual knowledge of their

own: how ashamed or how amused they have since been at their own

gratuitous idealism when they came into possession of the real facts

concerning them. They were accustomed to treat the definite Titus

or Sempronius as the _quidam homo_, the _individuum vagum_ of the

logician. They spoke of his opinions, his motives, his practices, as

their traditional rule for the _species_ Titus or Sempronius enjoined.

In order to find out what individual men in flesh and blood were, they

fancied that they had nothing to do but to refer to commonplaces,

alphabetically arranged. Thus they were well up with the character of

a Whig statesman or Tory magnate, a Wesleyan, a Congregationalist,

a parson, a priest, a philanthropist, a writer of controversy, a

sceptic; and found themselves prepared, without the trouble of direct

inquiry, to draw the individual after the peculiarities of his type.

And so with national character; the late Duke of Wellington must have

been impulsive, quarrelsome, witty, clever at repartee, for he was an

Irishman; in like manner, we must have cold and selfish Scots, crafty

Italians, vulgar Americans, and Frenchmen, half tiger, half monkey.

As to the French, those who are old enough to recollect the wars with

Napoleon, know what eccentric notions were popularly entertained about

them in England; how it was even a surprise to find some military man,

who was a prisoner of war, to be tall and stout, because it was a

received idea that all Frenchmen were undersized and lived on frogs.

Such again are the ideal personages who figure in romances and dramas

of the old school; tyrants, monks, crusaders, princes in disguise,

and captive damsels; or benevolent or angry fathers, and spendthrift

heirs; like the symbolical characters in some of Shakespeare’s plays,

“a Tapster,” or “a Lord Mayor,” or in the stage directions “Enter two

murderers.”

What I have been illustrating in the case of persons, might be

instanced in regard to places, transactions, physical calamities,

events in history. Words which are used by an eye-witness to express

things, unless he be especially eloquent or graphic, may only convey

general notions. Such is, and ever must be, the popular and ordinary

mode of apprehending language. On few subjects only have any of us the

opportunity of realizing in our minds what we speak and hear about;

and we fancy that we are doing justice to individual men and things by

making them a mere _synthesis_ of qualities, as if any number whatever

of abstractions would, by being fused together, be equivalent to one

concrete.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

Here then we have two modes of thought, both using the same words,

both having one origin, yet with nothing in common in their results.

The informations of sense and sensation are the initial basis of both

of them; but in the one we take hold of objects from within them, and

in the other we view them from without them; we perpetuate them as

images in the one case, we transform them into notions in the other.

And natural to us as are both processes in their first elements and in

their growth, however divergent and independent in their direction,

they cannot really be inconsistent with each other; yet no one from the

sight of a horse or a dog would be able to anticipate its zoological

definition, nor from a knowledge of its definition to draw such a

picture as would direct another to the living specimen.

Each use of propositions has its own excellence and serviceableness,

and each has its own imperfection. To apprehend notionally is to have

breadth of mind, but to be shallow; to apprehend really is to be deep,

but to be narrow-minded. The latter is the conservative principle of

knowledge, and the former the principle of its advancement. Without the

apprehension of notions, we should for ever pace round one small circle

of knowledge; without a firm hold upon things, we shall waste ourselves

in vague speculations. However, real apprehension has the precedence,

as being the scope and end and the test of notional; and the fuller is

the mind’s hold upon things or what it considers such, the more fertile

is it in its aspects of them, and the more practical in its definitions.

Of course, as these two are not inconsistent with each other, they may

co-exist in the same mind. Indeed there is no one who does not to a

certain extent exercise both the one and the other. Viewed in relation

to Assent, which has led to my speaking of them, they do not in any way

affect the nature of the mental act, which is in all cases absolute and

unconditional; but they give it an external character corresponding

respectively to their own: so much so, that at first sight it might

seem as if Assent admitted of degrees, on account of the variation

of vividness in these different apprehensions. As notions come of

abstractions, so images come of experiences; the more fully the mind

is occupied by an experience, the keener will be its assent to it,

if it assents, and on the other hand, the duller will be its assent

and the less operative, the more it is engaged with an abstraction;

and thus a scale of assents is conceivable, either in the instance of

one mind upon different subjects, or of many minds upon one subject,

varying from an assent which looks like mere inference up to a belief

both intense and practical,—from the acceptance which we accord to some

accidental news of the day to the supernatural dogmatic faith of the

Christian.

It follows to treat of Assent under this double aspect of its

subject-matter,—assent to notions, and assent to things.

Chapter IV. Notional And Real Assent.

1. I have said that our apprehension of a proposition varies in

strength, and that it is stronger when it is concerned with a

proposition expressive to us of things than when concerned with a

proposition expressive of notions; and I have given this reason for it,

viz. that what is concrete exerts a force and makes an impression on

the mind which nothing abstract can rival. That is, I have argued that,

because the object is more powerful, therefore so is the apprehension

of it.

I do not think it unfair reasoning thus to take the apprehension for

its object. The mind is ever stimulated in proportion to the cause

stimulating it. Sights, for instance, sway us, as scents do not;

whether this be owing to a greater power in the thing seen, or to a

greater receptivity and expansiveness in the sense of seeing, is a

superfluous question. The strong object would make the apprehension

strong. Our sense of seeing is able to open to its object, as our sense

of smell cannot open to its own. Its objects are able to awaken the

mind, take possession of it, inspire it, act through it, with an energy

and variousness which is not found in the case of scents and their

apprehension. Since we cannot draw the line between the object and the

act, I am at liberty to say, as I have said, that, as is the thing

apprehended, so is the apprehension.

And so in like manner as regards apprehension of mental objects. If

an image derived from experience or information is stronger than an

abstraction, conception, or conclusion—if I am more arrested by our

Lord’s bearing before Pilate and Herod than by the “Justum et tenacem”

&c. of the poet, more arrested by His Voice saying to us, “Give to

him that asketh thee,” than by the best arguments of the Economist

against indiscriminate almsgiving, it does not matter for my present

purpose whether the objects give strength to the apprehension or the

apprehension gives large admittance into the mind to the object. It

is in human nature to be more affected by the concrete than by the

abstract; it may be the reverse with other beings. The apprehension,

then, may be as fairly said to possess the force which acts upon us, as

the object apprehended.

2. Real apprehension, then, may be pronounced stronger than

notional, because things, which are its objects, are confessedly

more impressive and affective than notions, which are the objects of

notional. Experiences and their images strike and occupy the mind,

as abstractions and their combinations do not. Next, passing on to

Assent, I observe that it is this variation in the mind’s apprehension

of an object to which it assents, and not any incompleteness in the

assent itself, which leads us to speak of strong and weak assents, as

if Assent itself admitted of degrees. In either mode of apprehension,

be it real or be it notional, the assent preserves its essential

characteristic of being unconditional. The assent of a Stoic to the

“Justum et tenacem” &c. may be as genuine an assent, as absolute and

entire, as little admitting of degree or variation, as distinct from an

act of inference, as the assent of a Christian to the history of our

Lord’s Passion in the Gospel.

3. However, characteristic as it is of Assent, to be thus in its nature

simply one and indivisible, and thereby essentially different from

Inference, which is ever varying in strength, never quite at the same

pitch in any two of its acts, still it is at the same time true that it

may be difficult in fact, by external tokens, to distinguish certain

acts of assent from certain acts of inference. Thus, whereas no one

could possibly confuse the real assent of a Christian to the fact of

our Lord’s crucifixion, with the notional acceptance of it, as a point

of history, on the part of a philosophical heathen (so removed from

each other, _toto cœlo_, are the respective modes of apprehending it in

the two cases, though in both the assent is in its nature one and the

same), nevertheless it would be easy to mistake the Stoic’s notional

assent, genuine though it might be, to the moral nobleness of the just

man “struggling in the storms of fate,” for a mere act of inference

resulting from the principles of his Stoical profession, or again for

an assent merely to the inferential necessity of the nobleness of that

struggle. Nothing, indeed, is more common than to praise men for their

consistency to their principles, whatever those principles are, that

is, to praise them on an inference, without thereby implying any assent

to the principles themselves.

The cause of this resemblance between acts so distinct is obvious. It

exists only in cases of notional assents; when the assent is given

to notions, then it is possible to hesitate in deciding whether it

is assent or inference, whether the mind is merely without doubt or

whether it is actually certain. And the reason is this: notional Assent

seems like Inference, because the apprehension which accompanies acts

of inference is notional also,—because Inference is engaged for the

most part on notional propositions, both premiss and conclusion. This

point, which I have implied throughout, I here distinctly record, and

shall enlarge upon hereafter. Only propositions about individuals are

not notional, and they are seldom the matter of inference. Thus, did

the Stoic infer the fact of our Lord’s death instead of assenting to

it, the proposition would have been as much an abstraction to him as

the “Justum et tenacem,” &c; nay further, the “Justus et tenax” was at

least a notion in his mind, but “Jesus Christ” would, in the schools

of Athens or of Rome, have stood for less, for an unknown being, the

x or y of a formula. Except then in some of the cases of singular

conclusions, inferences are employed on notions, that is, unless they

are employed on mere symbols; and, indeed, when they are symbolical,

then are they clearest and most cogent, as I shall hereafter show.

The next clearest are such as carry out the necessary results of

previous classifications, and therefore may be called definitions or

conclusions, as we please. For instance, having divided beings into

their classes, the definition of man is inevitable.

4. We may call it then the normal state of Inference to apprehend

propositions as notions:—and we may call it the normal state of Assent

to apprehend propositions as things. If notional apprehension is most

congenial to Inference, real apprehension will be the most natural

concomitant on Assent. An act of Inference includes in its object the

dependence of its thesis upon its premisses, that is, upon a relation,

which is abstract; but an act of Assent rests wholly on the thesis as

its object, and the reality of the thesis is almost a condition of its

unconditionality.

5. I am led on to make one remark more, and it shall be my last.

An act of assent, it seems, is the most perfect and highest of its

kind, when it is exercised on propositions, which are apprehended as

experiences and images, that is, which stand for things; and, on the

other hand, an act of inference is the most perfect and highest of its

kind, when it is exercised on propositions which are apprehended as

notions, that is, which are creations of the mind. An act of inference

indeed may be made with either of these modes of apprehension; so

may an act of assent; but, when inferences are exercised on things,

they tend to be conjectures or presentiments, without logical force;

and when assents are exercised on notions, they tend to be mere

assertions without any personal hold on them on the part of those who

make them. If this be so, the paradox is true, that, when Inference

is clearest, Assent may be least forcible, and, when Assent is most

intense, Inference may be least distinct;—for, though acts of assent

require previous acts of inference, they require them, not as adequate

causes, but as _sine quâ non_ conditions: and, while the apprehension

strengthens Assent, Inference often weakens the apprehension.

§ 1. Notional Assents.

I shall consider Assent made to propositions which express abstractions

or notions under five heads; which I shall call Profession, Credence,

Opinion, Presumption, and Speculation.

1. _Profession._

There are assents so feeble and superficial, as to be little more than

assertions. I class them all together under the head of Profession.

Such are the assents made upon habit and without reflection; as when

a man calls himself a Tory or a Liberal, as having been brought up as

such; or again, when he adopts as a matter of course the literary or

other fashions of the day, admiring the poems, or the novels, or the

music, or the personages, or the costume, or the wines, or the manners,

which happen to be popular, or are patronized in the higher circles.

Such again are the assents of men of wavering restless minds, who

take up and then abandon beliefs so readily, so suddenly, as to make

it appear that they had no view (as it is called) on the matter they

professed, and did not know to what they assented or why.

Then, again, when men say they have no doubt of a thing, this is a

case, in which it is difficult to determine whether they assent to it,

infer it, or consider it highly probable. There are many cases, indeed,

in which it is impossible to discriminate between assent, inference,

and assertion, on account of the otiose, passive, inchoate character

of the act in question. If I say that to-morrow will be fine, what

does this enunciation mean? Perhaps it means that it ought to be fine,

if the glass tells truly; then it is the inference of a probability.

Perhaps it means no more than a surmise, because it is fine to-day, or

has been so for the week past. And perhaps it is a compliance with the

word of another, in which case it is sometimes a real assent, sometimes

a polite assertion or a wish.

Many a disciple of a philosophical school, who talks fluently, does but

assert, when he seems to assent to the _dicta_ of his master, little as

he may be aware of it. Nor is he secured against this self-deception

by knowing the arguments on which those _dicta_ rest, for he may learn

the arguments by heart, as a careless schoolboy gets up his Euclid.

This practice of asserting simply on authority, with the pretence and

without the reality of assent, is what is meant by formalism. To say

“I do not understand a proposition, but I accept it on authority,” is

not formalism, but faith; it is not a direct assent to the proposition,

still it _is_ an assent to the authority which enunciates it; but what

I here speak of is professing to understand without understanding. It

is thus that political and religious watchwords are created; first

one man of name and then another adopts them, till their use becomes

popular, and then every one professes them, because every one else

does. Such words are “liberality,” “progress,” “light,” “civilization;”

such are “justification by faith only,” “vital religion,” “private

judgment,” “the Bible and nothing but the Bible.” Such again are

“Rationalism,” “Gallicanism,” “Jesuitism,” “Ultramontanism”—all of

which, in the mouths of conscientious thinkers, have a definite

meaning, but are used by the multitude as war-cries, nicknames,

and shibboleths, with scarcely enough of the scantiest grammatical

apprehension of them to allow of their being considered really more

than assertions.

Thus, instances occur now and then, when, in consequence of the

urgency of some fashionable superstition or popular delusion, some

eminent scientific authority is provoked to come forward, and to set

the world right by his “ipse dixit.” He, indeed, himself knows very

well what he is about; he has a right to speak, and his reasonings

and conclusions are sufficient, not only for his own, but for general

assent, and, it may be, are as simply true and impregnable, as they are

authoritative; but an intelligent hold on the matter in dispute, such

as he has himself, cannot be expected in the case of men in general.

They, nevertheless, one and all, repeat and retail his arguments, as

suddenly as if they had not to study them, as heartily as if they

understood them, changing round and becoming as strong antagonists of

the error which their master has exposed, as if they had never been its

advocates. If their word is to be taken, it is not simply his authority

that moves them, which would be sensible enough and suitable in them,

both apprehension and assent being in that case grounded on the maxim

“Cuique in arte suâ credendum,” but so far forth as they disown this

motive, and claim to judge in a scientific question of the worth of

arguments which require some real knowledge, they are little better,

not of course in a very serious matter, than pretenders and formalists.

Not only Authority, but Inference also may impose on us assents which

in themselves are little better than assertions, and which, so far as

they are assents, can only be notional assents, as being assents, not

to the propositions inferred, but to the truth of those propositions.

For instance, it can be proved by irrefragable calculations, that the

stars are not less than billions of miles distant from the earth; and

the process of calculation, upon which such statements are made, is

not so difficult as to require authority to secure our acceptance of

both it and of them; yet who can say that he has any real, nay, any

notional apprehension of a billion or a trillion? We can, indeed, have

some notion of it, if we analyze it into its factors, if we compare

it with other numbers, or if we illustrate it by analogies or by its

implications; but I am speaking of the vast number in itself. We cannot

assent to a proposition of which it is the predicate; we can but assent

to the truth of it.

This leads me to the question, whether belief in a mystery can be more

than an assertion. I consider it can be an assent, and my reasons

for saying so are as follows:—A mystery is a proposition conveying

incompatible notions, or is a statement of the inconceivable. Now we

can assent to propositions (and a mystery is a proposition), provided

we can apprehend them; therefore we can assent to a mystery, for,

unless we in some sense apprehended it, we should not recognize it

to be a mystery, that is, a statement uniting incompatible notions.

The same act, then, which enables us to discern that the words of

the proposition express a mystery, capacitates us for assenting to

it. Words which make nonsense, do not make a mystery. No one would

call Warton’s line—“Revolving swans proclaim the welkin near”—an

inconceivable assertion. It is equally plain, that the assent which

we give to mysteries, as such, is notional assent; for, by the

supposition, it is assent to propositions which we cannot conceive,

whereas, if we had had experience of them, we should be able to

conceive them, and without experience assent is not real.

But the question follows, Can processes of inference end in a mystery?

that is, not only in what is incomprehensible, that the stars are

billions of miles from each other, but in what is inconceivable, in the

co-existence of (seeming) incompatibilities? For how, it may be asked,

can reason carry out notions into their contradictories? since all the

developments of a truth must from the nature of the case be consistent

both with it and with each other. I answer, certainly processes of

inference, however accurate, can end in mystery; and I solve the

objection to such a doctrine thus:—our notion of a thing may be only

partially faithful to the original; it may be in excess of the thing,

or it may represent it incompletely, and, in consequence, it may serve

for it, it may stand for it, only to a certain point, in certain cases,

but no further. After that point is reached, the notion and the thing

part company; and then the notion, if still used as the representative

of the thing, will work out conclusions, not inconsistent with itself,

but with the thing to which it no longer corresponds.

This is seen most familiarly in the use of metaphors. Thus, in an

Oxford satire, which deservedly made a sensation in its day, it is said

that Vice “from its hardness takes a polish too.”(1) Whence we might

argue, that, whereas Caliban was vicious, he was therefore polished;

but politeness and Caliban are incompatible notions. Or again, when

some one said, perhaps to Dr. Johnson, that a certain writer (say

Hume) was a clear thinker, he made answer, “All shallows are clear.”

But supposing Hume to be in fact both a clear and a deep thinker,

yet supposing clearness and depth are incompatible in their literal

sense, which the objection seems to imply, and still in their full

literal sense were to be ascribed to Hume, then our reasoning about his

intellect has ended in the mystery, “Deep Hume is shallow;” whereas

the contradiction lies, not in the reasoning, but in the fancying that

inadequate notions can be taken as the exact representations of things.

Hence in science we sometimes use a definition or a _formula_, not as

exact, but as being sufficient for our purpose, for working out certain

conclusions, for a practical approximation, the error being small, till

a certain point is reached. This is what in theological investigations

I should call an economy.

