Faith may be defined as fidelity to our own being--so far as such
being is not and cannot become an object of the senses; and hence, by
clear inference or implication, to being generally, as far as the same
is not the object of the senses: and again to whatever is affirmed or
understood as the condition, or concomitant, or consequence of the
same. This will be best explained by an instance or example. That I am
conscious of something within me peremptorily commanding me to do unto
others as I would they should do unto me;--in other words, a
categorical (that is, primary and unconditional) imperative;--that the
maxim (_regula maxima_, or supreme rule) of my actions, both inward
and outward, should be such as I could, without any contradiction
arising therefrom, will to be the law of all moral and rational
beings;--this, I say, is a fact of which I am no less conscious
(though in a different way), nor less assured, than I am of any
appearance presented by my outward senses. Nor is this all; but in the
very act of being conscious of this in my own nature, I know that it
is a fact of which all men either are or ought to be conscious;--a
fact, the ignorance of which constitutes either the non-personality of
the ignorant, or the guilt, in which latter case the ignorance is
equivalent to knowledge wilfully darkened. I know that I possess this
knowledge as a man, and not as Samuel Taylor Coleridge; hence, knowing
that consciousness of this fact is the root of all other
consciousness, and the only practical contradistinction of man from
the brutes, we name it the conscience; by the natural absence or
presumed presence of which, the law, both divine and human, determines
whether X Y Z be a thing or a person:--the conscience being that which
never to have had places the objects in the same order of things as
the brutes, for example, idiots; and to have lost which implies either
insanity or apostasy. Well, this we have affirmed is a fact of which
every honest man is as fully assured as of his seeing, hearing, or
smelling. But though the former assurance does not differ from the
latter in the degree, it is altogether diverse in the kind; the senses
being morally passive, while the conscience is essentially connected
with the will, though not always, nor, indeed, in any case, except
after frequent attempts and aversions of will, dependent on the
choice. Thence we call the presentations of the senses impressions,
those of the conscience commands or dictates. In the senses we find
our receptivity, and as far as our personal being is concerned, we are
passive;--but in the fact of the conscience we are not only agents,
but it is by this alone that we know ourselves to be such; nay, that
our very passiveness in this latter is an act of passiveness, and that
we are patient (_patientes_)--not, as in the other case, _simply_
passive.
The result is, the consciousness of responsibility; and the proof is
afforded by the inward experience of the diversity between regret and
remorse.
If I have sound ears, and my companion speaks to me with a due
proportion of voice, I may persuade him that I did not hear, but
cannot deceive myself. But when my conscience speaks to me, I can, by
repeated efforts, render myself finally insensible; to which add this
other difference, namely, that to make myself deaf is one and the same
thing with making my conscience dumb, till at length I became
unconscious of my conscience. Frequent are the instances in which it
is suspended, and, as it were, drowned in the inundation of the
appetites, passions, and imaginations, to which I have resigned
myself, making use of my will in order to abandon my free-will; and
there are not, I fear, examples wanting of the conscience being
utterly destroyed, or of the passage of wickedness into madness;--that
species of madness, namely, in which the reason is lost. For so long
as the reason continues, so long must the conscience exist, either as
a good conscience or as a bad conscience.
It appears then, that even the very first step, that the initiation of
the process, the becoming conscious of a conscience, partakes of the
nature of an act. It is an act in and by which we take upon ourselves
an allegiance, and consequently the obligation of fealty; and this
fealty or fidelity implying the power of being unfaithful, it is the
first and fundamental sense of Faith. It is likewise the commencement
of experience, and the result of all other experience. In other words,
conscience, in this its simplest form, must be supposed in order to
consciousness, that is, to human consciousness. Brutes may be, and
are, scious, but those beings only, who have an I, _scire possunt hoc
vel illud una cum seipsis_; that is, _conscire vel scire aliquid
mecum_, or to know a thing in relation to myself, and in the act of
knowing myself as acted upon by that something.
Now the third person could never have been distinguished from the
first but by means of the second. There can be no He without a
previous Thou. Much less could an I exist for us, except as it exists
during the suspension of the will, as in dreams; and the nature of
brutes may be best understood by considering them as somnambulists.
