Part 4 (1/2)
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 a.s.sent then, or Belief, as it may be called, viewed in itself, that is, simply as a.s.sent, 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 pa.s.sions, 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 wis.h.i.+ng either to be a commander or an orator. However, on the whole, broadly contrasting Belief with Notional a.s.sent and with Inference, we shall not, with this explanation, be very wrong in p.r.o.nouncing that acts of Notional a.s.sent and of Inference do not affect our conduct, and acts of Belief, that is, of Real a.s.sent, 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 a.s.sent 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 a.s.sent, 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 pa.s.sions, 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.
I insisted on this marked distinction between Beliefs on the one hand, and Notional a.s.sents 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 ma.s.s of men, and in particular in the lower cla.s.ses of society, by acquaintance with literature and physical science, and through the instrumentality of Mechanics' Inst.i.tutes 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 pa.s.sage which I shall here quote, and which, with whatever differences in terminology, and hardihood of a.s.sertion, befitting the circ.u.mstances of its publication, nay, as far as words go, inaccuracy of theological statement, suitably ill.u.s.trates 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 ma.s.ses, 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 mult.i.tude; 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 n.o.body 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 const.i.tuted, 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 G.o.d'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 a.n.a.lyze 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 a.s.suming 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 a.s.sume, and that a.s.sumption 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 a.s.sumptions 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 a.n.a.lyze 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 const.i.tuted 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 ma.s.s 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 a.s.sertion 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 a.s.sent 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 a.s.sent of the mind to it, as it stands for the one or for the other. To give a real a.s.sent 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 a.s.sent, 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 G.o.d, and of the Divine Trinity in Unity, in their relation to a.s.sent, both notional and real, and princ.i.p.ally to real a.s.sent;-however, I have not yet finished all I have to say by way of introduction.
Now first, my subject is a.s.sent, 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 a.s.sent, 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 G.o.d, but rather what G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d.
There is one G.o.d, such and such in Nature and Attributes.