sions is true and real. In vision, for example, the man sees the external objects precisely as the eye presents them. In the seeming convergence of parallel rails his eye reports truly the physical reality of the lessening of the angle of vision with increasing distance. His intellect interprets the sensation. If there is any error it is not in the sensation but in his interpretation of it. And this error does not persist. The belief that the heavenly bodies move around the earth or that the firmament is a solid dome, has not persisted. IV. The fourth criterion of primitive knowledge is the consistency of itself and its necessary outcome with all knowledge. This criterion is of great practical importance in scientific and all other reflective thought. It has recently been said, "Internal consistency and harmony was the only test of truth known to antique thought; and it supplemented the appeal to actual authority characteristic of mediæval thought."* This is an example of a common style of remark depreciating ancient and especially medieval thought. Such remarks grossly misrepresent the facts. And the depreciation of this criterion as of little value is contradicted by the continual use of it in modern thought. The verification on which science insists so strenuously as necessary to establish an hypothesis is nothing but ascertaining the consistency of a conclusion of reflective thought with the results of observation. It is true, the mere self-consistency of a conception does not prove that it is a conception of reality. I may form a consistent theory of the government of fairies by Oberon and Titania. It is consistent with all known facts that beyond Neptune there may be a planet belonging to the solar system. These are only creations of imagination or conjectural possibilities, and do not present themselves in consciousness as knowledge. Mere consistency of thought cannot originate knowledge, but it may test it. Man has varied powers or faculties, and knowledge obtained through one faculty or from one sphere of investigation must be consistent with knowledge obtained from every other. This consistency is a criterion of knowledge. What I perceive by the eye I test by the hand. The correctness of an arithmetical division is tested by multiplication. If a necessary inference from a supposed principle is false, it compels us to doubt either the truth of the principle or the correctness of our reasoning from it. Speculative conclusions must be tested by observed facts. If an observed fact contradicts an accepted conclusion of science, the observation must be repeated and corrected or the scientific conclusion must be modified. The whole process of verification is an ascertaining of the consistency or inconsistency of the results attained by one intellectual power or process and from one sphere of inquiry with those at* The Value of Life: A Reply to Mallock, p. 73. tained from others. And so far as from all we obtain successively the same results, our knowledge is tested and confirmed. The same criterion may be applied in testing what is primitive knowledge. If the intuitions of reason contradict each other they ar proved false and at the same time reason itself is proved untrustworthy. If what seems to be primitive knowledge and its necessary outcome is inconsistent with itself or with other knowledge it is not primitive knowledge. But the criterion is not merely negative. If primitive knowledge is found to be in harmony with experience, if the first principles which regulate thought do not lead us in our reasonings to error and contradiction but to conclusions which all our powers in concurrence acknowledge as truth, if what we in our philosophy hold to be primitive knowledge conditioning experience, is in harmony with our actual experience, then we may properly say that it is continually verified by experience. It is consistent with itself and with all knowledge. It must be observed respecting the four criteria, that the mind does not consciously appeal to them in the primitive acts of knowing, but only in reflection on its own acts and in answer to the question whether knowledge is real. If then it is seen that the knowledge stands out clear and distinct in its own self-evidence, that it is impossible to think the contrary as real, that the belief persists in spontaneously regulating thought and action in the face of all speculative objections, and that it not only does not contradict any other knowledge, but is accordant with all our thinking and experience, it is accepted as real knowledge. If not, knowledge is impossible. 8. Knowing, Feeling and Willing. I. Knowing, feeling and willing are distinct but not separate. They are not separated in human experience. In every feeling there must be knowledge or belief. Every act of will involves feeling which is its motive, and knowledge, which is the light in which the determination is made and without which freedom of determination is impossible. And knowledge remains but nascent and cannot be apprehended in its complete significance until it reveals itself in feeling and discharges itself in voluntary action. The Speculative Reason cannot find the content and significance of its own necessary ideas nor solve its own necessary problems until it becomes the Practical Reason. Dean Swift compares the man of culture to the bee, which "visits all the flowers of the field and of the garden and by an universal search, much study and distinction of things, brings home honey and . . thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest things, wax. sweetness and light."* Matthew Arnold has popularized Swift's conception of culture as comprising sweetness and light-the light of knowledge and the sweetness of right feeling, action and character. These are necessary elements of culture because knowing, feeling and willing are indissolubly united in man's personality; they exist simultaneously in the same mental state, and no one of them can in fact complete itself without the others. The light is for no purpose without the sweetness, and the sweetness runs to waste and disappears without the light. But while, in human experience, knowing, feeling and willing are never separated, they are distinguished. They are not disparted organs or faculties; but they are different aspects of the same mental states, different poles of the same mental energy, different phases of the same indivisible personality. They are clearly presented in consciousness and recognised in thought as different. The difference of knowing, feeling and willing is apprehended by every mind and is at the basis of all reflection on the mental processes and powers. To deny it is to make all psychology impossible and all language respecting mental acts and processes unintelligible. II. True philosophy must recognize both the inseparableness and the distinctness of the three. Any theory of knowledge which overlooks either the one or the other is false and necessarily prolific of errors. man. 1. At present perhaps the more common tendency is to overlook the close factual connection of the speculative