This is a deep meditation, though the position is capable of the
strictest proof,--namely, that there can be no I without a Thou, and
that a Thou is only possible by an equation in which I is taken as
equal to Thou, and yet not the same. And this, again, is only possible
by putting them in opposition as correspondent opposites, or
correlatives. In order to this, a something must be affirmed in the
one, which is rejected in the other, and this something is the will. I
do not will to consider myself as equal to myself, for in the very act
of constructing myself _I_, I take it as the same, and therefore as
incapable of comparison, that is, of any application of the will. If
then, I _minus_ the will be the _thesis_;[183] Thou _plus_ will must
be the _antithesis_, but the equation of Thou with I, by means of a
free act, negativing the sameness in order to establish the equality,
is the true definition of conscience. But as without a Thou there can
be no You, so without a You no They, These, or Those; and as all these
conjointly form the materials and subjects of consciousness, and the
conditions of experience, it is evident that conscience is the root of
all consciousness,--_à fortiori_, the precondition of all
experience,--and that the conscience cannot have been in its first
revelation deduced from experience.
Soon, however, experience comes into play. We learn that there are
other impulses beside the dictates of conscience; that there are
powers within us and without us ready to usurp the throne of
conscience, and busy in tempting us to transfer our allegiance. We
learn that there are many things contrary to conscience, and therefore
to be rejected and utterly excluded, and many that can coexist with
its supremacy only by being subjugated, as beasts of burthen; and
others, again, as, for instance, the social tendernesses and
affections, and the faculties and excitations of the intellect, which
must be at least subordinated. The preservation of our loyalty and
fealty under these trials, and against these rivals, constitutes the
second sense of Faith; and we shall need but one more point of view to
complete its full import. This is the consideration of what is
presupposed in the human conscience. The answer is ready. As in the
equation of the correlative I and Thou, one of the twin constituents
is to be taken as _plus_ will, the other as _minus_ will, so is it
here: and it is obvious that the reason or _super_-individual of each
man, whereby he is a man, is the factor we are to take as _minus_
will; and that the individual will or personalizing principle of free
agency (arbitrement is Milton's word) is the factor marked _plus_
will;--and, again, that as the identity or coinherence of the absolute
will and the reason, is the peculiar character of God; so is the
_synthesis_ of the individual will and the common reason, by the
subordination of the former to the latter, the only possible likeness
or image of the _prothesis_, or identity, and therefore the required
proper character of man. Conscience, then, is a witness respecting the
identity of the will and the reason effected by the self-subordination
of the will, or self, to the reason, as equal to, or representing, the
will of God. But the personal will is a factor in other moral
_syntheses_; for example, appetite _plus_ personal will = sensuality;
lust of power, _plus_ personal will, = ambition, and so on, equally as
in the _synthesis_, on which the conscience is grounded. Not this,
therefore, but the other _synthesis_, must supply the specific
character of the conscience; and we must enter into an analysis of
reason. Such as the nature and objects of the reason are, such must be
the functions and objects of the conscience. And the former we shall
best learn by recapitulating those constituents of the total man which
are either contrary to, or disparate from, the reason.
I. Reason, and the proper objects of reason, are wholly alien from
sensation. Reason is supersensual, and its antagonist is appetite, and
the objects of appetite the lust of the flesh.
II. Reason and its objects do not appertain to the world of the
senses, inward or outward; that is, they partake not of sense or
fancy. Reason is super-sensuous, and here its antagonist is the lust
of the eye.
III. Reason and its objects are not things of reflection, association,
discursion, discourse in the old sense of the word as opposed to
intuition; "discursive or intuitive," as Milton has it. Reason does
not indeed necessarily exclude the finite, either in time or in space,
but it includes them _eminenter_. Thus the prime mover of the material
universe is affirmed to contain all motion as its cause, but not to
be, or to suffer, motion in itself.