A like contrast between notions and the things which they represent is

the principle of suspense and curiosity in those enigmatical sayings

which were frequent in the early stage of human society. In them the

problem proposed to the acuteness of the hearers, is to find some real

thing which may unite in itself certain conflicting notions which in

the question are attributed to it: “Out of the eater came forth meat,

and out of the strong came forth sweetness;” or, “What creature is

that, which in the morning goes on four legs, at noon on two, and on

three in the evening?” The answer, which names the thing, interprets

and thereby limits the notions under which it has been represented.

Let us take an example in algebra. Its calculus is commonly used

to investigate, not only the relations of quantity generally, but

geometrical facts in particular. Now it is at once too wide and too

narrow for such a purpose, fitting on to the doctrine of lines and

angles with a bad fit, as the coat of a short and stout man might serve

the needs of one who was tall and slim. Certainly it works well for

geometrical purposes up to a certain point, as when it enables us to

dispense with the cumbrous method of proof in questions of ratio and

proportion, which is adopted in the fifth book of Euclid; but what are

we to make of the fourth power of _a_, when it is to be translated into

geometrical language? If from this algebraical expression we determined

that space admitted of four dimensions, we should be enunciating a

mystery, because we should be applying to space a notion which belongs

to quantity. In this case algebra is in excess of geometrical truth.

Now let us take an instance in which it falls short of geometry,—What

is the meaning of the square root of _minus a_? Here the mystery is on

the side of algebra; and, in accordance with the principle which I am

illustrating, it has sometimes been considered as an abortive effort to

express, what is really beyond the capacity of algebraical notation,

the direction and position of lines in the third dimension of space,

as well as their length upon a plane. When the calculus is urged on by

the inevitable course of the working to do what it cannot do, it stops

short as if in resistance, and protests by an absurdity.

Our notions of things are never simply commensurate with the things

themselves; they are aspects of them, more or less exact, and

sometimes a mistake _ab initio_. Take an instance from arithmetic:—We

are accustomed to subject all that exists to numeration; but, to

be correct, we are bound first to reduce to some level of possible

comparison the things which we wish to number. We must be able to say,

not only that they are ten, twenty, or a hundred, but so many definite

somethings. For instance, we could not without extravagance throw

together Napoleon’s brain, ambition, hand, soul, smile, height, and

age at Marengo, and say that there were seven of them, though there

are seven words; nor will it even be enough to content ourselves with

what may be called a negative level, viz. that these seven were an

un-English or are a departed seven. Unless numeration is to issue in

nonsense, it must be conducted on conditions. This being the case,

there are, for what we know, collections of beings, to whom the notion

of number cannot be attached, except _catachrestically_, because, taken

individually, no positive point of real agreement can be found between

them, by which to call them. If indeed we can denote them by a plural

noun, then we can measure that plurality; but if they agree in nothing,

they cannot agree in bearing a common name, and to say that they amount

to a thousand these or those, is not to number them, but to count up a

certain number of names or words which we have written down.

Thus, the Angels have been considered by divines to have each of them

a species to himself; and we may fancy each of them so absolutely _sui

similis_ as to be like nothing else, so that it would be as untrue

to speak of a thousand Angels as of a thousand Hannibals or Ciceros.

It will be said, indeed, that all beings but One at least will come

under the notion of creatures, and are dependent upon that One; but

that is true of the brain, smile, and height of Napoleon, which no one

would call three creatures. But, if all this be so, much more does it

apply to our speculations concerning the Supreme Being, whom it may

be unmeaning, not only to number with other beings, but to subject to

number in regard to His own intrinsic characteristics. That is, to

apply arithmetical notions to Him may be as unphilosophical as it is

profane. Though He is at once Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the word

“Trinity” belongs to those notions of Him which are forced on us by the

necessity of our finite conceptions, the real and immutable distinction

which exists between Person and Person implying in itself no

infringement of His real and numerical Unity. And if it be asked how,

if we cannot properly speak of Him as Three, we can speak of Him as

One, I reply that He is not One in the way in which created things are

severally units; for one, as applied to ourselves, is used in contrast

to two or three and a whole series of numbers; but of the Supreme Being

it is safer to use the word “monad” than unit, for He has not even such

relation to His creatures as to allow, philosophically speaking, of our

contrasting Him with them.

Coming back to the main subject, which I have illustrated at the

risk of digression, I observe, that an alleged fact is not therefore

impossible because it is inconceivable; for the incompatible notions,

in which consists its inconceivableness, need not each of them really

belong to it in that fulness which involves their being incompatible

with each other. It is true indeed that I deny the possibility of

two straight lines enclosing a space, on the ground of its being

inconceivable; but I do so because a straight line is a notion and

nothing more, and not a thing, to which I may have attached a notion

more or less unfaithful. I have defined a straight line in my own way

at my own pleasure; the question is not one of facts at all, but of

the consistency with each other of definitions and of their logical

consequences.

“Space is not infinite, for nothing but the Creator is such:”—starting

from this thesis as a theological information, to be assumed as a

fact, though not one of experience, we arrive at once at an insoluble

mystery; for, if space be not infinite, it is finite, and finite space

is a contradiction in notions, space, as such, implying the absence

of boundaries. Here again it is our notion that carries us beyond the

fact, and in opposition to it, showing that from the first what we

apprehend of space does not in all respects correspond to the thing, of

which indeed we have no image.

This, then, is another instance in which the juxtaposition of notions

by the logical faculty lands us in what are commonly called mysteries.

Notions are but aspects of things; the free deductions from one of

these necessarily contradicts the free deductions from another. After

proceeding in our investigations a certain way, suddenly a blank or

a maze presents itself before the mental vision, as when the eye is

confused by the varying slides of a telescope. Thus, we believe in the

infinitude of the Divine Attributes, but we can have no experience of

infinitude as a fact; the word stands for a definition or a notion.

Hence, when we try how to reconcile in the moral world the fulness

of mercy with exactitude in sanctity and justice, or to explain that

the physical tokens of creative skill need not suggest any want of

creative power, we feel we are not masters of our subject. We apprehend

sufficiently to be able to assent to these theological truths as

mysteries; did we not apprehend them at all, we should be merely

asserting; though even then we might convert that assertion into an

assent, if we wished to do so, as I have already shown, by making it

the subject of a proposition, and predicating of it that it is true.

2. _Credence._

What I mean by giving credence to propositions is pretty much the same

as having “no doubt” about them. It is the sort of assent which we

give to those opinions and professed facts which are ever presenting

themselves to us without any effort of ours, and which we commonly

take for granted, thereby obtaining a broad foundation of thought

for ourselves, and a medium of intercourse between ourselves and

others. This form of notional assent comprises a great variety of

subject-matters; and is, as I have implied, of an otiose and passive

character, accepting whatever comes to hand, from whatever quarter,

warranted or not, so that it convey nothing on the face of it to its

own disadvantage. From the time that we begin to observe, think, and

reason, to the final failure of our powers, we are ever acquiring

fresh and fresh informations by means of our senses, and still more

from others and from books. The friends or strangers whom we fall in

with in the course of the day, the conversations or discussions to

which we are parties, the newspapers, the light reading of the season,

our recreations, our rambles in the country, our foreign tours, all

pour their contributions of intellectual matter into the storehouses

of our memory; and, though much may be lost, much is retained. These

informations, thus received with a spontaneous assent, constitute the

furniture of the mind, and make the difference between its civilized

condition and a state of nature. They are its education, as far as

general knowledge can so be called; and, though education is discipline

as well as learning, still, unless the mind implicitly welcomes the

truths, real or ostensible, which these informations supply, it will

gain neither formation nor a stimulus for its activity and progress.

Besides, to believe frankly what it is told, is in the young an

exercise of teachableness and humility.

Credence is the means by which, in high and low, in the man of the

world and in the recluse, our bare and barren nature is overrun and

diversified from without with a rich and living clothing. It is by

such ungrudging, prompt assents to what is offered to us so lavishly,

that we become possessed of the principles, doctrines, sentiments,

facts, which constitute useful, and especially liberal knowledge. These

various teachings, shallow though they be, are of a breadth which

secures us against those _lacunæ_ of knowledge which are apt to befall

the professed student, and keep us up to the mark in literature, in

the arts, in history, and in public matters. They give us in great

measure our morality, our politics, our social code, our art of

life. They supply the elements of public opinion, the watchwords of

patriotism, the standards of thought and action; they are our mutual

understandings, our channels of sympathy, our means of co-operation,

and the bond of our civil union. They become our moral language; we

learn them as we learn our mother tongue; they distinguish us from

foreigners; they are, in each of us, not indeed personal, but national

characteristics.

This account of them implies that they are received with a notional,

not a real assent; they are too manifold to be received in any

other way. Even the most practised and earnest minds must needs be

superficial in the greater part of their attainments. They know just

enough on all subjects, in literature, history, politics, philosophy,

and art, to be able to converse sensibly on them, and to understand

those who are really deep in one or other of them. This is what is

called, with a special appositeness, a gentleman’s knowledge, as

contrasted with that of a professional man, and is neither worthless

nor despicable, if used for its proper ends; but it is never more than

the furniture of the mind, as I have called it; it never is thoroughly

assimilated with it. Yet of course there is nothing to hinder those who

have even the largest stock of such notions from devoting themselves

to one or other of the subjects to which those notions belong, and

mastering it with a real apprehension; and then their general knowledge

of all subjects may be made variously useful in the direction of that

particular study or pursuit which they have selected.

I have been speaking of secular knowledge; but religion may be made a

subject of notional assent also, and is especially so made in our own

country. Theology, as such, always is notional, as being scientific:

religion, as being personal, should be real; but, except within a

small range of subjects, it commonly is not real in England. As to

Catholic populations, such as those of medieval Europe, or the Spain

of this day, or quasi-Catholic as those of Russia, among them assent

to religious objects is real, not notional. To them the Supreme Being,

our Lord, the Blessed Virgin, Angels and Saints, heaven and hell, are

as present as if they were objects of sight; but such a faith does

not suit the genius of modern England. There is in the literary world

just now an affectation of calling religion a “sentiment;” and it must

be confessed that usually it is nothing more with our own people,

educated or rude. Objects are barely necessary to it. I do not say so

of old Calvinism or Evangelical Religion; I do not call the religion of

Leighton, Beveridge, Wesley, Thomas Scott, or Cecil a mere sentiment;

nor do I so term the high Anglicanism of the present generation.

But these are only denominations, parties, schools, compared with

the national religion of England in its length and breadth. “Bible

Religion” is both the recognized title and the best description of

English religion.

It consists, not in rites or creeds, but mainly in having the Bible

read in Church, in the family, and in private. Now I am far indeed from

undervaluing that mere knowledge of Scripture which is imparted to the

population thus promiscuously. At least in England, it has to a certain

point made up for great and grievous losses in its Christianity. The

reiteration, again and again, in fixed course in the public service,

of the words of inspired teachers under both Covenants, and that in

grave majestic English, has in matter of fact been to our people a vast

benefit. It has attuned their minds to religious thoughts; it has given

them a high moral standard; it has served them in associating religion

with compositions which, even humanly considered, are among the most

sublime and beautiful ever written; especially, it has impressed

upon them the series of Divine Providences in behalf of man from his

creation to his end, and, above all, the words, deeds, and sacred

sufferings of Him in whom all the Providences of God centre.

So far the indiscriminate reading of Scripture has been of service;

still, much more is necessary than the benefits which I have

enumerated, to answer to the idea of a Religion; whereas our national

form professes to be little more than thus reading the Bible and

living a correct life. It is not a religion of persons and things, of

acts of faith and of direct devotion; but of sacred scenes and pious

sentiments. It has been comparatively careless of creed and catechism;

and has in consequence shown little sense of the need of consistency

in the matter of its teaching. Its doctrines are not so much facts, as

stereotyped aspects of facts; and it is afraid, so to say, of walking

round them. It induces its followers to be content with this meagre

view of revealed truth; or, rather, it is suspicious and protests,

or is frightened, as if it saw a figure in a picture move out of its

frame, when our Lord, the Blessed Virgin, or the Holy Apostles, are

spoken of as real beings, and really such as Scripture implies them to

be. I am not denying that the assent which it inculcates and elicits is

genuine as regards its contracted range of doctrine, but it is at best

notional. What Scripture especially illustrates from its first page to

its last, is God’s Providence; and that is nearly the only doctrine

held with a real assent by the mass of religious Englishmen. Hence the

Bible is so great a solace and refuge to them in trouble. I repeat, I

am not speaking of particular schools and parties in England, whether

of the High Church or the Low, but of the mass of piously-minded and

well-living people in all ranks of the community.

3. _Opinion._

That class of assents which I have called Credence, being a spontaneous

acceptance of the various informations, which are by whatever means

conveyed to our minds, sometimes goes by the name of Opinion. When

we speak of a man’s opinions, what do we mean, but the collection

of notions which he happens to have, and does not easily part with,

though he has neither sufficient proof nor firm grasp of them? This

is true; however, Opinion is a word of various significations, and

I prefer to use it in my own. Besides standing for Credence, it is

sometimes taken to mean Conviction, as when we speak of the “variety of

religious opinions,” or of being “persecuted for religious opinions,”

or of our having “no opinion on a particular point,” or of another

having “no religious opinions.” And sometimes it is used in contrast

with Conviction, as synonymous with a light and casual, though genuine

assent; thus, if a man was every day changing his mind, that is, his

assents, we might say, that he was very changeable in his opinions.

I shall here use the word to denote an assent, but an assent to a

proposition, not as true, but as probably true, that is, to the

probability of that which the proposition enunciates; and, as that

probability may vary in strength without limit, so may the cogency and

moment of the opinion. This account of Opinion may seem to confuse

it with Inference; for the strength of an inference varies with its

premisses, and is a probability; but the two acts of mind are really

distinct. Opinion, as being an assent, is independent of premisses. We

have opinions which we never think of defending by argument, though,

of course, we think they can be so defended. We are even obstinate in

them, or what is called “opinionated,” and may say that we have a right

to think just as we please, reason or no reason; whereas Inference is

in its nature and by its profession conditional and uncertain. To say

that “we shall have a fine hay-harvest if the present weather lasts,”

does not come of the same state of mind as, “I am of opinion that we

shall have a fine hay-harvest this year.”

Opinion, thus explained, has more connexion with Credence than with

Inference. It differs from Credence in these two points, viz. that,

while Opinion explicitly assents to the probability of a given

proposition, Credence is an implicit assent to its truth. It differs

from Credence in a third respect, viz. in being a reflex act;—when we

take a thing for granted, we have credence in it; when we begin to

reflect upon our credence, and to measure, estimate, and modify it,

then we are forming an opinion.

It is in this sense that Catholics speak of theological opinion, in

contrast with faith in dogma. It is much more than an inferential

act, but it is distinct from an act of certitude. And this is really

the sense which Protestants give to the word, when they interpret it

by Conviction; for their highest opinion in religion is, generally

speaking, an assent to a probability—as even Butler has been understood

or misunderstood to teach,—and therefore consistent with toleration of

its contradictory.

Opinion, being such as I have described, is a notional assent, for the

predicate of the proposition, on which it is exercised, is the abstract

word “probable.”

4. _Presumption._

By Presumption I mean an assent to first principles; and by first

principles I mean the propositions with which we start in reasoning on

any given subject-matter. They are in consequence very numerous, and

vary in great measure with the persons who reason, according to their

judgment and power of assent, being received by some minds, not by

others, and only a few of them received universally. They are all of

them notions, not images, because they express what is abstract, not

what is individual and from direct experience.

1. Sometimes our trust in our powers of reasoning and memory, that

is, our implicit assent to their telling truly, is treated as a first

principle; but we cannot properly be said to have any trust in them as

faculties. At most we trust in particular acts of memory and reasoning.

We are sure there was a yesterday, and that we did this or that in it;

we are sure that three times six is eighteen, and that the diagonal

of a square is longer than the side. So far as this we may be said to

trust the mental act, by which the object of our assent is verified;

but, in doing so, we imply no recognition of a general power or

faculty, or of any capability or affection of our minds, over and above

the particular act. We know indeed that we have a faculty by which we

remember, as we know we have a faculty by which we breathe; but we gain

this knowledge by abstraction or inference from its particular acts,

not by direct experience. Nor do we trust in the faculty of memory or

reasoning as such, even after that we have inferred its existence; for

its acts are often inaccurate, nor do we invariably assent to them.

However, if I must speak my mind, I have another ground for reluctance

to speak of our trusting memory or reasoning, except indeed by a

figure of speech. It seems to me unphilosophical to speak of trusting

ourselves. We are what we are, and we use, not trust our faculties. To

debate about trusting in a case like this, is parallel to the confusion

implied in wishing I had had a choice if I would be created or no, or

speculating what I should be like, if I were born of other parents.

“Proximus sum egomet mihi.” Our consciousness of self is prior to all

questions of trust or assent. We act according to our nature, by means

of ourselves, when we remember or reason. We are as little able to

accept or reject our mental constitution, as our being. We have not the

option; we can but misuse or mar its functions. We do not confront or

bargain with ourselves; and therefore I cannot call the trustworthiness

of the faculties of memory and reasoning one of our first principles.

2. Next, as to the proposition, that things exist external to

ourselves, this I do consider a first principle, and one of universal

reception. It is founded on an instinct; I so call it, because the

brute creation possesses it. This instinct is directed towards

individual phenomena, one by one, and has nothing of the character of

a generalization; and, since it exists in brutes, the gift of reason

is not a condition of its existence, and it may justly be considered

an instinct in man. What the human mind does is what brutes cannot

do, viz. to draw from our ever-recurring experiences of its testimony

in particulars a general proposition, and, because this instinct or

intuition acts whenever the phenomena of sense present themselves, to

lay down in broad terms, by an inductive process, the great aphorism,

that there is an external world, and that all the phenomena of sense

proceed from it. This general proposition, to which we go on to assent,

goes (_extensivè_, though not _intensivè_) far beyond our experience,

illimitable as that experience may be, and represents a notion.

