Читать книгу The Kernel and the Husk: Letters on Spiritual Christianity онлайн

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What then is the real proof that we are right in using the word “I” and in distinguishing ourselves from other objects which we call external? There is no proof at all except that, first, we are led to this way of looking at things by Nature and Imagination, and secondly, this way of looking at things works best. The “I-view” is better fitted than the “machine-view” to develop in us the faculties of judgment and self-control, to give us a sense of responsibility and a capability of amendment, and to make us ultimately more hopeful and more active. So too, the belief in “cause and effect” works better than a mere mental record of past antecedents and sequences, accompanied by a blank and strictly logical neutrality of mind as to what will happen in the future. Faith in “cause and effect” is the foundation of all stable life and all regular progress alike in the individual and in the state. The unfaithful unbeliever in causality is the Esau, both in the moral and in the intellectual world, the happy-go-lucky hunter who depends on stray venison and refuses to resort to system in order to make a sure provision for the needs of the future; the believer is the quiet plodding Jacob who has his goats in the fold where he knows he can find them when wanted. The unbeliever is the unimaginative savage who has not faith enough to see the harvest in the seed; the believer is the man of civilisation who can trust Nature through six long months of waiting and can say to her, not in the language of hope, “do ut des,” but in the language of conviction, “do daturae.” Nevertheless, convenient as these ideas may be for our comfort, nay, though they may be even necessary for our existence, we are bound to recollect that they are merely ideas. Like the ideas of force, cause, effect, necessity, so the idea of “I,”—though produced with the aid of experience and tested by appeal to experience and reason—appears to be nothing but a child of the Imagination, and a foster-child of Faith.