Reason is not the faculty of the finite. But here I must premise the
following. The faculty of the finite is that which reduces the
confused impressions of sense to their essential forms,--quantity,
quality, relation, and in these action and reaction, cause and
effect, and the like; thus raises the materials furnished by the
senses and sensations into objects of reflection, and so makes
experience possible. Without it, man's representative powers would be
a delirium, a chaos, a scudding cloudage of shapes; and it is
therefore most appropriately called the understanding, or
substantiative faculty. Our elder metaphysicians, down to Hobbes
inclusively, called this likewise discourse, _discursus_, _discursio_,
from its mode of action as not staying at any one object, but running,
as it were, to and fro to abstract, generalize, and classify. Now when
this faculty is employed in the service of the pure reason, it brings
out the necessary and universal truths contained in the infinite into
distinct contemplation by the pure act of the sensuous imagination,
that is, in the production of the forms of space and time abstracted
from all corporeity, and likewise of the inherent forms of the
understanding itself abstractedly from the consideration of
particulars, as in the case of geometry, numeral mathematics,
universal logic, and pure metaphysics. The discursive faculty then
becomes what our Shakespeare, with happy precision, calls "discourse
of reason."
We will now take up our reasoning again from the words "motion in
itself."
It is evident, then, that the reason as the irradiative power, and the
representative of the infinite, judges the understanding as the
faculty of the finite, and cannot without error be judged by it. When
this is attempted, or when the understanding in its _synthesis_ with
the personal will, usurps the supremacy of the reason, or affects to
supersede the reason, it is then what St. Paul calls the mind of the
flesh (φρονημα σαρκος), or the wisdom of this world. The result is,
that the reason is super-finite; and in this relation, its antagonist
is the insubordinate understanding, or mind of the flesh.
IV. Reason, as one with the absolute will (_In the beginning was the
Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God_), and
therefore for man the certain representative of the will of God, is
above the will of man as an individual will. We have seen in III. that
it stands in antagonism to all mere particulars; but here it stands in
antagonism to all mere individual interests as so many selves, to the
personal will as seeking its objects in the manifestation of itself
for itself--_sit pro ratione voluntas_;--whether this be realized with
adjuncts, as in the lust of the flesh, and in the lust of the eye; or
without adjuncts, as in the thirst and pride of power, despotism,
egoistic ambition. The fourth antagonist, then, of reason, is the lust
of the will.
Corollary. Unlike a million of tigers, a million of men is very
different from a million times one man. Each man in a numerous society
is not only coexistent with, but virtually organized into, the
multitude of which he is an integral part. His _idem_ is modified by
the _alter_. And there arise impulses and objects from this
_synthesis_ of the _alter et idem_, myself and my neighbour. This,
again, is strictly analogous to what takes places in the vital
organization of the individual man. The cerebral system of the nerves
has its correspondent _antithesis_ in the abdominal system: but hence
arises a _synthesis_ of the two in the pectoral system as the
intermediate, and, like a drawbridge, at once conductor and boundary.
In the latter, as objectized by the former, arise the emotions,
affections, and, in one word, the passions, as distinguished from the
cognitions and appetites. Now, the reason has been shown to be
super-individual, generally, and therefore not less so when the form
of an individualization subsists in the _alter_, than when it is
confined to the _idem_; not less when the emotions have their
conscious or believed object in another, than when their subject is
the individual personal self. For though these emotions, affections,
attachments, and the like, are the prepared ladder by which the lower
nature is taken up into, and made to partake of, the highest room,--as
we are taught to give a feeling of reality to the higher _per medium
commune_ with the lower, and thus gradually to see the reality of the
higher (namely, the objects of reason), and finally to know that the
latter are indeed, and pre-eminently real, as if you love your earthly
parents whom you see, by these means you will learn to love your
Heavenly Father who is invisible;--yet this holds good only so far as
the reason is the president, and its objects the ultimate aim; and
cases may arise in which the Christ as the Logos, or Redemptive
Reason, declares, _He that loves father or mother more than me, is
not worthy of me_; nay, he that can permit his emotions to rise to an
equality with the universal reason, is in enmity with that reason.
Here, then, reason appears as the love of God; and its antagonist is
the attachment to individuals wherever it exists in diminution of, or
in competition with, the love which is reason.