3. I have spoken, and I think rightly spoken, of instinct as a force

which spontaneously impels us, not only to bodily movements, but to

mental acts. It is instinct which leads the quasi-intelligent principle

(whatever it is) in brutes to perceive in the phenomena of sense a

something distinct from and beyond those phenomena. It is instinct

which impels the child to recognize in the smiles or the frowns of

a countenance which meets his eyes, not only a being external to

himself, but one whose looks elicit in him confidence or fear. And,

as he instinctively interprets these physical phenomena, as tokens

of things beyond themselves, so from the sensations attendant upon

certain classes of his thoughts and actions he gains a perception of

an external being, who reads his mind, to whom he is responsible,

who praises and blames, who promises and threatens. As I am only

illustrating a general view by examples, I shall take this analogy for

granted here. As then we have our initial knowledge of the universe

through sense, so do we in the first instance begin to learn about its

Lord and God from conscience; and, as from particular acts of that

instinct, which makes experiences, mere images (as they ultimately are)

upon the retina, the means of our perceiving something real beyond

them, we go on to draw the general conclusion that there is a vast

external world, so from the recurring instances in which conscience

acts, forcing upon us importunately the mandate of a Superior, we have

fresh and fresh evidence of the existence of a Sovereign Ruler, from

whom those particular dictates which we experience proceed; so that,

with limitations which cannot here be made without digressing from

my main subject, we may, by means of that induction from particular

experiences of conscience, have as good a warrant for concluding the

Ubiquitous Presence of One Supreme Master, as we have, from parallel

experience of sense, for assenting to the fact of a multiform and vast

world, material and mental.

However, this assent is notional, because we generalize a consistent,

methodical form of Divine Unity and Personality with Its attributes,

from particular experiences of the religious instinct, which are

themselves, only _intensivè_, not _extensivè_, and in the imagination,

not intellectually, notices of Its Presence; though at the same

time that assent may become real of course, as may the assent to

the external world, viz. when we apply our general knowledge to a

particular instance of that knowledge, as, according to a former

remark, the general “varium et mutabile” was realized in Dido. And in

thus treating the origin of these great notions, I am not forgetting

the aid which from our earliest years we receive from teachers, nor

am I denying the influence of certain original forms of thinking or

formative ideas, connatural with our minds, without which we could not

reason at all. I am only contemplating the mind as it moves in fact,

by whatever hidden mechanism; as a locomotive engine could not move

without steam, but still, under whatever number of forces, it certainly

does start from Birmingham and does arrive in London.

4. And so again, as regards the first principles expressed in such

propositions as “There is a right and a wrong,” “a true and a false,”

“a just and an unjust,” “a beautiful and a deformed;” they are

abstractions to which we give a notional assent in consequence of our

particular experiences of qualities in the concrete, to which we give a

real assent. As we form our notion of whiteness from the actual sight

of snow, milk, a lily, or a cloud, so, after experiencing the sentiment

of approbation which arises in us on the sight of certain acts one by

one, we go on to assign to that sentiment a cause, and to those acts

a quality, and we give to this notional cause or quality the name of

virtue, which is an abstraction, not a thing. And in like manner, when

we have been affected by a certain specific admiring pleasure at the

sight of this or that concrete object, we proceed by an arbitrary act

of the mind to give a name to the hypothetical cause or quality in

the abstract, which excites it. We speak of it as beautifulness, and

henceforth, when we call a thing beautiful, we mean by the word nothing

else than a certain quality of things which creates in us this special

sensation.

These so-called first principles, I say, are really conclusions or

abstractions from particular experiences; and an assent to their

existence is not an assent to things or their images, but to notions,

real assent being confined to the propositions directly embodying those

experiences. Such notions indeed are an evidence of the reality of the

special sentiments in particular instances, without which they would

not have been formed; but in themselves they are abstractions from

facts, not elementary truths prior to reasoning.

I am not of course dreaming of denying the objective existence of the

Moral Law, nor our instinctive recognition of the immutable difference

in the moral quality of acts, as elicited in us by one instance of

them. Even one act of cruelty, ingratitude, generosity, or justice

reveals to us at once _intensivè_ the immutable distinction between

those qualities and their contraries; that is, in that particular

instance and _pro hac vice_. From such experience—an experience which

is ever recurring—we proceed to abstract and generalize; and thus the

abstract proposition “There is a right and a wrong,” as representing

an act of inference, is received by the mind with a notional, not a

real assent. However, in proportion as we obey the particular dictates

which are its tokens, so are we led on more and more to view it in the

association of those particulars, which are real, and virtually to

change our notion of it into the image of that objective fact, which in

each particular case it undeniably is.

5. Another of these presumptions is the belief in causation. It is to

me a perplexity that grave authors seem to enunciate as an intuitive

truth, that every thing must have a cause. If this were so, the voice

of nature would tell false; for why in that case stop short at One, who

is Himself without cause? The assent which we give to the proposition,

as a first principle, that nothing happens without a cause, is

derived, in the first instance, from what we know of ourselves; and

we argue analogically from what is within us to what is external to

us. One of the first experiences of an infant is that of his willing

and doing; and, as time goes on, one of the first temptations of the

boy is to bring home to himself the fact of his sovereign arbitrary

power, though it be at the price of waywardness, mischievousness, and

disobedience. And when his parents, as antagonists of this wilfulness,

begin to restrain him, and to bring his mind and conduct into shape,

then he has a second series of experiences of cause and effect, and

that upon a principle or rule. Thus the notion of causation is one of

the first lessons which he learns from experience, that experience

limiting it to agents possessed of intelligence and will. It is the

notion of power combined with a purpose and an end. Physical phenomena,

as such, are without sense; and experience teaches us nothing about

physical phenomena as causes. Accordingly, wherever the world is

young, the movements and changes of physical nature have been and are

spontaneously ascribed by its people to the presence and will of hidden

agents, who haunt every part of it, the woods, the mountains and the

streams, the air and the stars, for good or for evil;—just as children

again, by beating the ground after falling, imply that what has bruised

them has intelligence;—nor is there anything illogical in such a

belief. It rests on the argument from analogy.

As time goes on, and society is formed, and the idea of science

is mastered, a different aspect of the physical universe presents

itself to the mind. Since causation implies a sequence of acts in our

own case, and our doing is always posterior, never contemporaneous

or prior, to our willing, therefore, when we witness invariable

antecedents and consequents, we call the former the cause of the

latter, though intelligence is absent, from the analogy of external

appearances. At length we go on to confuse causation with order;

and, because we happen to have made a successful analysis of some

complicated assemblage of phenomena, which experience has brought

before us in the visible scene of things, and have reduced them to a

tolerable dependence on each other, we call the ultimate points of

this analysis, and the hypothetical facts in which the whole mass of

phenomena is gathered up, by the name of causes, whereas they are

really only the formula under which those phenomena are conveniently

represented. Thus the constitutional formula, “The king can do no

wrong,” is not a fact, or a cause of the Constitution, but a happy mode

of bringing out its genius, of determining the correlations of its

elements, and of grouping or regulating political rules and proceedings

in a particular direction and in a particular form. And in like manner,

that all the particles of matter throughout the universe are attracted

to each other with a force varying inversely with the square of their

respective distances, is a profound idea, harmonizing the physical

works of the Creator; but even could it be proved to be a universal

fact, and also to be the actual cause of the movements of all bodies

in the universe, still it would not be an experience, any more than is

the mythological doctrine of the presence of innumerable spirits in

physical phenomena.

Of these two senses of the word “cause,” viz. that which brings a thing

to be, and that on which a thing under given circumstances follows,

the former is that of which our experience is the earlier and more

intimate, being suggested to us by our consciousness of willing and

doing. The latter of the two requires a discrimination and exactness of

thought for its apprehension, which implies special mental training;

else, how do we learn to call food the cause of refreshment, but day

never the cause of night, though night follows day more surely than

refreshment follows food? Starting, then, from experience, I consider

a cause to be an effective will; and, by the doctrine of causation, I

mean the notion, or first principle, that all things come of effective

will; and the reception or presumption of this notion is a notional

assent.

6. As to causation in the second sense (viz. an ordinary succession of

antecedents and consequents, or what is called the Order of Nature),

when so explained, it falls under the doctrine of general laws; and of

this I proceed to make mention, as another first principle or notion,

derived by us from experience, and accepted with what I have called

a presumption. By natural law I mean the fact that things happen

uniformly according to certain circumstances, and not without them and

at random: that is, that they happen in an order; and, as all things

in the universe are unit and individual, order implies a certain

repetition, whether of things or like things, or of their affections

and relations. Thus we have experience, for instance, of the regularity

of our physical functions, such as the beating of the pulse and the

heaving of the breath; of the recurring sensations of hunger and

thirst; of the alternation of waking and sleeping, and the succession

of youth and age. In like manner we have experience of the great

recurring phenomena of the heavens and earth, of day and night, summer

and winter. Also, we have experience of a like uniform succession in

the instance of fire burning, water choking, stones falling down and

not up, iron moving towards a magnet, friction followed by sparks and

crackling, an oar looking bent in the stream, and compressed steam

bursting its vessel. Also, by scientific analysis, we are led to the

conclusion that phenomena, which seem very different from each other,

admit of being grouped together as modes of the operation of one

hypothetical law, acting under varied circumstances. For instance, the

motion of a stone falling freely, of a projectile, and of a planet, may

be generalized as one and the same property, in each of them, of the

particles of matter; and this generalization loses its character of

hypothesis, and becomes a probability, in proportion as we have reason

for thinking on other grounds that the particles of all matter really

move and act towards each other in one certain way in relation to space

and time, and not in half a dozen ways; that is, that nature acts

by uniform laws. And thus we advance to the general notion or first

principle of the sovereignty of law throughout the universe.

There are philosophers who go farther, and teach, not only a general,

but an invariable, and inviolable, and necessary uniformity in the

action of the laws of nature, holding that every thing is the result

of some law or laws, and that exceptions are impossible; but I do

not see on what ground of experience or reason they take up this

position. Our experience rather is adverse to such a doctrine, for

what concrete fact or phenomenon exactly repeats itself? Some abstract

conception of it, more perfect than the recurrent phenomenon itself,

is necessary, before we are able to say that it has happened even

twice, and the variations which accompany the repetition are of the

nature of exceptions. The earth, for instance, never moves exactly in

the same orbit year by year, but is in perpetual vacillation. It will,

indeed, be replied that this arises from the interaction of one law

with another, of which the actual orbit is only the accidental issue,

that the earth is under the influence of a variety of attractions from

cosmical bodies, and that, if it is subject to continual aberrations

in its course, these are accounted for accurately or sufficiently by

the presence of those extraordinary and variable attractions:—science,

then, by its analytical processes sets right the _primâ facie_

confusion. Of course; still let us not by our words imply that we are

appealing to experience, when really we are only accounting, and that

by hypothesis, for the absence of experience. The confusion is a fact,

the reasoning processes are not facts. The extraordinary attractions

assigned to account for our experience of that confusion are not

themselves experienced phenomenal facts, but more or less probable

hypotheses, argued out by means of an assumed analogy between the

cosmical bodies to which those attractions are referred and falling

bodies on the earth. I say “assumed,” because that analogy (in other

words, the unfailing uniformity of nature) is the very point which

has to be proved. It is true, that we can make experiment of the law

of attraction in the case of bodies on the earth; but, I repeat, to

assume from analogy that, as stones do fall to the earth, so Jupiter,

if let alone, would fall upon the earth and the earth upon Jupiter,

and with certain peculiarities of velocity on either side, is to have

recourse to an explanation which is not necessarily valid, unless

nature is necessarily uniform. Nor, indeed, has it yet been proved,

nor ought it to be assumed, even that the law of velocity of falling

bodies on the earth is invariable in its operation; for that again is

only an instance of the general proposition, which is the very thesis

in debate. It seems safer then to hold that the order of nature is not

necessary, but general in its manifestations.

But, it may be urged, if a thing happens once, it must happen always;

for what is to hinder it? Nay, on the contrary, why, because one

particle of matter has a certain property, should all particles have

the same? Why, because particles have instanced the property a thousand

times, should the thousand and first instance it also? It is _primâ

facie_ unaccountable that an accident should happen twice, not to

speak of its happening always. If we expect a thing to happen twice,

it is because we think it is not an accident, but has a cause. What

has brought about a thing once, may bring it about twice. _What_ is to

hinder its happening? rather, What is to make it happen? Here we are

thrown back from the question of Order to that of Causation. A law is

not a cause, but a fact; but when we come to the question of cause,

then, as I have said, we have no experience of any cause but Will. If,

then, I must answer the question, What is to alter the order of nature?

I reply, That which willed it;—That which willed it, can unwill it; and

the invariableness of law depends on the unchangeableness of that Will.

And here I am led to observe that, as a cause implies a will, so order

implies a purpose. Did we see flint celts, in their various receptacles

all over Europe, scored always with certain special and characteristic

marks, even though those marks had no assignable meaning or final

cause whatever, we should take that very repetition, which indeed is

the principle of order, to be a proof of intelligence. The agency then

which has kept up and keeps up the general laws of nature, energizing

at once in Sirius and on the earth, and on the earth in its primary

period as well as in the nineteenth century, must be Mind, and nothing

else, and Mind at least as wide and as enduring in its living action,

as the immeasurable ages and spaces of the universe on which that

agency has left its traces.

In these remarks I have digressed from my immediate subject, but

they have some bearing on points which will subsequently come into

discussion.

5. _Speculation._

Speculation is one of those words which, in the vernacular, have so

different a sense from what they bear in philosophy. It is commonly

taken to mean a conjecture, or a venture on chances; but its proper

meaning is mental sight, or the contemplation of mental operations and

their results as opposed to experience, experiment, or sense, analogous

to its meaning in Shakspeare’s line, “Thou hast no speculation in those

eyes.” In this sense I use it here.

And I use it in this sense to denote those notional assents which are

the most direct, explicit, and perfect of their kind, viz. those which

are the firm, conscious acceptance of propositions as true. This kind

of assent includes the assent to all reasoning and its conclusions, to

all general propositions, to all rules of conduct, to all proverbs,

aphorisms, sayings, and reflections on men and society. Of course

mathematical investigations and truths are the subjects of this

speculative assent. So are legal judgments, and constitutional maxims,

as far as they appeal to us for assent. So are the determinations

of science; so are the principles, disputations, and doctrines of

theology. That there is a God, that He has certain attributes, and in

what sense He can be said to have attributes, that He has done certain

works, that He has made certain revelations of Himself and of His will,

and what they are, and the multiplied bearings of the parts of the

teaching, thus developed and formed, upon each other, all this is the

subject of notional assent, and of that particular department of it

which I have called Speculation. As far as these particular subjects

can be viewed in the concrete and represent experiences, they can be

received by real assent also; but as expressed in general propositions

they belong to notional apprehension and assent.

§ 2. Real Assents.

I have in a measure anticipated the subject of Real Assent by what

I have been saying about Notional. In comparison of the directness

and force of the apprehension, which we have of an object, when our

assent is to be called real, Notional Assent and Inference seem to be

thrown back into one and the same class of intellectual acts, though

the former of the two is always an unconditional acceptance of a

proposition, and the latter is an acceptance on the condition of an

acceptance of its premisses. In its notional assents as well as in

its inferences, the mind contemplates its own creations instead of

things; in real, it is directed towards things, represented by the

impressions which they have left on the imagination. These images, when

assented-to, have an influence both on the individual and on society,

which mere notions cannot exert.

I have already given various illustrations of Real Assent; I will

follow them up here by some instances of the change of Notional Assent

into Real.

1. For instance: boys at school look like each other, and pursue the

same studies, some of them with greater success than others; but it

will sometimes happen, that those who acquitted themselves but poorly

in class, when they come into the action of life, and engage in some

particular work, which they have already been learning in its theory

and with little promise of proficiency, are suddenly found to have

what is called an eye for that work—an eye for trade matters, or for

engineering, or a special taste for literature—which no one expected

from them at school, while they were engaged on notions. Minds of

this stamp not only know the received rules of their profession, but

enter into them, and even anticipate them, or dispense with them, or

substitute other rules instead. And when new questions are opened,

and arguments are drawn up on one side and the other in long array,

they with a natural ease and promptness form their views and give

their decision, as if they had no need to reason, from their clear

apprehension of the lie and issue of the whole matter in dispute, as

if it were drawn out in a map before them. These are the reformers,

systematizers, inventors, in various departments of thought,

speculative and practical; in education, in administration, in social

and political matters, in science. Such men indeed are far from

infallible; however great their powers, they sometimes fall into great

errors, in their own special department, while second-rate men who go

by rule come to sound and safe conclusions. Images need not be true;

but I am illustrating what vividness of apprehension is, and what is

the strength of belief consequent upon it.

2. Again:—twenty years ago, the Duke of Wellington wrote his celebrated

letter on the subject of the national defences. His authority gave

it an immediate circulation among all classes of the community; none

questioned what he said, nor as if taking his words on faith merely,

but as intellectually recognizing their truth; yet few could be said

to see or feel that truth. His letter lay, so to say, upon the pure

intellect of the national mind, and nothing for a time came of it.

But eleven years afterwards, after his death, the anger of the French

colonels with us, after the attempt upon Louis Napoleon’s life,

transferred its facts to the charge of the imagination. Then forthwith

the national assent became in various ways an operative principle,

especially in its promotion of the volunteer movement. The Duke, having

a special eye for military matters, had realized the state of things

from the first; but it took a course of years to impress upon the

public mind an assent to his warning deeper and more energetic than the

reception it is accustomed to give to a clever article in a newspaper

or a review.

3. And so generally: great truths, practical or ethical, float on

the surface of society, admitted by all, valued by few, exemplifying

the poet’s adage, “Probitas laudatur et alget,” until changed

circumstances, accident, or the continual pressure of their advocates,

force them upon its attention. The iniquity, for instance, of the

slave-trade ought to have been acknowledged by all men from the first;

it was acknowledged by many, but it needed an organized agitation, with

tracts and speeches innumerable, so to affect the imagination of men as

to make their acknowledgment of that iniquitousness operative.

In like manner, when Mr. Wilberforce, after succeeding in the slave

question, urged the Duke of Wellington to use his great influence

in discountenancing duelling, he could only get from him in answer,

“A relic of barbarism, Mr. Wilberforce;” as if he accepted a notion

without realizing a fact: at length, the growing intelligence of

the community, and the shock inflicted upon it by the tragical

circumstances of a particular duel, were fatal to that barbarism.

The governing classes were roused from their dreamy acquiescence in

an abstract truth, and recognized the duty of giving it practical

expression.

