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

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But perhaps by “prove,” you mean “absolutely demonstrate;” and your thesis is that “it is immoral to believe what cannot be absolutely demonstrated;” in that case I am obliged to ask you how you can repeat such cant, such a mere parrot cry, with a grave face.

Do you not see that, as soon as you conceded (as I understand you to have done) that our belief in the Laws of Nature is based upon the Imagination, you virtually conceded the validity of a kind of proof in which faith and hope play a large part, and in which demonstration is impossible. “Demonstration” applies to mathematics and to syllogisms where the premises are granted, though it is also sometimes loosely used of proof conveyed by personal observation; “proof” applies to the other affairs of life. Demonstration appeals very largely (not entirely, as I have shown above, but very largely) to Reason; proof is largely based on Faith. Having defined “angles,” “triangles,” “base,” and “isosceles,” and having been granted certain axioms and postulates, I can demonstrate that the angles at the basis of an isosceles triangle are equal to one another; but I cannot “demonstrate” that, if I throw a stone in the air, it will come down again, though I am perfectly convinced that it will come down, and though I commonly assert that I can “prove” that it will come down.