intellect with the practical side of human nature, to insist that true knowledge can be acquired only in the complete isolation of the intellectual process from all feeling, volition and choice, and so to exalt the speculative intellect at the expense of the moral, the aesthetic, the religious and the practical in This tendency may explain some of the defects and errors of psychology, metaphysics and Christian theology; it is even more obtrusive and more potent for evil in the materialistic speculations which swarm, like poisonous flies, around the head of "star-eyed science." I will exemplify it in Christian theology. Some theologians have insisted that the Spirit of God can influence the human soul only by presenting truth to the intellect. An eminent divine preaching in Boston many years ago declared: "If I could present truth to the mind as clearly as the Holy Spirit does, I could convert souls as easily as He." This supposes man to be a creature of intellect alone, whose action is excited and directed invariably in a sort of mechanical way by processes of logic. But in a multitude of cases every man acts from feeling with scarcely the consciousness of belief or thought. If he meets a tiger in a jungle, his fear makes him run without a process Battle of the Books; Swift's Works, Vol. i. pp. 203, 205. of reasoning. So preaching when addressed exclusively to the intellect is dry, while eloquence touches the whole man and in enlightening the intellect fires also the heart. And what is the power of music? Why does a cheerful face diffuse its sunshine, and gloomy looks spread like a chilling mist to all? What is the power of a commanding presence, or of the self-possession and courage of a single person in a time of danger and general consternation? What did General Sheridan impart to his fleeing army in Virginia, when his mere coming into sight changed defeat into victory? The power of mere argument in determining the opinions, conduct and character of individuals, the courses of history and the development of civilization has been greatly overrated. The element of feeling commonly enters into the formation of opinions. Men adopt opinions, not because they have logically proved them, but because they suit their feelings, are in harmony with their characters and their views of human life and accordant with their chosen ends. Nor must opinion be erroneous because founded on the feelings. If the feelings on which it is founded are right, the opinion will be likely to be right. If a pure woman passes on the sidewalk the entrance to a by-way to hell, whence come up the reek of the stews, the babble of drunkards, and the words of obscenity and profaneness, her pure feelings drive her away before she has time to think. A pure spirit in heaven may follow his feelings as safely as his judgment. There are as many erroneous opinions founded on false logic as on wrong feelings. Men do not commonly believe in God because they have proved his existence, but because their whole spiritual being cries. out for him, is smothered without him, and refreshed, inspired and ennobled by his presence. The soul responds to the touch of the divine as the string of the viol to the touch of the musician. An atheist, who had been pressed with many an argument without conviction, was one day felling a tree. As the tree came crashing down, these words, from the memory of childhood, flashed on his mind: "As the tree falleth so it shall lie; and as death leaves us so judgment must find us.” It awakened his consciousness of responsibility and of sin; and he found no peace till he found it in faith in God. A most reasonable conversion, though unreasoning. For whatever may awaken the spiritual in the constitution of man awakens it to the consciousness of God. Hence the unexpected and seemingly inexplicable breaking down of religious unbelief in the great crises of life. When the shadow of death is glooming on the soul and the body is sinking to its last sleep, the spirit awakens and finds itself, as it always must when it awakens, face to face with God. The intellect, therefore, is not the only inlet by which the truth can enter and influence a man. His soul is like a great cathedral admit ting light through many windows, each stained its own color and having its own pictures; yet not falsifying the light, but showing in the varying colors its real elements and its diversified richness and beauty. Therefore the only true philosophy is that which germinates from the entire constitution of man and grows with the normal growth of his entire life. This is the only philosophy which can safely be the guide of life. A French writer has said regretfully, "There is in each of us a poet that died young." It is the characteristic of genius that this inborn poet lives the whole life long with all the dewy freshness of youth. It is the characteristic of Christianity that passing through the intellect it quickens and keeps fresh all the purest and most beautiful sentiments of humanity, all that is noblest and most divine in the spi ritual life, so that always in the freshness of spiritual youth, "as little children" we enter into the kingdom of God. 2. Errors also arise from identifying knowing, feeling and willing, or obscuring the difference between them. These errors do not arise so much from definite denials of the difference, as from admissions or attempted explanations or lines of thought and argument which imply that there is no difference. Such, for example, is the assertion that choice is a judgment of the intellect; and such is the use of the popular saying, that feeling is a kind of knowing, as if it were a philosophical definition. In respect to errors of this class two points must be noticed. The first point is that in cases of which we say the feeling is the knowing, there is a belief or knowledge present with the feeling. If fear moves a man to run away from a tiger, the fear involves a belief or knowledge that the tiger is a dangerous beast. If a pure woman is driven by her feelings away from impurity, she knows what impurity is and knows that she has come near it. And the knowledge in these cases is just as different from the feeling as if it were separated from it by some hours. In all these cases the knowledge, in the order of dependence and thought, is presupposed in the feeling. How can one fear if he has no knowledge of danger? It is only in instinct that the feeling and action precede the knowledge. And evolutionists suppose that in instinct the knowledge originally preceded the feeling and action, but by heredity through many generations the knowledge or belief has become. merged and lost in the feeling. The other point to be noticed is that feeling and willing cannot in themselves be ultimate criteria of knowledge. If one person lives for sensual gratification and another for the service of God and man in obedience to the law of love, their respective feelings will lead them to different lines of conduct, to different views of life and to different opinions. Feeling may guide to right action, and opinions founded on |