4. Let us consider, too, how differently young and old are affected by

the words of some classic author, such as Homer or Horace. Passages,

which to a boy are but rhetorical commonplaces, neither better nor

worse than a hundred others which any clever writer might supply, which

he gets by heart and thinks very fine, and imitates, as he thinks,

successfully, in his own flowing versification, at length come home

to him, when long years have passed, and he has had experience of

life, and pierce him, as if he had never before known them, with their

sad earnestness and vivid exactness. Then he comes to understand how

it is that lines, the birth of some chance morning or evening at an

Ionian festival, or among the Sabine hills, have lasted generation

after generation, for thousands of years, with a power over the mind,

and a charm, which the current literature of his own day, with all

its obvious advantages, is utterly unable to rival. Perhaps this is

the reason of the medieval opinion about Virgil, as if a prophet or

magician; his single words and phrases, his pathetic half lines, giving

utterance, as the voice of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness,

yet hope of better things, which is the experience of her children in

every time.

5. And what the experience of the world effects for the illustration

of classical authors, that office the religious sense, carefully

cultivated, fulfils towards Holy Scripture. To the devout and

spiritual, the Divine Word speaks of things, not merely of notions.

And, again, to the disconsolate, the tempted, the perplexed, the

suffering, there comes, by means of their very trials, an enlargement

of thought, which enables them to see in it what they never saw before.

Henceforth there is to them a reality in its teachings, which they

recognize as an argument, and the best of arguments, for its divine

origin. Hence the practice of meditation on the Sacred Text, so highly

thought of by Catholics. Reading, as we do, the Gospels from our youth

up, we are in danger of becoming so familiar with them as to be dead

to their force, and to view them as a mere history. The purpose, then,

of meditation is to realize them; to make the facts which they relate

stand out before our minds as objects, such as may be appropriated by a

faith as living as the imagination which apprehends them.

It is obvious to refer to the unworthy use made of the more solemn

parts of the sacred volume by the mere popular preacher. His very mode

of reading, whether warnings or prayers, is as if he thought them to

be little more than fine writing, poetical in sense, musical in sound,

and worthy of inspiration. The most awful truths are to him but sublime

or beautiful conceptions, and are adduced and used by him, in season

and out of season, for his own purposes, for embellishing his style or

rounding his periods. But let his heart at length be ploughed by some

keen grief or deep anxiety, and Scripture is a new book to him. This

is the change which so often takes place in what is called religious

conversion, and it is a change so far simply for the better, by

whatever infirmity or error it is in the particular case accompanied.

And it is strikingly suggested to us, to take a saintly example, in the

confession of the patriarch Job, when he contrasts his apprehension

of the Almighty before and after his afflictions. He says he had

indeed a true apprehension of the Divine Attributes before as well as

after; but with the trial came a great change in the character of that

apprehension:—“With the hearing of the ear,” he says, “I have heard

Thee, but now mine eye seeth Thee; therefore I reprehend myself, and do

penance in dust and ashes.”

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

Let these instances suffice of Real Assent in its relation to Notional;

they lead me to make three remarks in further illustration of its

character.

1. The fact of the distinctness of the images, which are required for

real assent, is no warrant for the existence of the objects which those

images represent. A proposition, be it ever so keenly apprehended,

may be true or may be false. If we simply put aside all inferential

information, such as is derived from testimony, from general belief,

from the concurrence of the senses, from common sense, or otherwise,

we have no right to consider that we have apprehended a truth, merely

because of the strength of our mental impression of it. Hence the

proverb, “Fronti nulla fides.” An image, with the characters of perfect

veracity and faithfulness, may be ever so distinct and eloquent an

object presented before the mind (or, as it is sometimes called,

an “objectum internum,” or a “subject-object”); but, nevertheless,

there may be no external reality in the case, corresponding to it, in

spite of its impressiveness. One of the most remarkable instances of

this fallacious impressiveness is the illusion which possesses the

minds of able men, those especially who are exercised in physical

investigations, in favour of the inviolability of the laws of nature.

Philosophers of the school of Hume discard the very supposition of

miracles, and scornfully refuse to hear evidence in their behalf in

given instances, from their intimate experience of physical order and

of the ever-recurring connexion of antecedent and consequent. Their

imagination usurps the functions of reason; and they cannot bring

themselves even to entertain as a hypothesis (and this is all that they

are asked to do) a thought contrary to that vivid impression of which

they are the victims, that the uniformity of nature, which they witness

hour by hour, is equivalent to a necessary, inviolable law.

Yet it is plain, and I shall take it for granted here, that when

I assent to a proposition, I ought to have some more legitimate

reason for doing so, than the brilliancy of the image of which that

proposition is the expression. That I have no experience of a thing

happening except in one way, is a cause of the intensity of my assent,

if I assent, but not the reason of my assenting. In saying this, I

am not disposed to deny the presence in some men of an idiosyncratic

sagacity, which really and rightly sees reasons in impressions which

common men cannot see, and is secured from the peril of confusing truth

with make-belief; but this is genius, and beyond rule. I grant too, of

course, that accidentally impressiveness does in matter of fact, as in

the instance which I have been giving, constitute the motive principle

of belief; for the mind is ever exposed to the danger of being carried

away by the liveliness of its conceptions, to the sacrifice of good

sense and conscientious caution, and the greater and the more rare are

its gifts, the greater is the risk of swerving from the line of reason

and duty; but here I am not speaking of transgressions of rule any more

than of exceptions to it, but of the normal constitution of our minds,

and of the natural and rightful effect of acts of the imagination upon

us, and this is, not to create assent, but to intensify it.

2. Next, Assent, however strong, and accorded to images however

vivid, is not therefore necessarily practical. Strictly speaking, it

is not imagination that causes action; but hope and fear, likes and

dislikes, appetite, passion, affection, the stirrings of selfishness

and self-love. What imagination does for us is to find a means of

stimulating those motive powers; and it does so by providing a supply

of objects strong enough to stimulate them. The thought of honour,

glory, duty, self-aggrandisement, gain, or on the other hand of Divine

Goodness, future reward, eternal life, perseveringly dwelt upon, leads

us along a course of action corresponding to itself, but only in case

there be that in our minds which is congenial to it. However, when

there is that preparation of mind, the thought does lead to the act.

Hence it is that the fact of a proposition being accepted with a real

assent is accidentally an earnest of that proposition being carried out

in conduct, and the imagination may be said in some sense to be of a

practical nature, inasmuch as it leads to practice indirectly by the

action of its object upon the affections.

3. There is a third remark suggested by the view which I have been

taking of real assents, viz. that they are of a personal character,

each individual having his own, and being known by them. It is

otherwise with notions; notional apprehension is in itself an ordinary

act of our common nature. All of us have the power of abstraction, and

can be taught either to make or to enter into the same abstractions;

and thus to co-operate in the establishment of a common measure

between mind and mind. And, though for one and all of us to assent

to the notions which we thus apprehend in common, is a further step,

as requiring the adoption of a common stand-point of principle and

judgment, yet this too depends in good measure on certain logical

processes of thought, with which we are all familiar, and on facts

which we all take for granted. But we cannot make sure, for ourselves

or others, of real apprehension and assent, because we have to secure

first the images which are their objects, and these are often peculiar

and special. They depend on personal experience; and the experience of

one man is not the experience of another. Real assent, then, as the

experience which it presupposes, is proper to the individual, and, as

such, thwarts rather than promotes the intercourse of man with man. It

shuts itself up, as it were, in its own home, or at least it is its own

witness and its own standard; and, as in the instances above given, it

cannot be reckoned on, anticipated, accounted for, inasmuch as it is

the accident of this man or that.

I call the characteristics of an individual accidents, in spite of the

universal reign of law, because they are severally the co-incidents of

many laws, and there are no laws as yet discovered of such coincidence.

A man who is run over in the street and killed, in one sense suffers

according to rule or law; he was crossing, he was short-sighted or

preoccupied in mind, or he was looking another way; he was deaf, lame,

or flurried; and the cab came up at a great pace. If all this was

so, it was by a necessity that he was run over; it would have been a

miracle if he had escaped. So far is clear; but what is not clear is

how all these various conditions met together in the particular case,

how it was that a man, short-sighted, hard of hearing, deficient in

presence of mind, happened to get in the way of a cab hurrying along to

catch a train. This concrete fact does not come under any law of sudden

deaths, but, like the earth’s yearly path which I spoke of above, is

the accident of the individual.

It does not meet the case to refer to the law of averages, for such

laws deal with percentages, not with individuals, and it is about

individuals that I am speaking. That this particular man out of

the three millions congregated in the metropolis, was to have the

experience of this catastrophe, and to be the select victim to appease

that law of averages, no statistical tables could foretell, even

though they could determine that it was in the fates that in that week

or day some four persons in the length and breadth of London should

be run over. And in like manner that this or that person should have

the particular experiences necessary for real assent on any point,

that the Deist should become a Theist, the Erastian a Catholic, the

Protectionist a Free-trader, the Conservative a Legitimist, the high

Tory an out-and-out Democrat, are facts, each of which may be the

result of a multitude of coincidences in one and the same individual,

coincidences which we have no means of determining, and which,

therefore, we may call accidents. For—

“There’s a Divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough hew them how we will.”

Such accidents are the characteristics of persons, as _differentiæ_ and

properties are the characteristics of species or natures.

That a man dies when deprived of air, is not an accident of his person,

but a law of his nature; that he cannot live without quinine or opium,

or out of the climate of Madeira, is his own peculiarity. If all men

every where usually had the yellow fever once in their lives, we should

call it (speaking according to our knowledge) a law of the human

constitution; if the inhabitants of a particular country commonly had

it, we should call it a law of the climate; if a healthy man has a

fever in a healthy place, in a healthy season, we call it an accident,

though it be reducible to the coincidence of laws, because there is

no known law of their coincidence. To be rational, to have speech, to

pass through successive changes of mind and body from infancy to death,

belong to man’s nature; to have a particular history, to be married or

single, to have children or to be childless, to live a given number of

years, to have a certain constitution, moral temperament, intellectual

outfit, mental formation, these and the like, taken all together, are

the accidents which make up our notion of a man’s person, and are the

ground-work or condition of his particular experiences.

Moreover, various of the experiences which befall this man may be the

same as those which befall that, although those experiences result

each from the combination of its own accidents, and are ultimately

traceable each to its own special condition or history. That is, images

which are possessed in common, with their apprehensions and assents,

may nevertheless be personal characteristics. If two or three hundred

men are to be found, who cannot live out of Madeira, that inability

would still be an accident and a peculiarity of each of them. Even

if in each case it implied delicacy of lungs, still that delicacy is

a vague notion, comprehending under it a great variety of cases in

detail. If “five hundred brethren at once” saw our risen Lord, that

common experience would not be a law, but a personal accident which

was the prerogative of each. And so again in this day the belief of

so many thousands in His Divinity, is not therefore notional, because

it is common, but may be a real and personal belief, being produced

in different individual minds by various experiences and disposing

causes, variously combined; such as a warm or strong imagination,

great sensibility, compunction and horror at sin, frequenting the

Mass and other rites of the Church, meditating on the contents of

the Gospels, familiarity with hymns and religious poems, dwelling on

the Evidences, parental example and instruction, religious friends,

strange providences, powerful preaching. In each case the image in

the mind, with the experiences out of which it is formed, would be a

personal result; and, though the same in all, would in each case be so

idiosyncratic in its circumstances, that it would stand by itself, a

special formation, unconnected with any law; though at the same time it

would necessarily be a principle of sympathy and a bond of intercourse

between those whose minds had been thus variously wrought into a common

assent, far stronger than could follow upon any multitude of mere

notions which they unanimously held. And even when that assent is not

the result of concurrent causes, if such a case is possible, but has

one single origin, as the study of Scripture, careful teaching, or a

religious temper, still its presence argues a special history, and a

personal formation, which an abstraction does not. For an abstraction

can be made at will, and may be the work of a moment; but the moral

experiences which perpetuate themselves in images, must be sought after

in order to be found, and encouraged and cultivated in order to be

appropriated.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

I have now said all that occurs to me on the subject of Real Assents,

perhaps not without some risk of subtlety and minuteness. They are

sometimes called beliefs, convictions, certitudes; and, as given to

moral objects, they are perhaps as rare as they are powerful. Till we

have them, in spite of a full apprehension and assent in the field of

notions, we have no intellectual moorings, and are at the mercy of

impulses, fancies, and wandering lights, whether as regards personal

conduct, social and political action, or religion. These beliefs,

be they true or false in the particular case, form the mind out of

which they grow, and impart to it a seriousness and manliness which

inspires in other minds a confidence in its views, and is one secret

of persuasiveness and influence in the public stage of the world.

They create, as the case may be, heroes and saints, great leaders,

statesmen, preachers, and reformers, the pioneers of discovery in

science, visionaries, fanatics, knight-errants, demagogues, and

adventurers. They have given to the world men of one idea, of immense

energy, of adamantine will, of revolutionary power. They kindle

sympathies between man and man, and knit together the innumerable units

which constitute a race and a nation. They become the principle of

its political existence; they impart to it homogeneity of thought and

fellowship of purpose. They have given form to the medieval theocracy

and to the Mahometan superstition; they are now the life both of “Holy

Russia,” and of that freedom of speech and action which is the special

boast of Englishmen.

§ 3. Notional and Real Assents Contrasted.

It appears from what has been said, that, though Real Assent is not

intrinsically operative, it accidentally and indirectly affects

practice. It is in itself an intellectual act, of which the object is

presented to it by the imagination; and though the pure intellect does

not lead to action, nor the imagination either, yet the imagination has

the means, which pure intellect has not, of stimulating those powers of

the mind from which action proceeds. Real Assent then, or Belief, as it

may be called, viewed in itself, that is, simply as Assent, does not

lead to action; but the images in which it lives, representing as they

do the concrete, have the power of the concrete upon the affections and

passions, and by means of these indirectly become operative. Still this

practical influence is not invariable, nor to be relied on; for given

images may have no tendency to affect given minds, or to excite them to

action. Thus, a philosopher or a poet may vividly realize the brilliant

rewards of military genius or of eloquence, without wishing either to

be a commander or an orator. However, on the whole, broadly contrasting

Belief with Notional Assent and with Inference, we shall not, with this

explanation, be very wrong in pronouncing that acts of Notional Assent

and of Inference do not affect our conduct, and acts of Belief, that

is, of Real Assent, do (not necessarily, but do) affect it.

I have scarcely spoken of Inference since my Introductory Chapter,

though I intend, before I conclude, to consider it fully; but I have

said enough to admit of my introducing it here in contrast with Real

Assent or Belief, and that contrast is necessary in order to complete

what I have been saying about the latter. Let me then, for the sake

of the latter, be allowed here to say, that, while Assent, or Belief,

presupposes some apprehension of the things believed, Inference

requires no apprehension of the things inferred; that in consequence,

Inference is necessarily concerned with surfaces and aspects; that it

begins with itself, and ends with itself; that it does not reach as

far as facts; that it is employed upon formulas; that, as far as it

takes real objects of whatever kind into account, such as motives and

actions, character and conduct, art, science, taste, morals, religion,

it deals with them, not as they are, but simply in its own line, as

materials of argument or inquiry, that they are to it nothing more than

major and minor premisses and conclusions. Belief, on the other hand,

being concerned with things concrete, not abstract, which variously

excite the mind from their moral and imaginative properties, has for

its object, not only directly what is true, but inclusively what is

beautiful, useful, admirable, heroic; objects which kindle devotion,

rouse the passions, and attach the affections; and thus it leads the

way to actions of every kind, to the establishment of principles, and

the formation of character, and is thus again intimately connected with

what is individual and personal.

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I insisted on this marked distinction between Beliefs on the one hand,

and Notional Assents and Inferences on the other, many years ago in

words which it will be to my purpose to use now.(2) I quote them,

because, over and above their appositeness in this place, they present

the doctrine on which I have been insisting, from a second point of

view, and with a freshness and force which I cannot now command, and,

moreover, (though they are my own, nevertheless, from the length of

time which has elapsed since their publication,) almost with the

cogency of an independent testimony.

They occur in a protest which I had occasion to write in February,

1841, against a dangerous doctrine maintained, as I considered, by two

very eminent men of that day, now no more—Lord Brougham and Sir Robert

Peel. That doctrine was to the effect that the claims of religion could

be secured and sustained in the mass of men, and in particular in the

lower classes of society, by acquaintance with literature and physical

science, and through the instrumentality of Mechanics’ Institutes and

Reading Rooms, to the serious disparagement, as it seemed to me, of

direct Christian instruction. In the course of my remarks is found the

passage which I shall here quote, and which, with whatever differences

in terminology, and hardihood of assertion, befitting the circumstances

of its publication, nay, as far as words go, inaccuracy of theological

statement, suitably illustrates the subject here under discussion. It

runs thus:—

“People say to me, that it is but a dream to suppose that Christianity

should regain the organic power in human society which once it

possessed. I cannot help that; I never said it could. I am not a

politician; I am proposing no measures, but exposing a fallacy and

resisting a pretence. Let Benthamism reign, if men have no aspirations;

but do not tell them to be romantic and then solace them with ‘glory:’

do not attempt by philosophy what once was done by religion. The

ascendency of faith may be impracticable, but the reign of knowledge

is incomprehensible. The problem for statesmen of this age is how to

educate the masses, and literature and science cannot give the solution.

“Science gives us the grounds or premisses from which religious truths

are to be enforced; but it does not set about inferring them, much

less does it reach the inference—that is not its province. It brings

before us phenomena, and it leaves us, if we will, to call them works

of design, wisdom, or benevolence; and further still, if we will, to

proceed to confess an Intelligent Creator. We have to take its facts,

and to give them a meaning, and to draw our own conclusions from them.

First comes knowledge, then a view, then reasoning, and then belief.

This is why science has so little of a religious tendency; deductions

have no power of persuasion. The heart is commonly reached, not

through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct

impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by

description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us,

deeds inflame us. Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man

will be a martyr for a conclusion. A conclusion is but an opinion; it

is not a thing which _is_, but which we are ‘_quite sure about_;’ and

it has often been observed, that we never say we are sure and certain

without implying that we doubt. To say that a thing _must_ be, is

to admit that it _may not_ be. No one, I say, will die for his own

calculations: he dies for realities. This is why a literary religion

is so little to be depended upon; it looks well in fair weather; but

its doctrines are opinions, and, when called to suffer for them, it

slips them between its folios, or burns them at its hearth. And this

again is the secret of the distrust and raillery with which moralists

have been so commonly visited. They say and do not. Why? Because they

are contemplating the fitness of things, and they live by the square,

when they should be realizing their high maxims in the concrete. Now

Sir Robert Peel thinks better of natural history, chemistry, and

astronomy than of such ethics; but these too, what are they more than

divinity _in posse_? He protests against ‘_controversial_ divinity:’ is

_inferential_ much better?

