otnote A: _In Memoriam_.]

What, then, I have now to ask, is the meaning and value of this appeal
to emotion? Can love, or emotion in any of its forms, reveal truths to
man which his intellect cannot discover? If so, how? If not, how shall
we account for the general conviction of good men that it can? We have,
in a word, either to justify the appeal to the heart, by explaining how
the heart may utter truths that are hidden from reason; or else to
account for the illusion, by which religious emotion seems to reveal
such truths.

The first requirement is shown to be unreasonable by the very terms in
which it is made. The intuitive insight of faith, the immediate
conviction of the heart, cannot render, and must not try to render, any
account of itself. Proof is a process; but there is no process in this
direct conviction of truth. Its assertion is just the denial of process;
it is a repudiation of all connections; in such a faith of feeling there
are no cob-web lines relating fact to fact, which doubt could break.
Feeling is the immediate unity of the subject and object. I am pained,
because I cannot rid myself of an element which is already within me; I
am lifted into the emotion of pleasure, or happiness, or bliss, by the
consciousness that I am already at one with an object that fulfils my
longings and satisfies my needs. Hence, there seems to be ground for
saying that, in this instance, the witness cannot lie; for it cannot go
before the fact, as it is itself the effect of the fact. If the emotion
is pleasurable it is the consciousness of the unity within; if it is
painful, of the disunity. In feeling, I am absolutely with myself; and
there seems, therefore, to be no need of attempting to justify, by means
of reason, a faith in God which manifests itself in emotion. The emotion
itself is its own sufficient witness, a direct result of the intimate
union of man with the object of devotion. Nay, we may go further, and
say that the demand is an unjust one, which betrays ignorance of the
true nature of moral intuition and religious feeling.

I am not concerned to deny the truth that lies in the view here stated;
and no advocate of the dignity of human reason, or of the worth of human
knowledge, is called upon to deny it. There is a sense in which the
conviction of "faith" or "feeling" is more intimate and strong than any
process of proof. But this does not in any wise justify the contention
of those who maintain that we c