V.

It will be observed that for the purposes of this discussion we are on 'dogmatic' ground,--ground, I mean, which leaves systematic philosophical scepticism altogether out of account. The postulate that there is truth, and that it is the destiny of our minds to attain it, we are deliberately resolving to make, though the sceptic will not make it. We part company with him, therefore, absolutely, at this point. But the faith that truth exists, and that our minds can find it, may be held in two ways. We may talk of the _empiricist_ way and of the _absolutist_ way of believing in truth. The absolutists in this matter say that we not only can attain to knowing truth, but we can _know when_ we have attained to knowing it; while the empiricists think that although we may attain it, we cannot infallibly know when. To _know_ is one thing, and to know for certain _that_ we know is another. One may hold to the first being possible without the second; hence the empiricists and the absolutists, although neither of them is a sceptic in the usual philosophic sense of the term, show very different degrees of dogmatism in their lives.

If we look at the history of opinions, we see that the empiricist tendency has largely prevailed in science, while in philosophy the absolutist tendency has had everything its own way. The characteristic sort of happiness, indeed, which philosophies yield has mainly consisted in the conviction felt by each successive school or system that by it bottom-certitude had been attained. "Other philosophies are collections of opinions, mostly false; _my_ philosophy {13} gives standing-ground forever,"--who does not recognize in this the key-note of every system worthy of the name? A system, to be a system at all, must come as a _closed_ system, reversible in this or that detail, perchance, but in its essential features never!

Scholastic orthodoxy, to which one must always go when one wishes to find perfectly clear statement, has beautifully elaborated this absolutist conviction in a doctrine which it calls that of 'objective evidence.' If, for example, I am unable to doubt that I now exist before you, that two is less than three, or that if all men are mortal then I am mortal too, it is because these things illumine my intellect irresistibly. The final ground of this objective evidence possessed by certain propositions is the _adaequatio intellectûs nostri cum rê_. The certitude it brings involves an _aptitudinem ad extorquendum certum assensum_ on the part of the truth envisaged, and on the side of the subject a _quietem in cognitione_, when once the object is mentally received, that leaves no possibility of doubt behind; and in the whole transaction nothing operates but the _entitas ipsa_ of the object and the _entitas ipsa_ of the mind. We slouchy modern thinkers dislike to talk in Latin,--indeed, we dislike to talk in set terms at all; but at bottom our own state of mind is very much like this whenever we uncritically abandon ourselves: You believe in objective evidence, and I do. Of some things we feel that we are certain: we know, and we know that we do know. There is something that gives a click inside of us, a bell that strikes twelve, when the hands of our mental clock have swept the dial and meet over the meridian hour. The greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection: when {14} left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes. When the Cliffords tell us how sinful it is to be Christians on such 'insufficient evidence,' insufficiency is really the last thing they have in mind. For them the evidence is absolutely sufficient, only it makes the other way. They believe so completely in an anti-christian order of the universe that there is no living option: Christianity is a dead hypothesis from the start.