of intellectual
responsibility and truthfulness and coherency quick and wakeful among
us? Because so many people, even among those who might be expected to
know better, insist on the futile attempt to reconcile all those
courses, instead of fixing on one and steadily abiding in it. They speak
as if they affirmed, and they act as if they denied, and in their hearts
they cherish a slovenly sort of suspicion that we can neither deny nor
affirm. It may be said that this comes to much the same thing as if they
had formally decided in the last or neutral sense. It is not so. This
illegitimate union of three contradictories fritters character away,
breaks it up into discordant parts, and dissolves into mercurial
fluidity that leavening sincerity and free and cheerful boldness, which
come of harmonious principles of faith and action, and without which men
can never walk as confident lovers of justice and truth.
Ambrose's famous saying, that 'it hath not pleased the Lord to give his
people salvation in dialectic,' has a profound meaning far beyond its
application to theology. It is deeply true that our ruling convictions
are less the product of ratiocination than of sympathy, imagination,
usage, tradition. But from this it does not follow that the reasoning
faculties are to be further discouraged. On the contrary, just because
the other elements are so strong that they can be trusted to take care
of themselves, it is expedient to give special countenance to the
intellectual habits, which alone can check and rectify the constantly
aberrating tendencies of sentiment on the one side, and custom on the
other. This remark brings us to another type, of whom it is not
irrelevant to speak shortly in this place. The consequences of the
strength of the political spirit are not all direct, nor does its
strength by any means spring solely from its indulgence to the less
respectable elements of character, such as languor, extreme pliableness,
superficiality. On the contrary, it has an indirect influence in
removing the only effective restraint on the excesses of some qualities
which, when duly directed and limited, are among the most precious parts
of our mental constitution. The political spirit is the great force in
throwing love of truth and accurate reasoning into a secondary place.
The evil does not stop here. This achievement has indirectly
countenanced the postponement of intellectual methods, and the
diminution of the sense of int
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