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

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It is on the basis of the Imagination, aided by Experience and Reason, that we establish our conviction of the permanence of the simplest Laws of Nature. This I have touched on in one of my previous letters. The Memory, recalling the sight of many stones falling to the ground, comes perhaps to the aid of Attention, as a child notes a particular stone falling to the ground, and suggests to the child’s imitative nature an experimental attempt to make a stone fall to the ground. The child does it once and again, as often as he likes. Then, as a result of this unvarying experience, there springs up in the child’s mind a picture in which he sees reproduced an apparently endless vista of his sensations as to stone-falling and its antecedents, a picture not confined, like the pictures of Memory, to past time, but including future as well as past and present; and thus the childish thought leaps upwards all at once to the conception of that sublime word “always,” and dares to promulgate its first universal proposition, and attains to the definite certainty of a Law of Nature.