“I have no confidence, then, in philosophers who cannot help being

religious, and are Christians by implication. They sit at home, and

reach forward to distances which astonish us; but they hit without

grasping, and are sometimes as confident about shadows as about

realities. They have worked out by a calculation the lie of a country

which they never saw, and mapped it by means of a gazetteer; and, like

blind men, though they can put a stranger on his way, they cannot walk

straight themselves, and do not feel it quite their business to walk at

all.

“Logic makes but a sorry rhetoric with the multitude; first shoot

round corners, and you may not despair of converting by a syllogism.

Tell men to gain notions of a Creator from His works, and, if they

were to set about it (which nobody does) they would be jaded and

wearied by the labyrinth they were tracing. Their minds would be gorged

and surfeited by the logical operation. Logicians are more set upon

concluding rightly, than on right conclusions. They cannot see the

end for the process. Few men have that power of mind which may hold

fast and firmly a variety of thoughts. We ridicule ’men of one idea;’

but a great many of us are born to be such, and we should be happier

if we knew it. To most men argument makes the point in hand only more

doubtful, and considerably less impressive. After all, man is _not_

a reasoning animal; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting

animal. He is influenced by what is direct and precise. It is very well

to freshen our impressions and convictions from physics, but to create

them we must go elsewhere. Sir Robert Peel ‘never can think it possible

that a mind can be so constituted, that, after being familiarized

with the wonderful discoveries which have been made in every part of

experimental science, it can retire from such contemplation without

more enlarged conceptions of God’s providence, and a higher reverence

for His Name!’ If he speaks of religious minds, he perpetrates a

truism; if of irreligious, he insinuates a paradox.

“Life is not long enough for a religion of inferences; we shall never

have done beginning, if we determine to begin with proof. We shall ever

be laying our foundations; we shall turn theology into evidences, and

divines into textuaries. We shall never get at our first principles.

Resolve to believe nothing, and you must prove your proof and analyze

your elements, sinking farther and farther, and finding ‘in the lowest

depth a lower deep,’ till you come to the broad bosom of scepticism.

I would rather be bound to defend the reasonableness of assuming that

Christianity is true, than to demonstrate a moral governance from the

physical world. Life is for action. If we insist on proofs for every

thing, we shall never come to action: to act you must assume, and that

assumption is faith.

“Let no one suppose, that in saying this I am maintaining that all

proofs are equally difficult, and all propositions equally debatable.

Some assumptions are greater than others, and some doctrines involve

postulates larger than others, and more numerous. I only say, that

impressions lead to action, and that reasonings lead from it. Knowledge

of premisses, and inferences upon them,—this is not to _live_. It is

very well as a matter of liberal curiosity and of philosophy to analyze

our modes of thought: but let this come second, and when there is

leisure for it, and then our examinations will in many ways even be

subservient to action. But if we commence with scientific knowledge

and argumentative proof, or lay any great stress upon it as the basis

of personal Christianity, or attempt to make man moral and religious

by libraries and museums, let us in consistency take chemists for our

cooks, and mineralogists for our masons.

“Now I wish to state all this as matter of fact, to be judged by the

candid testimony of any persons whatever. Why we are so constituted

that faith, not knowledge or argument, is our principle of action, is

a question with which I have nothing to do; but I think it is a fact,

and, if it be such, we must resign ourselves to it as best we may,

unless we take refuge in the intolerable paradox, that the mass of men

are created for nothing, and are meant to leave life as they entered it.

“So well has this practically been understood in all ages of the world,

that no religion yet has been a religion of physics or of philosophy.

It has ever been synonymous with revelation. It never has been a

deduction from what we know; it has ever been an assertion of what

we are to believe. It has never lived in a conclusion; it has ever

been a message, a history, or a vision. No legislator or priest ever

dreamed of educating our moral nature by science or by argument. There

is no difference here between true religions and pretended. Moses was

instructed not to reason from the creation, but to work miracles.

Christianity is a history supernatural, and almost scenic: it tells us

what its Author is, by telling us what He has done.

“Lord Brougham himself has recognized the force of this principle. He

has not left his philosophical religion to argument; he has committed

it to the keeping of the imagination. Why should he depict a great

republic of letters, and an intellectual pantheon, but that he feels

that instances and patterns, not logical reasonings, are the living

conclusions which alone have a hold over the affections or can form the

character?”

Chapter V. Apprehension And Assent In The Matter Of Religion.

We are now able to determine what a dogma of faith is, and what it is

to believe it. A dogma is a proposition; it stands for a notion or for

a thing; and to believe it is to give the assent of the mind to it, as

it stands for the one or for the other. To give a real assent to it is

an act of religion; to give a notional, is a theological act. It is

discerned, rested in, and appropriated as a reality, by the religious

imagination; it is held as a truth, by the theological intellect.

Not as if there were in fact, or could be, any line of demarcation

or party-wall between these two modes of assent, the religious

and the theological. As intellect is common to all men as well as

imagination, every religious man is to a certain extent a theologian,

and no theology can start or thrive without the initiative and abiding

presence of religion. As in matters of this world, sense, sensation,

instinct, intuition, supply us with facts, and the intellect uses

them; so, as regards our relations with the Supreme Being, we get our

facts from the witness, first of nature, then of revelation, and our

doctrines, in which they issue, through the exercise of abstraction and

inference. This is obvious; but it does not interfere with holding that

there is a theological habit of mind, and a religious, each distinct

from each, religion using theology, and theology using religion. This

being understood, I propose to consider the dogmas of the Being of a

God, and of the Divine Trinity in Unity, in their relation to assent,

both notional and real, and principally to real assent;—however, I have

not yet finished all I have to say by way of introduction.

Now first, my subject is assent, and not inference. I am not proposing

to set forth the arguments which issue in the belief of these

doctrines, but to investigate what it is to believe in them, what the

mind does, what it contemplates, when it makes an act of faith. It

is true that the same elementary facts which create an object for an

assent, also furnish matter for an inference: and in showing what we

believe, I shall unavoidably be in a measure showing why we believe;

but this is the very reason that makes it necessary for me at the

outset to insist on the real distinction between these two concurring

and coincident courses of thought, and to premise by way of caution,

lest I should be misunderstood, that I am not considering the question

that there is a God, but rather what God is.

And secondly, I mean by belief, not precisely faith, because faith,

in its theological sense, includes a belief, not only in the thing

believed, but also in the ground of believing; that is, not only

belief in certain doctrines, but belief in them expressly because God

has revealed them; but here I am engaged only with what is called the

material object of faith, not with the formal,—with the thing believed.

The Almighty witnesses to Himself in Revelation; we believe that He

is One and that He is Three, because He says so. We believe also what

He tells us about His Attributes, His providences and dispensations,

His determinations and acts, what He has done and what He will do. And

if all this is too much for us, whether to bring before our minds at

one time from its variety, or even to apprehend at all or enunciate

from our narrowness of intellect or want of learning, then at least

we believe _in globo_ all that He has revealed to us about Himself,

and that, because He has revealed it. However, this “because He says

it” does not enter into the scope of the present inquiry, but only

the truths themselves, and these particular truths, “He is One,” “He

is Three;” and of these two, both of which are in Revelation, I shall

consider “He is One,” not as a revealed truth, but as, what it is also,

a natural truth, the foundation of all religion. And with it I begin.

§ 1. Belief in One God.

There is one GOD, such and such in Nature and Attributes.

I say “such and such,” for, unless I explain what I mean by “one God,”

I use words which may mean any thing or nothing. I may mean a mere

_anima mundi_; or an initial principle which once was in action and now

is not; or collective humanity. I speak then of the God of the Theist

and of the Christian: a God who is numerically One, who is Personal;

the Author, Sustainer, and Finisher of all things, the life of Law and

Order, the Moral Governor; One who is Supreme and Sole; like Himself,

unlike all things besides Himself, which all are but His creatures;

distinct from, independent of them all; One who is self-existing,

absolutely infinite, who has ever been and ever will be, to whom

nothing is past or future; who is all perfection, and the fulness and

archetype of every possible excellence, the Truth Itself, Wisdom, Love,

Justice, Holiness; One who is All-powerful, All-knowing, Omnipresent,

Incomprehensible. These are some of the distinctive prerogatives which

I ascribe unconditionally and unreservedly to the great Being whom I

call God.

This being what Theists mean when they speak of God, their assent to

this truth admits without difficulty of being what I have called a

notional assent. It is an assent following upon acts of inference,

and other purely intellectual exercises; and it is an assent to a

large development of predicates, correlative to each other, or at

least intimately connected together, drawn out as if on paper, as we

might map a country which we had never seen, or construct mathematical

tables, or master the methods of discovery of Newton or Davy, without

being geographers, mathematicians, or chemists ourselves.

So far is clear; but the question follows, Can I attain to any more

vivid assent to the Being of a God, than that which is given merely to

notions of the intellect? Can I enter with a personal knowledge into

the circle of truths which make up that great thought? Can I rise to

what I have called an imaginative apprehension of it? Can I believe as

if I saw? Since such a high assent requires a present experience or

memory of the fact, at first sight it would seem as if the answer must

be in the negative; for how can I assent as if I saw, unless I have

seen? but no one in this life can see God. Yet I conceive a real assent

is possible, and I proceed to show how.

When it is said that we cannot see God, this is undeniable; but in what

sense have we a discernment of His creatures, of the individual beings

which surround us? The evidence which we have of their presence lies

in the phenomena which address our senses, and our warrant for taking

these for evidence is our instinctive certitude that they are evidence.

By the law of our nature we associate those sensible phenomena or

impressions with certain units, individuals, substances, whatever they

are to be called, which are outside and out of the reach of sense, and

we picture them to ourselves in those phenomena. The phenomena are

as if pictures; but at the same time they give us no exact measure

or character of the unknown things beyond them;—for who will say

there is any uniformity between the impressions which two of us would

respectively have of some third thing, supposing one of us had only the

sense of touch, and the other only the sense of hearing? Therefore,

when we speak of our having a picture of the things which are perceived

through the senses, we mean a certain representation, true as far as it

goes, but not adequate.

And so of those intellectual and moral objects which are brought

home to us through our senses:—that they exist, we know by instinct;

that they are such and such, we apprehend from the impressions which

they leave upon our minds. Thus the life and writings of Cicero or

Dr. Johnson, of St. Jerome or St. Chrysostom, leave upon us certain

impressions of the intellectual and moral character of each of them,

_sui generis_, and unmistakable. We take up a passage of Chrysostom or

a passage of Jerome; there is no possibility of confusing the one with

the other; in each case we see the man in his language. And so of any

great man whom we may have known: that he is not a mere impression on

our senses, but a real being, we know by instinct; that he is such and

such, we know by the matter or quality of that impression.

Now certainly the thought of God, as Theists entertain it, is not

gained by an instinctive association of His presence with any sensible

phenomena; but the office which the senses directly fulfil as regards

creation that devolves indirectly on certain of our mental phenomena

as regards the Creator. Those phenomena are found in the sense of

moral obligation. As from a multitude of instinctive perceptions,

acting in particular instances, of something beyond the senses, we

generalize the notion of an external world, and then picture that world

in and according to those particular phenomena from which we started,

so from the perceptive power which identifies the intimations of

conscience with the reverberations or echoes (so to say) of an external

admonition, we proceed on to the notion of a Supreme Ruler and Judge,

and then again we image Him and His attributes in those recurring

intimations, out of which, as mental phenomena, our recognition of

His existence was originally gained. And, if the impressions which

His creatures make on us through our senses oblige us to regard those

creatures as _sui generis_ respectively, it is not wonderful that the

notices, which He indirectly gives us through our conscience, of His

own nature are such as to make us understand that He is like Himself

and like nothing else.

I have already said I am not proposing here to prove the Being of a

God; yet I have found it impossible to avoid saying where I look for

the proof of it. For I am looking for that proof in the same quarter

as that from which I would commence a proof of His attributes and

character,—by the same means as those by which I show how we apprehend

Him, not merely as a notion, but as a reality. The last indeed of these

three investigations alone concerns me here, but I cannot altogether

exclude the two former from my consideration. However, I repeat, what

I am directly aiming at, is to explain how we gain an image of God and

give a real assent to the proposition that He exists. And next, in

order to do this, of course I must start from some first principle;—and

that first principle, which I assume and shall not attempt to prove,

is that which I should also use as a foundation in those other two

inquiries, viz. that we have by nature a conscience.

I assume, then, that Conscience has a legitimate place among our

mental acts; as really so, as the action of memory, of reasoning,

of imagination, or as the sense of the beautiful; that, as there

are objects which, when presented to the mind, cause it to feel

grief, regret, joy, or desire, so there are things which excite in

us approbation or blame, and which we in consequence call right or

wrong; and which, experienced in ourselves, kindle in us that specific

sense of pleasure or pain, which goes by the name of a good or bad

conscience. This being taken for granted, I shall attempt to show that

in this special feeling, which follows on the commission of what we

call right or wrong, lie the materials for the real apprehension of a

Divine Sovereign and Judge.

The feeling of conscience (being, I repeat, a certain keen sensibility,

pleasant or painful,—self-approval and hope, or compunction and

fear,—attendant on certain of our actions, which in consequence we

call right or wrong) is twofold:—it is a moral sense, and a sense of

duty; a judgment of the reason and a magisterial dictate. Of course

its act is indivisible; still it has these two aspects, distinct from

each other, and admitting of a separate consideration. Though I lost

my sense of the obligation which I lie under to abstain from acts

of dishonesty, I should not in consequence lose my sense that such

actions were an outrage offered to my moral nature. Again; though I

lost my sense of their moral deformity, I should not therefore lose

my sense that they were forbidden to me. Thus conscience has both a

critical and a judicial office, and though its promptings, in the

breasts of the millions of human beings to whom it is given, are not

in all cases correct, that does not necessarily interfere with the

force of its testimony and of its sanction: its testimony that there

is a right and a wrong, and its sanction to that testimony conveyed in

the feelings which attend on right or wrong conduct. Here I have to

speak of conscience in the latter point of view, not as supplying us,

by means of its various acts, with the elements of morals, such as may

be developed by the intellect into an ethical code, but simply as the

dictate of an authoritative monitor bearing upon the details of conduct

as they come before us, and complete in its several acts, one by one.

Let us then thus consider conscience, not as a rule of right conduct,

but as a sanction of right conduct. This is its primary and most

authoritative aspect; it is the ordinary sense of the word. Half the

world would be puzzled to know what was meant by the moral sense; but

every one knows what is meant by a good or bad conscience. Conscience

is ever forcing on us by threats and by promises that we must follow

the right and avoid the wrong; so far it is one and the same in the

mind of every one, whatever be its particular errors in particular

minds as to the acts which it orders to be done or to be avoided; and

in this respect it corresponds to our perception of the beautiful and

deformed. As we have naturally a sense of the beautiful and graceful

in nature and art, though tastes proverbially differ, so we have a

sense of duty and obligation, whether we all associate it with the

same certain actions in particular or not. Here, however, Taste and

Conscience part company: for the sense of beautifulness, as indeed the

Moral Sense, has no special relations to persons, but contemplates

objects in themselves; conscience, on the other hand, is concerned with

persons primarily, and with actions mainly as viewed in their doers,

or rather with self alone and one’s own actions, and with others only

indirectly and as if in association with self. And further, taste is

its own evidence, appealing to nothing beyond its own sense of the

beautiful or the ugly, and enjoying the specimens of the beautiful

simply for their own sake; but conscience does not repose on itself,

but vaguely reaches forward to something beyond self, and dimly

discerns a sanction higher than self for its decisions, as is evidenced

in that keen sense of obligation and responsibility which informs them.

And hence it is that we are accustomed to speak of conscience as a

voice,—a term which we should never think of applying to the sense of

the beautiful; and moreover a voice, or the echo of a voice, imperative

and constraining, like no other dictate in the whole of our experience.

And again, in consequence of this prerogative of dictating and

commanding, which is of its essence, Conscience has an intimate

bearing on our affections and emotions, leading us to reverence and

awe, hope and fear, especially fear, a feeling which is foreign for

the most part, not only to Taste, but even to the Moral Sense, except

in consequence of accidental associations. No fear is felt by any one

who recognizes that his conduct has not been beautiful, though he may

be mortified at himself, if perhaps he has thereby forfeited some

advantage; but, if he has been betrayed into any kind of immorality,

he has a lively sense of responsibility and guilt, though the act

be no offence against society,—of distress and apprehension, even

though it may be of present service to him,—of compunction and

regret, though in itself it be most pleasurable,—of confusion of

face, though it may have no witnesses. These various perturbations of

mind, which are characteristic of a bad conscience, and may be very

considerable,—self-reproach, poignant shame, haunting remorse, chill

dismay at the prospect of the future,—and their contraries, when the

conscience is good, as real though less forcible, self-approval, inward

peace, lightness of heart, and the like,—these emotions constitute

a specific difference between conscience and our other intellectual

senses,—common sense, good sense, sense of expedience, taste, sense

of honour, and the like,—as indeed they would also constitute

between conscience and the moral sense, supposing these two were not

aspects of one and the same feeling, exercised upon one and the same

subject-matter.

So much for the characteristic phenomena, which conscience presents,

nor is it difficult to determine what they imply. I refer once more to

our sense of the beautiful. This sense is attended by an intellectual

enjoyment, and is free from whatever is of the nature of emotion,

except in one case, viz. when it is excited by personal objects; then

it is that the tranquil feeling of admiration is exchanged for the

excitement of affection and passion. Conscience too, considered as a

moral sense, an intellectual sentiment, is a sense of admiration and

disgust, of approbation and blame: but it is something more than a

moral sense; it is always, what the sense of the beautiful is only in

certain cases; it is always emotional. No wonder then that it always

implies what that sense only sometimes implies; that it always involves

the recognition of a living object, towards which it is directed.

