Reason and Faith [pp. 648-685]

Reason and Faith.
the philosophy of the conditioned, developed from Kant's
antinomies, that the infinite is that which includes in itself all
actual and all possible existence; that therefore an infinite
God is incompatible with finite or created beings; that creation
is impossible, and pantheism the only possibility conceivable
by the human intellect, is a very different thing. Men are
exceedingly apt to take partial views of things, and uncon sciously shut their eyes to whatever does not accord with their
own likes and prejudices, and to exalt the tenets of their own
clan, party or sect, or their own pet conceits and logical
quibbles, to the dignity of intuitive truths, about which they
are impatient of all doubt and controversy. Unaquaeque gens
id legem naturae putat quod didicit. On the other hand,
fierce partizans will often deny even intuitive truths which
militate against their favourite dogmas. Besides all this,
there are not wanting those who, pleading a quasi, if not real,
sanction from Locke, deny all intuitive truths; assert that the
mind is a tabula rasa, without any original ideas or first principles, potential or actual, and that its only resource for
general truths is by induction from the facts of its outward
and inward experience. For the elucidation of such questions,
and the settlement of such controversies, the inductive investigation of our intuitions is indispensable. And to this work,
Dr. McCosh has addressed himself with signal success.
A chief point which he emphasizes is the manner in which
our intuitions first operate and display themselves. They
always first perceive the truths they discern, not in the abstract, but in the concrete, as qualities of individual objects
or actions. These are afterwards, having been observed in connection with a number of such individual things, generalized
and formalized into abstract propositions or principles, whose
truth the mind sees intuitively as soon as they are stated.
That no two straight lines can enclose a space, that no two
bodies can occupy the same space at the same moment, that
worship is right and blasphemy wicked, this and all else the
like is first seen concretely in individual cases. The observation of these qualities in such instances suggests and induces
the statement of the universal abstract principle, which is seen
to be true as soon as stated, by its own self-evidencing light.
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