SAYINGS AND ESSAYINGS.
1.
An unproductive truth is none. But there are products which cannot be weighed even in patent scales, nor brought to market.
2.
It is an old discovery that man passes from knowledge to doubt, and thence again attains to knowledge. But it is a vulgar error to suppose that we return not only to the same knowledge, but that in the same forms, and under the same limitations as before.
3.
All religion implies that the universe is a system of essential good, not evil. And this in spite of experience, which acquaints us with nothing but a mixture, in larger or smaller proportion, of good and evil, neither of them at any time pure from some ingredient of the other. Thus the great general axiom of all higher than Pagan religion is the existence of an Absolute which transcends experience. No philosophy which teaches this can, without danger of calumny, be called irreligious.
4.
Of a mere chaos, blank ignorance would be the only corresponding image in the soul. Of a mere hell, an unchecked appetite of hatred would be the proper counterpart in man. All knowledge contradicts the one view; all goodness the other. The energies of life in all men work in opposition to both falsehoods, and take for granted their emptiness. But the clear insight and mature conscientiousness of the wise man realize the complete victory over all doubt of truth, and all self-abandonment to evil.
5.
The true idea of a philosopher, and that which, dimly apprehended, has been the cause of the universal reverence, even if only a reverential hatred, connected with the name, is—a man who discerns an Absolute Truth more clearly than others, and is thus enabled to found on it a scientific, that is, systematic construction of all knowledge. To this idea is directly opposed that of a man whose aim is to establish the uncertainty of all things,—who is certain only that we can know nothing certainly. To this class of thinkers belong not merely Pyrrhonists, that is, the dealers in lazy and captious frivolities of speculation, but all who maintain, however zealously and consistently, that we know nothing beyond appearances—all who teach that truth is endowed with a positive value and certainty, but only in reference to us, who are essentially fallible, as having in ourselves no measure or organ of the absolute. Of such men, Locke, though often inconsistent, and sometimes suggesting a higher belief than he could clearly understand, is, on the whole, the great modern master. But from this, it by no means follows, nor indeed is it at all true, that he and his most decided followers have asserted nothing but error as to the mode in which our conceptions arise, and are associated and generalized. On the contrary, his writings, and those of others who pursue the same method, abound in ingenious and undeniable explanations of many phenomena of consciousness. Their error—when a philosopher of a higher and more genuine school must believe them in error—is in the denial of any deeper ground of conviction in man than that which can be reduced to the impressions of objects, and the manufacture of these into conceptions, and sequences of conceptions.
6.
The belief in an Absolute Truth discernible by man, under whatever conditions, is the common ground of all constructive, all religious philosophies; by which they are contradistinguished from all the schemes which would reduce the objects of knowledge to an accidental and relative medley of facts, and the powers of knowing to implements produced by no previous high necessity of reason, and of which we can only say that here they are—and neither why nor whence. The enquiries of the empirical analyses, pursued, as they may be, with serious devotion to truth, have yet so strong a tendency to deaden and choke up the inlets for all higher suggestions, that the affirmation of an absolute reality discernible by man seems to such a one, when at all accomplished in his own method, no better than the conceits of children