Inanimate things cannot stir our affections; these are correlative with

persons. If, as is the case, we feel responsibility, are ashamed, are

frightened, at transgressing the voice of conscience, this implies that

there is One to whom we are responsible, before whom we are ashamed,

whose claims upon us we fear. If, on doing wrong, we feel the same

tearful, broken-hearted sorrow which overwhelms us on hurting a mother;

if, on doing right, we enjoy the same sunny serenity of mind, the same

soothing, satisfactory delight which follows on our receiving praise

from a father, we certainly have within us the image of some person,

to whom our love and veneration look, in whose smile we find our

happiness, for whom we yearn, towards whom we direct our pleadings, in

whose anger we are troubled and waste away. These feelings in us are

such as require for their exciting cause an intelligent being: we are

not affectionate towards a stone, nor do we feel shame before a horse

or a dog; we have no remorse or compunction on breaking mere human

law: yet, so it is, conscience excites all these painful emotions,

confusion, foreboding, self-condemnation; and on the other hand it

sheds upon us a deep peace, a sense of security, a resignation, and a

hope, which there is no sensible, no earthly object to elicit. “The

wicked flees, when no one pursueth;” then why does he flee? whence his

terror? Who is it that he sees in solitude, in darkness, in the hidden

chambers of his heart? If the cause of these emotions does not belong

to this visible world, the Object to which his perception is directed

must be Supernatural and Divine; and thus the phenomena of Conscience,

as a dictate, avail to impress the imagination with the picture(3)

of a Supreme Governor, a Judge, holy, just, powerful, all-seeing,

retributive, and is the creative principle of religion, as the Moral

Sense is the principle of ethics.

And let me here refer again to the fact, to which I have already drawn

attention, that this instinct of the mind recognizing an external

Master in the dictate of conscience, and imaging the thought of Him

in the definite impressions which conscience creates, is parallel to

that other law of, not only human, but of brute nature, by which the

presence of unseen individual beings is discerned under the shifting

shapes and colours of the visible world. Is it by sense, or by reason,

that brutes understand the real unities, material and spiritual, which

are signified by the lights and shadows, the brilliant ever-changing

calidoscope, as it may be called, which plays upon their _retina_? Not

by reason, for they have not reason; not by sense, because they are

transcending sense; therefore it is an instinct. This faculty on the

part of brutes, unless we were used to it, would strike us as a great

mystery. It is one peculiarity of animal natures to be susceptible of

phenomena through the channels of sense; it is another to have in those

sensible phenomena a perception of the individuals to which this or

that group of them belongs. This perception of individual things, amid

the maze of shapes and colours which meets their sight, is given to

brutes in large measures, and that, apparently from the moment of their

birth. It is by no mere physical instinct, such as that which leads him

to his mother for milk, that the new-dropped lamb recognizes each of

his fellow lambkins as a whole, consisting of many parts bound up in

one, and, before he is an hour old, makes experience of his and their

rival individualities. And much more distinctly do the horse and dog

recognize even the personality of their masters. How are we to explain

this apprehension of things, which are one and individual, in the midst

of a world of pluralities and transmutations, whether in the instance

of brutes or again of children? But until we account for the knowledge

which an infant has of his mother or his nurse, what reason have we

to take exception at the doctrine, as strange and difficult, that in

the dictate of conscience, without previous experiences or analogical

reasoning, he is able gradually to perceive the voice, or the echoes of

the voice, of a Master, living, personal, and sovereign?

I grant, of course, that we cannot assign a date, ever so early,

before which he had learned nothing at all, and formed no mental

associations, from the words and conduct of those who have the care of

him. But still, if a child of five or six years old, when reason is

at length fully awake, has already mastered and appropriated thoughts

and beliefs, in consequence of their teaching, in such sort as to be

able to handle and apply them familiarly, according to the occasion, as

principles of intellectual action, those beliefs at the very least must

be singularly congenial to his mind, if not connatural with its initial

action. And that such a spontaneous reception of religious truths is

common with children, I shall take for granted, till I am convinced

that I am wrong in so doing. The child keenly understands that there

is a difference between right and wrong; and when he has done what he

believes to be wrong, he is conscious that he is offending One to whom

he is amenable, whom he does not see, who sees him. His mind reaches

forward with a strong presentiment to the thought of a Moral Governor,

sovereign over him, mindful, and just. It comes to him like an impulse

of nature to entertain it.

It is my wish to take an ordinary child, but still one who is safe from

influences destructive of his religious instincts. Supposing he has

offended his parents, he will all alone and without effort, as if it

were the most natural of acts, place himself in the presence of God,

and beg of Him to set him right with them. Let us consider how much

is contained in this simple act. First, it involves the impression on

his mind of an unseen Being with whom he is in immediate relation, and

that relation so familiar that he can address Him whenever he himself

chooses; next, of One whose goodwill towards him he is assured of,

and can take for granted—nay, who loves him better, and is nearer to

him, than his parents; further, of One who can hear him, wherever he

happens to be, and who can read his thoughts, for his prayer need

not be vocal; lastly, of One who can effect a critical change in the

state of feeling of others towards him. That is, we shall not be wrong

in holding that this child has in his mind the image of an Invisible

Being, who exercises a particular providence among us, who is present

every where, who is heart-reading, heart-changing, ever-accessible,

open to impetration. What a strong and intimate vision of God must he

have already attained, if, as I have supposed, an ordinary trouble of

mind has the spontaneous effect of leading him for consolation and aid

to an Invisible Personal Power!

Moreover, this image brought before his mental vision is the image

of One who by implicit threat and promise commands certain things

which he, the same child, coincidently, by the same act of his mind,

approves; which receive the adhesion of his moral sense and judgment,

as right and good. It is the image of One who is good, inasmuch

as enjoining and enforcing what is right and good, and who, in

consequence, not only excites in the child hope and fear,—nay (it may

be added), gratitude towards Him, as giving a law and maintaining it by

reward and punishment,—but kindles in him love towards Him, as giving

him a good law, and therefore as being good Himself, for it is the

property of goodness to kindle love, or rather the very object of love

is goodness; and all those distinct elements of the moral law, which

the typical child, whom I am supposing, more or less consciously loves

and approves,—truth, purity, justice, kindness, and the like,—are but

shapes and aspects of goodness. And having in his degree a sensibility

towards them all, for the sake of them all he is moved to love the

Lawgiver, who enjoins them upon him. And, as he can contemplate

these qualities and their manifestations under the common name of

goodness, he is prepared to think of them as indivisible, correlative,

supplementary of each other in one and the same Personality, so that

there is no aspect of goodness which God is not; and that the more,

because the notion of a perfection embracing all possible excellences,

both moral and intellectual, is especially congenial to the mind, and

there are in fact intellectual attributes, as well as moral, included

in the child’s image of God, as above represented.

Such is the apprehension which even a child may have of his Sovereign

Lawgiver and Judge; which is possible in the case of children, because,

at least, some children possess it, whether others possess it or no;

and which, when it is found in children, is found to act promptly and

keenly, by reason of the paucity of their ideas. It is an image of the

good God, good in Himself, good relatively to the child, with whatever

incompleteness; an image before it has been reflected on, and before it

is recognized by him as a notion. Though he cannot explain or define

the word “God,” when told to use it, his acts show that to him it is

far more than a word. He listens, indeed, with wonder and interest to

fables or tales; he has a dim, shadowy sense of what he hears about

persons and matters of this world; but he has that within him which

actually vibrates, responds, and gives a deep meaning to the lessons of

his first teachers about the will and the providence of God.

How far this initial religious knowledge comes from without, and how

far from within, how much is natural, how much implies a special divine

aid which is above nature, we have no means of determining, nor is

it necessary for my present purpose to determine. I am not engaged

in tracing the image of God in the mind of a child or a man to its

first origins, but showing that he can become possessed of such an

image, over and above all mere notions of God, and in what that image

consists. Whether its elements, latent in the mind, would ever be

elicited without extrinsic help is very doubtful; but whatever be the

actual history of the first formation of the divine image within us, so

far at least is certain, that, by informations external to ourselves,

as time goes on, it admits of being strengthened and improved. It is

certain too, that, whether it grows brighter and stronger, or, on the

other hand, is dimmed, distorted, or obliterated, depends on each of

us individually, and on his circumstances. It is more than probable

that, in the event, from neglect, from the temptations of life, from

bad companions, or from the urgency of secular occupations, the light

of the soul will fade away and die out. Men transgress their sense

of duty, and gradually lose those sentiments of shame and fear, the

natural supplements of transgression, which, as I have said, are the

witnesses of the Unseen Judge. And, even were it deemed impossible

that those who had in their first youth a genuine apprehension of Him,

could ever utterly lose it, yet that apprehension may become almost

undistinguishable from an inferential acceptance of the great truth, or

may dwindle into a mere notion of their intellect. On the contrary, the

image of God, if duly cherished, may expand, deepen, and be completed,

with the growth of their powers and in the course of life, under the

varied lessons, within and without them, which are brought home to them

concerning that same God, One and Personal, by means of education,

social intercourse, experience, and literature.

To a mind thus carefully formed upon the basis of its natural

conscience, the world, both of nature and of man, does but give back a

reflection of those truths about the One Living God, which have been

familiar to it from childhood. Good and evil meet us daily as we pass

through life, and there are those who think it philosophical to act

towards the manifestations of each with some sort of impartiality, as

if evil had as much right to be there as good, or even a better, as

having more striking triumphs and a broader jurisdiction. And because

the course of things is determined by fixed laws, they consider that

those laws preclude the present agency of the Creator in the carrying

out of particular issues. It is otherwise with the theology of a

religious imagination. It has a living hold on truths which are really

to be found in the world, though they are not upon the surface. It is

able to pronounce by anticipation, what it takes a long argument to

prove—that good is the rule, and evil the exception. It is able to

assume that, uniform as are the laws of nature, they are consistent

with a particular Providence. It interprets what it sees around it by

this previous inward teaching, as the true key of that maze of vast

complicated disorder; and thus it gains a more and more consistent

and luminous vision of God from the most unpromising materials. Thus

conscience is a connecting principle between the creature and his

Creator; and the firmest hold of theological truths is gained by habits

of personal religion. When men begin all their works with the thought

of God, acting for His sake and to fulfil His will, when they ask His

blessing on themselves and their life, pray to Him for the objects they

desire, and see Him in the event, whether it be according to their

prayers or not, they will find every thing that happens tend to confirm

them in the truth about Him which live in their imagination, varied

and unearthly as those truths may be. Then they are brought into His

presence as that of a Living Person, and are able to hold converse with

Him, and that with a directness and simplicity, with a confidence and

intimacy, _mutatis mutandis_, which we use towards an earthly superior;

so that it is doubtful whether we realize the company of our fellow-men

with greater keenness than these favoured minds are able to contemplate

and adore the Unseen, Incomprehensible Creator.

This vivid apprehension of religious objects, on which I have been

enlarging, is independent of the written records of Revelation; it

does not require any knowledge of Scripture, nor of the history or the

teaching of the Catholic Church. It is independent of books. But if

so much may be traced out in the twilight of Natural Religion, it is

obvious how great an addition in fulness and exactness is made to our

mental image of the Divine Personality and Attributes, by the light of

Christianity. And, indeed, to give us a clear and sufficient object

for our faith, is one main purpose of the supernatural Dispensations

of Religion. This purpose is carried out in the written Word, with

an effectiveness which inspiration alone could secure, first, by

the histories which form so large a portion of the Old Testament;

and scarcely less impressively in the prophetical system, as it is

gradually unfolded and perfected in the writings of those who were

its ministers and spokesmen. And as the exercise of the affections

strengthens our apprehension of the object of them, it is impossible to

exaggerate the influence exerted on the religious imagination by a book

of devotions so sublime, so penetrating, so full of deep instruction

as the Psalter, to say nothing of other portions of the Hagiographa.

And then as regards the New Testament, the Gospels, from their subject,

contain a manifestation of the Divine Nature, so special, as to make

it appear from the contrast as if nothing were known of God, when they

are unknown. Lastly, the Apostolic Epistles, the long history of the

Church, with its fresh exhibitions of Divine Agency, the Lives of the

Saints, and the reasonings, internal collisions, and decisions of the

Theological School, form an extended comment on the words and works of

our Lord.

I think I need not say more in illustration of the subject which I

proposed for consideration in this Section. I have wished to trace

the process by which the mind arrives, not only at a notional, but

at an imaginative or real assent to the doctrine that there is One

God, that is, an assent made with an apprehension, not only of what

the words of the proposition mean, but of the object denoted by them.

Without a proposition or thesis there can be no assent, no belief, at

all; any more than there can be an inference without a conclusion. The

proposition that there is One Personal and Present God may be held in

either way; either as a theological truth, or as a religious fact or

reality. The notion and the reality assented-to are represented by

one and the same proposition, but serve as distinct interpretations

of it. When the proposition is apprehended for the purposes of proof,

analysis, comparison, and the like intellectual exercises, it is used

as the expression of a notion; when for the purposes of devotion, it

is the image of a reality. Theology, properly and directly, deals with

notional apprehension; religion with imaginative.

Here we have the solution of the common mistake of supposing that there

is a contrariety and antagonism between a dogmatic creed and vital

religion. People urge that salvation consists, not in believing the

propositions that there is a God, that there is a Saviour, that our

Lord is God, that there is a Trinity, but in believing in God, in a

Saviour, in a Sanctifier; and they object that such propositions are

but a formal and human medium destroying all true reception of the

Gospel, and making religion a matter of words or of logic, instead

of its having its seat in the heart. They are right so far as this,

that men can and sometimes do rest in the propositions themselves as

expressing intellectual notions; they are wrong, when they maintain

that men need do so or always do so. The propositions may and must be

used, and can easily be used, as the expression of facts, not notions,

and they are necessary to the mind in the same way that language is

ever necessary for denoting facts, both for ourselves as individuals,

and for our intercourse with others. Again, they are useful in their

dogmatic aspect as ascertaining and making clear for us the truths

on which the religious imagination has to rest. Knowledge must ever

precede the exercise of the affections. We feel gratitude and love, we

feel indignation and dislike, when we have the informations actually

put before us which are to kindle those several emotions. We love our

parents, as our parents, when we know them to be our parents; we must

know concerning God, before we can feel love, fear, hope, or trust

towards Him. Devotion must have its objects; those objects, as being

supernatural, when not represented to our senses by material symbols,

must be set before the mind in propositions. The formula, which

embodies a dogma for the theologian, readily suggests an object for the

worshipper. It seems a truism to say, yet it is all that I have been

saying, that in religion the imagination and affections should always

be under the control of reason. Theology may stand as a substantive

science, though it be without the life of religion; but religion

cannot maintain its ground at all without theology. Sentiment, whether

imaginative or emotional, falls back upon the intellect for its stay,

when sense cannot be called into exercise; and it is in this way that

devotion falls back upon dogma.

§ 2. Belief in the Holy Trinity.

Of course I cannot hope to carry all inquiring minds with me in what

I have been laying down in the foregoing Section. I have appealed to

the testimony given implicitly by our conscience to the Divine Being

and His Attributes, and there are those, I know, whose experience

will not respond to the appeal:—doubtless; but are there any truths

which have reality, whether of experience or of reason, which are

not disputed by some schools of philosophy or some bodies of men? If

we assume nothing but what has universal reception, the field of our

possible discussions will suffer much contraction; so that it must

be considered sufficient in any inquiry, if the principles or facts

assumed have a large following. This condition is abundantly fulfilled

as regards the authority and religious meaning of conscience;—that

conscience is the voice of God has almost grown into a proverb. This

solemn dogma is recognized as such by the great mass both of the

young and of the uneducated, by the religious few and the irreligious

many. It is proclaimed in the history and literature of nations;

it has had supporters in all ages, places, creeds, forms of social

life, professions, and classes. It has held its ground under great

intellectual and moral disadvantages; it has recovered its supremacy,

and ultimately triumphed in the minds of those who had rebelled against

it. Even philosophers, who have been antagonists on other points, agree

in recognizing the inward voice of that solemn Monitor, personal,

peremptory, unargumentative, irresponsible, minatory, definitive. This

I consider relieves me of the necessity of arguing with those who would

resolve our sense of right and wrong into a sense of the Expedient or

the Beautiful, or would refer its authoritative suggestions to the

effect of teaching or of association. There are those who can see and

hear for all the common purposes of life, yet have no eye for colours

or their shades, or no ear for music; moreover, there are degrees of

sensibility to colours and to sounds, in the comparison of man with

man, while some men are stone-blind or stone-deaf. Again, all men, as

time goes on, have the prospect of losing that keenness of sight and

hearing which they possessed in their youth; and so, in like manner,

we may lose in manhood and in age that sense of a Supreme Teacher

and Judge which was the gift of our first years; and that the more,

because in most men the imagination suffers from the lapse of time and

the experience of life, long before the bodily senses fail. And this

accords with the advice of the sacred writer to “remember our Creator

in the days of our youth,” while our moral sensibilities are fresh,

“before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars be darkened,

and the clouds return after the rain.” Accordingly, if there be those

who deny that the dictate of conscience is ever more than a taste, or

an association, it is a less difficulty to me to believe that they are

deficient either in the religious sense or in their memory of early

years, than that they never had at all what those around them without

hesitation profess to have received from nature.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

So much on the doctrine of the Being and Attributes of God, and of

the real apprehension with which we can contemplate and assent to

it:—now I turn to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, with the purpose of

investigating in like manner how far it belongs to theology, how far

to the faith and devotion of the individual; how far the propositions

enunciating it are confined to the expression of intellectual notions,

and how far they stand for things also, and admit of that assent which

we give to objects presented to us by the imagination. And first I have

to state what our doctrine is.

No one is to be called a Theist, who does not believe in a Personal

God, whatever difficulty there may be in defining the word “Personal.”

Now it is the belief of Catholics about the Supreme Being, that

this essential characteristic of His Nature is reiterated in three

distinct ways or modes; so that the Almighty God, instead of being

One Person only, which is the teaching of Natural Religion, has Three

Personalities, and is at once, according as we view Him in the one or

the other of them, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit—a Divine Three,

who bear towards Each Other the several relations which those names

indicate, and are in that respect distinct from Each Other, and in that

alone.