In these five paragraphs I have enumerated and explained the several
powers or forces belonging or incidental to human nature, which in all
matters of reason the man is bound either to subjugate or subordinate
to reason. The application to Faith follows of its own accord. The
first or most indefinite sense of faith is fidelity: then fidelity
under previous contract or particular moral obligation. In this sense
faith is fealty to a rightful superior: faith is the duty of a
faithful subject to a rightful governor. Then it is allegiance in
active service; fidelity to the liege lord under circumstances, and
amid the temptations of usurpation, rebellion, and intestine discord.
Next we seek for that rightful superior on our duties to whom all our
duties to all other superiors, on our faithfulness to whom all our
bounden relations to all other objects of fidelity, are founded. We
must inquire after that duty in which all others find their several
degrees and dignities, and from which they derive their obligative
force. We are to find a superior, whose rights, including our duties,
are presented to the mind in the very idea of that Supreme Being,
whose sovereign prerogatives are predicates implied in the subjects,
as the essential properties of a circle are co-assumed in the first
assumption of a circle, consequently underived, unconditional, and as
rationally unsusceptible, so probably prohibitive, of all further
question. In this sense, then, faith is fidelity, fealty, allegiance
of the moral nature to God, in opposition to all usurpation, and in
resistance to all temptation to the placing any other claim above or
equal with our fidelity to God.
The will of God is the last ground and final aim of all our duties,
and to that the whole man is to be harmonized by subordination,
subjugation, or suppression alike in commission and omission. But the
will of God, which is one with the supreme intelligence, is revealed
to man through the conscience. But the conscience, which consists in
an inappellable bearing-witness to the truth and reality of our
reason, may legitimately be construed with the term reason, so far as
the conscience is prescriptive; while as approving or condemning, it
is the consciousness of the subordination or insubordination, the
harmony or discord, of the personal will of man to and with the
representative of the will of God. This brings me to the last and
fullest sense of Faith, that is, the obedience of the individual will
to the reason, in the lust of the flesh as opposed to the
supersensual; in the lust of the eye as opposed to the supersensuous;
in the pride of the understanding as opposed to the infinite; in the
φρονημα σαρκος in contrariety to the spiritual truth; in the lust
of the personal will as opposed to the absolute and universal; and in
the love of the creature, as far as it is opposed to the love which is
one with the reason, namely, the love of God.
Thus, then, to conclude. Faith subsists in the _synthesis_ of the
Reason and the individual Will. By virtue of the latter, therefore, it
must be an energy, and, inasmuch as it relates to the whole moral man,
it must be exerted in each and all of his constituents or incidents,
faculties and tendencies;--it must be a total, not a partial--a
continuous, not a desultory or occasional--energy. And by virtue of
the former, that is, Reason, Faith must be a Light, a form of knowing,
a beholding of Truth. In the incomparable words of the Evangelist,
therefore,--_Faith must be a Light originating in the Logos, or the
substantial Reason, which is co-eternal and one with the Holy Will,
and which Light is at the same time the Life of men._ Now, as _Life_
is here the sum or collective of all moral and spiritual acts, in
suffering, doing, and being, so is Faith the source and the sum, the
energy and the principle of the fidelity of Man to God, by the
subordination of his human Will, in all provinces of his nature, to
his Reason, as the sum of spiritual Truth, representing and
manifesting the Will Divine.
[183] There are four kinds of _Theses_, Θεσεις, puttings or
placings.
1. _Prothesis._
2. _Thesis._ 3. _Antithesis._
4. _Synthesis._
A and B are said to be thesis and antithesis, when if A be the
_thesis_, B is the _antithesis_ to A, and if B be made the _thesis_,
then A becomes the _antithesis_. Thus making me the _thesis_, you are
thou to me, but making you the _thesis_, I become thou to you.
_Synthesis_ is a putting together of the two, so that a third
something is generated. Thus the _synthesis_ of hydrogen and oxygen is
water, a third something, neither hydrogen nor oxygen. But the blade
of a knife and its handle when put together do not form a _synthesis_,
but still remain a blade and a handle. And as a _synthesis_ is a unity
that results from the union of two things, so a _prothesis_ is a
primary unity that gives itself forth into two things.