This is the teaching of the Athanasian Creed; viz. that the One

Personal God, who is not a logical or physical unity, but a Living

_Monas_, more really one even than an individual man is one—He

(“unus,” not “unum,” because of the inseparability of His Nature and

Personality),—He at once is Father, is Son, is Holy Ghost, Each of whom

is that One Personal God in the fulness of His Being and Attributes; so

that the Father is all that is meant by the word “God,” as if we knew

nothing of Son, or of Spirit; and in like manner the Son and the Spirit

are Each by Himself all that is meant by the word, as if the Other Two

were unknown; moreover, that by the word “God” is meant nothing over

and above what is meant by the “Father,” or by “the Son,” or by “the

Holy Ghost;” and that the Father is in no sense the Son, nor the Son

the Holy Ghost, nor the Holy Ghost the Father. Such is the prerogative

of the Divine Infinitude, that that One and Single Personal Being, the

Almighty God, is really Three, while He is absolutely One.

Indeed, the Catholic dogma may be said to be summed up in this very

formula on which St. Augustine lays so much stress, “Tres et Unus,”

not merely “Unum;” hence that formula is the key-note, as it may be

called, of the Athanasian Creed. In that Creed we testify to the Unus

Increatus, to the Unus Immensus, Omnipotens, Deus, and Dominus; yet

Each of the Three also is by Himself Increatus, Immensus, Omnipotens,

for Each is that One God, though Each is not the Other; Each, as

is intimated by Unus Increatus, is the One Personal God of Natural

Religion.

That this doctrine, thus drawn out, is of a notional character, is

plain; the question before me is whether in any sense it can become the

object of real apprehension, that is, whether any portion of it may be

considered as addressed to the imagination, and is able to exert that

living mastery over the mind, which is instanced as I have shown above,

as regards the proposition, “There is a God.”

“There is a God,” when really apprehended, is the object of a strong

energetic adhesion, which works a revolution in the mind; but when held

merely as a notion, it requires but a cold and ineffective acceptance,

though it be held ever so unconditionally. Such in its character is the

assent of thousands, whose imaginations are not at all kindled, nor

their hearts inflamed, nor their conduct affected, by the most august

of all conceivable truths. I ask, then, as concerns the doctrine of

the Holy Trinity, such as I have drawn it out to be, is it capable of

being apprehended otherwise than notionally? Is it a theory, undeniable

indeed, but addressed to the student, and to no one else? Is it the

elaborate, subtle, triumphant exhibition of a truth, completely

developed, and happily adjusted, and accurately balanced on its centre,

and impregnable on every side, as a scientific view, “totus, teres,

atque rotundus,” challenging all assailants, or, on the other hand,

does it come to the unlearned, the young, the busy, and the afflicted,

as a fact which is to arrest them, penetrate them, and to support and

animate them in their passage through life? That is, does it admit of

being held in the imagination, and being embraced with a real assent? I

maintain it does, and that it is the normal faith which every Christian

has, on which he is stayed, which is his spiritual life, there being

nothing in the exposition of the dogma, as I have given it above, which

does not address the imagination, as well as the intellect.

Now let us observe what is not in that exposition;—there are no

scientific terms in it. I will not allow that “Personal” is such,

because it is a word in common use, and though it cannot mean

precisely the same when used of God as when it is used of man, yet it

is sufficiently explained by that common use, to allow of its being

intelligibly applied to the Divine Nature. The other words, which occur

in the above account of the doctrine,—Three, One, He, God, Father, Son,

Spirit,—are none of them words peculiar to theology, have all a popular

meaning, and are used according to that obvious and popular meaning,

when introduced into the Catholic dogma. No human words indeed are

worthy of the Supreme Being, none are adequate; but we have no other

words to use but human, and those in question are among the simplest

and most intelligible that are to be found in language.

There are then no terms in the foregoing exposition which do not admit

of a plain sense, and they are there used in that sense; and, moreover,

that sense is what I have called real, for the words in their ordinary

use stand for things. The words, Father, Son, Spirit, He, One, and

the rest, are not abstract terms, but concrete, and adapted to excite

images. And these words thus simple and clear, are embodied in simple,

clear, brief, categorical propositions. There is nothing abstruse

either in the terms themselves, or in their setting. It is otherwise

of course with formal theological treatises on the subject of the

dogma. There we find such words as substance, essence, existence, form,

subsistence, notion, circumincession; and, though these are far easier

to understand than might at first sight be thought, still they are

doubtless addressed to the intellect, and can only command a notional

assent.

It will be observed also that not even the words “mysteriousness”

and “mystery” occur in the exposition which I have above given of

the doctrine; I omitted them, because they are not parts of the

Divine Verity as such, but in relation to creatures and to the human

intellect; and because they are of a notional character. It is plain

of course even at first sight that the doctrine is an inscrutable

mystery, or has an inscrutable mysteriousness; few minds indeed but

have theology enough to see this; and if an educated man, to whom it

is presented, does not perceive that mysteriousness at once, that

is a sure token that he does not rightly apprehend the propositions

which contain the doctrine. Hence it follows that the thesis “the

doctrine of the Holy Trinity in Unity is mysterious” is indirectly an

article of faith. But such an article, being a reflection made upon a

revealed truth in an inference, expresses a notion, not a thing. It

does not relate to the direct apprehension of the object, but to a

judgment of our reason upon the object. Accordingly the mysteriousness

of the doctrine is not, strictly speaking, intrinsical to it, as it

is proposed to the religious apprehension, though in matter of fact

a devotional mind, on perceiving that mysteriousness, will lovingly

appropriate it, as involved in the divine revelation; and, as such a

mind turns all thoughts which come before it to a sacred use, so will

it dwell upon the Mystery of the Trinity with awe and veneration, as a

truth befitting, so to say, the Immensity and Incomprehensibility of

the Supreme Being.

However, I do not put forward the mystery as the direct object of real

or religious apprehension; nor again, the complex doctrine (when it is

viewed, _per modum unius_, as one whole), in which the mystery lies.

Let it be observed, it is possible for the mind to hold a number of

propositions either in their combination as one whole, or one by one;

one by one, with an intelligent perception indeed of each, and of the

general direction of each towards the rest, yet of each separately

from the rest, for its own sake only, and not in connexion and one

with the rest. Thus I may know London quite well, and find my way from

street to street in any part of it without difficulty, yet be quite

unable to draw a map of it. Comparison, calculation, cataloguing,

arranging, classifying, are intellectual acts subsequent upon, and not

necessary for, a real apprehension of the things on which they are

exercised. Strictly speaking then, the dogma of the Holy Trinity, as a

complex whole, or as a mystery, is not the formal object of religious

apprehension and assent; but as a number of propositions, taken one

by one. That mystery also is of course the object of assent, but it

is the notional object; and when presented to religious minds, it is

received by them notionally; and again implicitly, viz. in the real

assent which they give to the word of God as conveyed to them through

the instrumentality of His Church. On these points it may be right to

enlarge.

Of course, as I have been saying, a man of ordinary intelligence

will be at once struck with the apparent contrariety between the

propositions one with another which constitute the Heavenly Dogma,

and, by reason of his spontaneous activity of mind and by an habitual

association, he will be compelled to view the Dogma in the light

of that contrariety,—so much so, that to hold one and all of these

separate propositions will be to such a man all one with holding

the mystery, as a mystery; and in consequence he will so hold

it;—but still, I say, so far he will hold it only with a notional

apprehension. He will accurately take in the meaning of each of the

dogmatic propositions in its relation to the rest of them, combining

them into one whole and embracing what he cannot realize, with an

assent, notional indeed, but as genuine and thorough as any real assent

can be. But the question is whether a real assent to the mystery,

as such, is possible; and I say it is not possible, because, while

we can image the separate propositions, we cannot image them all

together. We cannot, because the mystery transcends all our experience;

we have no experiences in our memory which we can put together,

compare, contrast, unite, and thereby transmute into an image of the

Ineffable Verity;—certainly; but what is in some degree a matter of

experience, what is presented for the imagination, the affections,

the devotion, the spiritual life of the Christian to repose upon

with a real assent, what stands for things, not for notions only, is

each of those propositions taken one by one, and that, not in the

case of intellectual and thoughtful minds only, but of all religious

minds whatever, in the case of a child or a peasant, as well as of a

philosopher.

This is only one instance of a general principle which holds good

in all such real apprehension as is possible to us, of God and His

Attributes. Not only do we see Him at best only in shadows, but we

cannot bring even those shadows together, for they flit to and fro,

and are never present to us at once. We can indeed combine the various

matters which we know of Him by an act of the intellect, and treat them

theologically, but such theological combinations are no objects for the

imagination to gaze upon. Our image of Him never is one, but broken

into numberless partial aspects, independent each of each. As we cannot

see the whole starry firmament at once, but have to turn ourselves

from east to west, and then round to east again, sighting first one

constellation and then another, and losing these in order to gain

those, so it is, and much more, with such real apprehensions as we can

secure of the Divine Nature. We know one truth about Him and another

truth,—but we cannot image both of them together; we cannot bring them

before us by one act of the mind; we drop the one while we turn to take

up the other. None of them are fully dwelt on and enjoyed, when they

are viewed in combination. Moreover, our devotion is tried and confused

by the long list of propositions which theology is obliged to draw up,

by the limitations, explanations, definitions, adjustments, balancings,

cautions, arbitrary prohibitions, which are imperatively required by

the weakness of human thought and the imperfections of human language.

Such exercises of reasoning indeed do but increase and harmonize

our notional apprehension of the dogma, but they add little to the

luminousness and vital force with which its separate propositions come

home to our imagination, and if they are necessary, as they certainly

are, they are necessary not so much for faith, as against unbelief.

Break a ray of light into its constituent colours, each is beautiful,

each may be enjoyed; attempt to unite them, and perhaps you produce

only a dirty white. The pure and indivisible Light is seen only by the

blessed inhabitants of heaven; here we have but such faint reflections

of it as its diffraction supplies; but they are sufficient for faith

and devotion. Attempt to combine them into one, and you gain nothing

but a mystery, which you can describe as a notion, but cannot depict as

an imagination. And this, which holds of the Divine Attributes, holds

also of the Holy Trinity in Unity. And hence, perhaps, it is that the

latter doctrine is never spoken of as a Mystery in the New Testament,

which is addressed far more to the imagination and affections than to

the intellect. Hence, too, what is more remarkable, the dogma is not

called a mystery in the Creeds; not in the Apostles’ nor the Nicene,

nor even in the Athanasian. The reason seems to be, that the Creeds

have a place in the Ritual; they are devotional acts, and of the nature

of prayers, addressed to God; and, in such addresses, to speak of

intellectual difficulties would be out of place. It must be recollected

especially that the Athanasian Creed has sometimes been called the

“Psalmus _Quicunque_.” It is not a mere collection of notions, however

momentous. It is a psalm or hymn of praise, of confession, and of

profound, self-prostrating homage, parallel to the canticles of the

elect in the Apocalypse. It appeals to the imagination quite as much

as to the intellect. It is the war-song of faith, with which we warn

first ourselves, then each other, and then all those who are within its

hearing, and the hearing of the Truth, who our God is, and how we must

worship Him, and how vast our responsibility will be, if we know what

to believe, and yet believe not. It is

“The Psalm that gathers in one glorious lay

All chants that e’er from heaven to earth found way;

Creed of the Saints, and Anthem of the Blest,

And calm-breathed warning of the kindliest love

That ever heaved a wakeful mother’s breast.”

For myself, I have ever felt it as the most simple and sublime, the

most devotional formulary to which Christianity has given birth,

more so even than the _Veni Creator_ and the _Te Deum_. Even the

antithetical form of its sentences, which is a stumbling-block to

so many, as seeming to force, and to exult in forcing a mystery

upon recalcitrating minds, has to my apprehension, even notionally

considered, a very different drift. It is intended as a check upon our

reasonings, lest they rush on in one direction beyond the limits of the

truth, and it turns them back into the opposite direction. Certainly it

implies a glorying in the Mystery; but it is not simply a statement of

the Mystery for the sake of its mysteriousness.

What is more remarkable still, a like silence as to the mysteriousness

of the doctrine is observed in the successive definitions of the Church

concerning it. Confession after confession, canon after canon is drawn

up in the course of centuries; Popes and Councils have found it their

duty to insist afresh upon the dogma; they have enunciated it in new

or additional propositions; but not even in their most elaborate

formularies do they use the word “mystery,” as far as I know. The

great Council of Toledo pursues the scientific ramifications of the

doctrine, with the exact diligence of theology, at a length four times

that of the Athanasian Creed; the fourth Lateran completes, by a final

enunciation, the development of the sacred doctrine after the mind

of St. Augustine; the Creed of Pope Pius IV. prescribes the general

rule of faith against the heresies of these latter times; but in none

of them do we find either the word “mystery,” or any suggestion of

mysteriousness.

Such is the usage of the Church in its dogmatic statements concerning

the Holy Trinity, as if fulfilling the maxim, “Lex orandi, lex

credendi.” I suppose it is founded on a tradition, because the

custom is otherwise as regards catechisms and theological treatises.

These belong to particular ages and places, and are addressed to the

intellect. In them, certainly, the mysteriousness of the doctrine is

almost uniformly insisted on. But, however this contrast of usage

is to be explained, the Creeds are enough to show that the dogma

may be taught in its fulness for the purposes of popular faith and

devotion without directly insisting on that mysteriousness, which is

necessarily involved in the combined view of its separate propositions.

That systematized whole is the object of notional assent, and its

propositions, one by one, are the objects of real.

To show this in fact, I will enumerate the separate propositions of

which the dogma consists. They are nine, and stand as follows:—

1. There are Three who give testimony in heaven, the Father, the Word

or Son, and the Holy Spirit. 2. From the Father is, and ever has been,

the Son. 3. From the Father and Son is, and ever has been, the Spirit.

4. The Father is the One Eternal Personal God. 5. The Son is the One

Eternal Personal God. 6. The Spirit is the One Eternal Personal God.

7. The Father is not the Son. 8. The Son is not the Holy Ghost. 9. The

Holy Ghost is not the Father.

Now I think it is a fact, that, whereas these nine propositions

contain the Mystery, yet, taken, not as a whole, but separately,

each by itself, they are not only apprehensible, but admit of a real

apprehension.

Thus, for instance, if the proposition “There is One who bears witness

of Himself,” or “reveals Himself,” would admit of a real assent, why

does not also the proposition “There are Three who bear witness”?

Again, if the word “God” may create an image in our minds, why may not

the proposition “The Father is God”? or again, “The Son,” or “The Holy

Ghost is God”?

Again, to say that “the Son is other than the Holy Ghost,” or “neither

Son nor Holy Ghost is the Father,” is not a simple negative, but also

a declaration that Each of the Divine Three by Himself is complete in

Himself, and simply and absolutely God as though the Other Two were not

revealed to us.

Again, from our experience of the works of man, we accept with a real

apprehension the proposition “The Angels are made by God,” correcting

the word “made,” as is required in the case of a creating Power, and a

spiritual work:—why may we not in like matter refine and elevate the

human analogy, yet keep the image, when a Divine Birth is set before

us in terms which properly belong to what is human and earthly? If our

experience enables us to apprehend the essential fact of sonship, as

being a communication of being and of nature from one to another, why

should we not thereby in a certain measure realize the proposition “The

Word is the Son of God”?

Again, we have abundant instances in nature of the general law of

one thing coming from another or from others:—as the child issues

in the man as his successor, and the child and the man issue in the

old man, like them both, but not the same, so different as almost

to have a fresh personality distinct from each, so we may form some

image, however vague, of the procession of the Holy Spirit from Father

and Son. This is what I should say of the propositions which I have

numbered two and three, which are the least susceptible of a real

assent out of the nine.

So much at first sight; but the force of what I have been saying will

be best understood, by considering what Scripture and the Ritual of the

Church witness in accordance with it. In referring to these two great

store-houses of faith and devotion, I must premise, as when I spoke of

the Being of a God, that I am not proving by means of them the dogma of

the Holy Trinity, but using the one and the other in illustration of

the action of the separate articles of that dogma upon the imagination,

though the complex truth, in which, when combined, they issue, is not

in sympathy or correspondence with it, but altogether beyond it; and

next of the action and influence of those separate articles, by means

of the imagination, upon the affections and obedience of Christians,

high and low.

This being understood, I ask what chapter of St. John or St. Paul is

not full of the Three Divine Names, introduced in one or other of the

above nine propositions, expressed or implied, or in their parallels,

or in parts or equivalents of them? What lesson is there given us by

these two chief writers of the New Testament, which does not grow out

of Their Persons and Their Offices? At one time we read of the grace

of the Second Person, the love of the First, and the communication

of the Third; at another we are told by the Son, “I will pray the

Father, and He will send you another Paraclete;” and then, “All that

the Father hath are Mine; the Paraclete shall receive of Mine.” Then

again we read of “the foreknowledge of the Father, the sanctification

of the Spirit, the Blood of Jesus Christ;” and again we are to “pray

in the Holy Ghost, abide in the love of God, and look for the mercy of

Jesus.” And so, in like manner, to Each, in one passage or another, are

ascribed the same titles and works: Each is acknowledged as Lord; Each

is eternal; Each is Truth; Each is Holiness; Each is all in all; Each

is Creator; Each wills with a Supreme Will; Each is the Author of the

new birth; Each speaks in His ministers; Each is the Revealer; Each is

the Lawgiver; Each is the Teacher of the elect; in Each the elect have

fellowship; Each leads them on; Each raises them from the dead. What is

all this, but “the Father Eternal, the Son Eternal, and the Holy Ghost

Eternal; the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost Omnipotent; the Father, Son,

and Holy Ghost God,” of the Athanasian Creed? And if the New Testament

be, as it confessedly is, so real in its teaching, so luminous, so

impressive, so constraining, so full of images, so sparing in mere

notions, whence is this but because, in its references to the Object

of our supreme worship, it is ever ringing the changes (so to say) on

the nine propositions which I have set down, and on the particular

statements into which they may be severally resolved?

Take one of them, as an instance, viz. the dogmatic sentence “The Son

is God.” What an illustration of the real assent which can be given

to this proposition, and its power over our affections and emotions,

is the first half of the first chapter of St. John’s gospel! or again

the vision of our Lord in the first chapter of the Apocalypse! or the

first chapter of St. John’s first Epistle! Again, how burning are St.

Paul’s words when he speaks of our Lord’s crucifixion and death! what

is the secret of that flame, but this same dogmatic sentence, “The

Son is God”? why should the death of the Son be more awful than any

other death, except that He, though man, was God? And so, again, all

through the Old Testament, what is it which gives an interpretation

and a persuasive power to so many passages and portions, especially of

the Psalms and the Prophets, but this same theological formula, “The

Messias is God,” a proposition which never could thus vivify in the

religious mind the letter of the sacred text, unless it appealed to the

imagination, and could be held with a much stronger assent than any

that is merely notional.

This same power of the dogma may be illustrated from the Ritual.

Consider the services for Christmas or Epiphany; for Easter, Ascension,

and (I may say) pre-eminently Corpus Christi; what are these great

Festivals but comments on the words, “The Son is God”? Yet who will

say that they have the subtlety, the aridity, the coldness of mere

scholastic science? Are they addressed to the pure intellect, or to

the imagination? do they interest our logical faculty, or excite

our devotion? Why is it that personally we often find ourselves so

ill-fitted to take part in them, except that we are not good enough,

that in our case the dogma is far too much a theological notion, far

too little an image living within us? And so again, as to the Divinity

of the Holy Ghost: consider the breviary offices for Pentecost and

its Octave, the grandest perhaps in the whole year; are they created

out of mere abstractions and inferences, or has not the categorical

proposition of St. Athanasius, “The Holy Ghost is God,” such a place in

the imagination and the heart, as suffices to give birth to the noble

Hymns, _Veni Creator_, and _Veni Sancte Spiritus_?

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

I sum up then to the same effect as in the preceding Section. Religion

has to do with the real, and the real is the particular; theology

has to do with what is notional, and the notional is the general and

systematic. Hence theology has to do with the dogma of the Holy Trinity

as a whole made up of many propositions; but Religion has to do with

each of those separate propositions which compose it, and lives and

thrives in the contemplation of them. In them it finds the motives for

devotion and faithful obedience; while theology on the other hand forms

and protects them by virtue of its function of regarding them, not

merely one by one, but as a system of truth.

One other remark is in place here. If the separate articles of the

Athanasian Creed are so closely connected with vital and personal

religion as I have shown them to be, if they supply motives on which a

man may act, if they determine the state of mind, the special thoughts,

affections, and habits, which he carries with him from this world to

the next, is there cause to wonder, that the Creed should proclaim

aloud, that those who are not internally such as Christ, by means

of it, came to make them, are not capable of the heaven to which He

died to bring them? Is not the importance of accepting the dogma the

very explanation of that careful minuteness with which the few simple

truths which compose it are inculcated, are reiterated, in the Creed?

And shall the Church of God, to whom “the dispensation” of the Gospel

is committed, forget the concomitant obligation, “Woe is unto me if I

preach not the Gospel”? Are her ministers by their silence to bring

upon themselves the Prophet’s anathema, “Cursed is he that doth the

work of the Lord deceitfully”? Can they ever forget the lesson conveyed

to them in the Apostle’s protestation, “God is faithful, as our

preaching which was among you was not Yea and Nay.... For we are a good

odour of Christ unto God in them that are in the way of salvation, and

in them that are perishing. For we are not as the many, who adulterate

the word of God; but with sincerity, but as from God, in the presence

of God, so speak we in Christ”?

§ 3. Belief in Dogmatic Theology.

It is a familiar charge against the Catholic Church in the mouths of

her opponents, that she imposes on her children as matters of faith,

not only such dogmas as have an intimate bearing on moral conduct and

character, but a great number of doctrines which none but professed

theologians can understand, and which in consequence do but oppress the

mind, and are the perpetual fuel of controversy. The first who made

this complaint was no less a man than the great Constantine, and on no

less an occasion than the rise of the Arian heresy, which he, as yet

a catechumen, was pleased to consider a trifling and tolerable error.

So, deciding the matter, he wrote at once a letter to Alexander, Bishop

of Alexandria, and to Arius, who was a presbyter in the same city,

exhorting them to drop the matter in dispute, and to live in peace with

one another. He was answered by the meeting of the Council of Nicæa,

and by the insertion of the word “Consubstantial” into the Creed of the

Church.

What the Emperor thought of the controversy itself, that Bishop Jeremy

Taylor thought of the insertion of the “Consubstantial,” viz. that

it was a mischievous affair, and ought never to have taken place. He

thus quotes and comments on the Emperor’s letter: “The Epistle of

Constantine to Alexander and Arius tells the truth, and chides them

both for commencing the question, Alexander for broaching it, Arius

for taking it up. And although this be true, that it had been better

for the Church it had never begun, yet, being begun, what is to be

done with it? Of this also, in that admirable epistle, we have the

Emperor’s judgment (I suppose not without the advice and privity of

Hosius), ... for first he calls it a certain vain piece of a question,

ill begun, and more unadvisedly published,—a question which no law or

ecclesiastical canon defineth; a fruitless contention; the product of

idle brains; a matter so nice, so obscure, so intricate, that it was

neither to be explicated by the clergy nor understood by the people;

a dispute of words, a doctrine inexplicable, but most dangerous when

taught, lest it introduce discord or blasphemy; and, therefore, the

objector was rash, and the answer unadvised, for it concerned not the

substance of faith or the worship of God, nor the chief commandment

of Scripture; and, therefore, why should it be the matter of discord?

for though the matter be grave, yet, because neither necessary nor

explicable, the contention is trifling and toyish.... So that the

matter being of no great importance, but vain and a toy in respect

of the excellent blessings of peace and charity, it were good that

Alexander and Arius should leave contending, keep their opinions to

themselves, ask each other forgiveness, and give mutual toleration.(4)”

Moreover, Taylor is of opinion that “they both did believe One God,

and the Holy Trinity;” an opinion in the teeth of historical fact.

Also he is of opinion, that “that faith is best which hath greatest

simplicity, and that it is better in all cases humbly to submit, than

curiously to inquire and pry into the mystery under the cloud, and to

hazard our faith by improving knowledge.” He is, further, of opinion,

that “if the Nicene Fathers had done so too, possibly the Church would

never have repented it.” He also thinks that their insertion of the

“Consubstantial” into the Creed was a bad precedent.

Whether it was likely to act as a precedent or not, it has not been

so in fact, for fifteen hundred years have passed since the Nicene

Council, and it is the one instance of a scientific word having been

introduced into the Creed from that day to this. And after all,

the word in question has a plain meaning, as the Council used it,

easily stated and intelligible to all; for “consubstantial with the

Father,” means nothing more than “really one with the Father,” being

adopted to meet the evasion of the Arians. The Creed then remains

now what it was in the beginning, a popular form of faith, suited to

every age, class, and condition. Its declarations are categorical,

brief, clear, elementary, of the first importance, expressive of the

concrete, the objects of real apprehension, and the basis and rule

of devotion. As to the proper Nicene formula itself, excepting the

one term “Consubstantial,” it has not a word which does not relate to

the rudimental facts of Christianity. The Niceno-Constantinopolitan

and the various ante-Nicene Symbols, of which the Apostles’ is one,

add summarily one or two notional articles, such as “the communion of

Saints,” and “the forgiveness of sins,” which, however, may be readily

converted into real propositions. On the other hand, one chief dogma,

which is easy to popular apprehension, is necessarily absent from all

of them, the Real Presence; but the omission is owing to the ancient

“Disciplina Arcani,” which withheld the Sacred Mystery from catechumens

and heathen, to whom the Creed was known.

So far the charge which Taylor brings forward has no great

plausibility; but it is not the whole of his case. I cannot deny that

a large and ever-increasing collection of propositions, abstract

notions, not concrete truths, become, by the successive definitions of

Councils, a portion of the _credenda_, and have an imperative claim

upon the faith of every Catholic; and this being the case, it will be

asked me how I am borne out by facts in enlarging, as I have done, on

the simplicity and directness, on the tangible reality, of the Church’s

dogmatic teaching.

I will suppose the objection urged thus:—why has not the Catholic

Church limited her _credenda_ to propositions such as those in her

Creed, concrete and practical, easy of apprehension, and of a character

to win assent? such as “Christ is God;” “This is My Body;” “Baptism

gives life to the soul;” “The Saints intercede for us;” “Death,

judgment, heaven, hell, the four last things;” “There are seven gifts

of the Holy Ghost,” “three theological virtues,” “seven capital sins,”

and the like, as they are found in her catechisms. On the contrary,

she makes it imperative on every one, priest and layman, to profess

as revealed truth all the canons of the Councils, and innumerable

decisions of Popes, propositions so various, so notional, that but few

can know them, and fewer can understand them. What sense, for instance,

can a child or a peasant, nay, or any ordinary Catholic, put upon

the Tridentine Canons, even in translation? such as, “Siquis dixerit

homines sine Christi justitiâ, per quam nobis meruit, justificari, aut

per eam ipsam formaliter justos esse, anathema sit;” or “Siquis dixerit

justificatum peccare, dum intuitu æternæ mercedis bene operatur,

anathema sit.” Or again, consider the very anathema annexed by the

Nicene Council to its Creed, the language of which is so obscure, that

even theologians differ about its meaning. It runs as follows:—“Those

who say that once the Son was not, and before He was begotten He was

not, and that He was made out of that which was not, or who pretend

that He was of other hypostasis or substance, or that the Son of God is

created, mutable, or alterable, the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church

anathematizes.” These doctrinal enunciations are _de fide_; peasants

are bound to believe them as well as controversialists, and to believe

them as truly as they believe that our Lord is God. How then are the

Catholic _credenda_ easy and within reach of all men?

I begin my answer to this objection by recurring to what has already

been said concerning the relation of theology with its notional

propositions to religious and devotional assent. Devotion is excited

doubtless by the plain, categorical truths of revelation, such as the

articles of the Creed; on these it depends; with these it is satisfied.

It accepts them one by one; it is careless about intellectual

consistency; it draws from each of them the spiritual nourishment which

it was intended to supply. Far different, certainly, is the nature and

duty of the intellect. It is ever active, inquisitive, penetrating;

it examines doctrine and doctrine; it compares, contrasts, and forms

them into a science; that science is theology. Now theological

science, being thus the exercise of the intellect upon the _credenda_

of revelation, is, though not directly devotional, at once natural,

excellent, and necessary. It is natural, because the intellect is one

of our highest faculties; excellent, because it is our duty to use

our faculties to the full; necessary, because, unless we apply our

intellect to revealed truth rightly, others will exercise their minds

upon it wrongly. Accordingly, the Catholic intellect makes a survey

and a catalogue of the doctrines contained in the _depositum_ of

revelation, as committed to the Church’s keeping; it locates, adjusts,

defines them each, and brings them together into a whole. Moreover,

it takes particular aspects or portions of them; it analyzes them,

whether into first principles really such, or into hypotheses of an

illustrative character. It forms generalizations, and gives names to

them. All these deductions are true, if rightly deduced, because they

are deduced from what is true; and therefore in one sense they are a

portion of the _depositum_ of faith or _credenda_, while in another

sense they are additions to it: however, additions or not, they have,

I readily grant, the characteristic disadvantage of being abstract and

notional statements.

Nor is this all: error gives opportunity to many more additions than

truth. There is another set of deductions, inevitable also, and also

part or not part of the revealed _credenda_, according as we please

to view them. If a proposition is true, its contradictory is false.

If then a man believes that Christ is God, he believes also, and that

necessarily, that to say He is not God is false, and that those who

so say are in error. Here then again the prospect opens upon us of a

countless multitude of propositions, which in their first elements

are close upon devotional truth,—of groups of propositions, and those

groups divergent, independent, ever springing into life with an

inexhaustible fecundity, according to the ever-germinating forms of

heresy, of which they are the antagonists. These too have their place

in theological science.

Such is theology in contrast to religion; and as follows from the

circumstances of its formation, though some of its statements easily

find equivalents in the language of devotion, the greater number of

them are more or less unintelligible to the ordinary Catholic, as

law-books to the private citizen. And especially those portions of

theology which are the indirect creation, not of orthodox, but of

heretical thought, such as the repudiations of error contained in the

Canons of Councils, of which specimens have been given above, will ever

be foreign, strange, and hard to the pious but uncontroversial mind;

for what have good Christians to do, in the ordinary course of things,

with the subtle hallucinations of the intellect? This is manifest from

the nature of the case; but then the question recurs, why should the

refutations of heresy be our objects of faith? if no mind, theological

or not, can believe what it cannot understand, in what sense can the

Canons of Councils and other ecclesiastical determinations be included

in those _credenda_ which the Church presents to every Catholic as if

apprehensible, and to which every Catholic gives his firm interior

assent?

In solving this difficulty I wish it first observed, that, if it is

the duty of the Church to act as “the pillar and ground of the Truth,”

she is manifestly obliged from time to time, and to the end of time,

to denounce opinions incompatible with that truth, whenever able and

subtle minds in her communion venture to publish such opinions. Suppose

certain Bishops and priests at this day began to teach that Islamism

or Buddhism was a direct and immediate revelation from God, she would

be bound to use the authority which God has given her to declare that

such a proposition will not stand with Christianity, and that those

who hold it are none of hers; and she would be bound to impose such a

declaration on that very knot of persons who had committed themselves

to the novel proposition, in order that, if they would not recant,

they might be separated from her communion, as they were separate

from her faith. In such a case, her masses of population would either

not hear of the controversy, or they would at once take part with

her, and without effort take any test, which secured the exclusion

of the innovators; and she on the other hand would feel that what is

a rule for some Catholics must be a rule for all. Who is to draw the

line between who are to acknowledge it, and who are not? It is plain,

there cannot be two rules of faith in the same communion, or rather,

as the case really would be, an endless variety of rules, coming into

force according to the multiplication of heretical theories, and to

the degrees of knowledge and varieties of sentiment in individual

Catholics. There is but one rule of faith for all; and it would be a

greater difficulty to allow of an uncertain rule of faith, than (if

that was the alternative, as it is not), to impose upon uneducated

minds a profession which they cannot understand.

But it is not the necessary result of unity of profession, nor is it

the fact, that the Church imposes dogmatic statements on the interior

assent of those who cannot apprehend them. The difficulty is removed

by the dogma of the Church’s infallibility, and of the consequent duty

of “implicit faith” in her word. The “One Holy Catholic and Apostolic

Church” is an article of the Creed, and an article, which, inclusive

of her infallibility, all men, high and low, can easily master and

accept with a real and operative assent. It stands in the place of all

abstruse propositions in a Catholic’s mind, for to believe in her word

is virtually to believe in them all. Even what he cannot understand, at

least he can believe to be true; and he believes it to be true because

he believes in the Church.

The _rationale_ of this provision for unlearned devotion is as

follows:—It stands to reason that all of us, learned and unlearned, are

bound to believe the whole revealed doctrine in all its parts and in

all that it implies, according as portion after portion is brought home

to our consciousness as belonging to it; and it also stands to reason,

that a doctrine, so deep and so various, as the revealed _depositum_

of faith, cannot be brought home to us and made our own all at once.

No mind, however large, however penetrating, can directly and fully

by one act understand any one truth, however simple. What can be more

intelligible than that “Alexander conquered Asia,” or that “Veracity

is a duty”? but what a multitude of propositions is included under

either of these theses! still, if we profess either, we profess all

that it includes. Thus, as regards the Catholic Creed, if we really

believe that our Lord is God, we believe all that is meant by such a

belief; or, else, we are not in earnest, when we profess to believe the

proposition. In the act of believing it at all, we forthwith commit

ourselves by anticipation to believe truths which at present we do not

believe, because they have never come before us;—we limit henceforth

the range of our private judgment in prospect by the conditions,

whatever they are, of that dogma. Thus the Arians said that they

believed in our Lord’s divinity, but when they were pressed to confess

His eternity, they denied it: thereby showing in fact that they never

had believed in His divinity at all. In other words, a man who really

believes in our Lord’s proper divinity, believes _implicitè_ in His

eternity.

And so, in like manner, of the whole _depositum_ of faith, or the

revealed word:—if we believe in the revelation, we believe in what is

revealed, in all that is revealed, however it may be brought home to

us, by reasoning or in any other way. He who believes that Christ is

the Truth, and that the Evangelists are truthful, believes all that

He has said through them, though he has only read St. Matthew and has

not read St. John. He who believes in the _depositum_ of Revelation,

believes in all the doctrines of the _depositum_; and since he cannot

know them all at once, he knows some doctrines, and does not know

others; he may know only the Creed, nay, perhaps only the chief

portions of the Creed; but, whether he knows little or much, he has

the intention of believing all that there is to believe, whenever and

as soon as it is brought home to him, if he believes in Revelation at

all. All that he knows now as revealed, and all that he shall know, and

all that there is to know, he embraces it all in his intention by one

act of faith; otherwise, it is but an accident that he believes this or

that, not because it is a revelation. This virtual, interpretative, or

prospective belief is called a believing _implicitè_; and it follows

from this, that, granting that the Canons of Councils and the other

ecclesiastical documents and confessions, to which I have referred, are

really involved in the _depositum_ or revealed word, every Catholic,

in accepting the _depositum_, does _implicitè_ accept those dogmatic

decisions.

I say, “granting these various propositions are virtually contained in

the revealed word,” for this is the only question left; and that it is

to be answered in the affirmative, is clear at once to the Catholic,

from the fact that the Church declares that they really belong to it.

To her is committed the care and the interpretation of the revelation.

The word of the Church is the word of the revelation. That the Church

is the infallible oracle of truth is the fundamental dogma of the

Catholic religion; and “I believe what the Church proposes to be

believed” is an act of real assent, including all particular assents,

notional and real; and, while it is possible for unlearned as well as

learned, it is imperative on learned as well as unlearned. And thus it

is, that by believing the word of the Church _implicitè_, that is, by

believing all that that word does or shall declare itself to contain,

every Catholic, according to his intellectual capacity, supplements

the shortcomings of his knowledge without blunting his real assent to

what is elementary, and takes upon himself from the first the whole

truth of revelation, progressing from one apprehension of it to another

according to his opportunities of doing so.

PART II. ASSENT AND INFERENCE.