NewThoughtLibrary.com / DivineLibrary.org

CHAPTER VI. THE RELATIONS OF THE SYSTEMS HERE OFFERED TO PREVALENT FORMS OF PHILOSOPHY.

Lesson 112 - 1. Value of general convictions - p.434

1. THE inquiries of broadest outside and inside interest as regards any system of philosophy are: How does it unite the intellectual to the physical world? Which, if either, does it absorb in the other? What are with it the pregnant, ontological principles? The philosophy now offered strives to maintain, so far as man is concerned, physical and mental phenomena on an independent basis; so far as God is concerned, it centres and absorbs them both in Him. It thus endeavors to explain the familiar facts of experience, not as a vision, delusive in its form; but as the substantial, sufficient frame-work of knowledge. It does not by thought abolish that which called forth thought, but retains entire the phenomena it seeks to expound. Indeed, it is difficult to see on what ground the reasoning of a few is to be accepted, while it overturns fundamentally the conclusions of the many concerning facts of which each is independently cognizant. To yield our faith to such theories seems to be a surrender of the trustworthiness of our faculties, since with almost perfect unanimity and endless reiteration they have reached results exactly opposite to those thus offered. Nor is it an answer to this statement to say, that such a submission of the philosophical to the common mind precludes progress. It does not preclude the addition of new facts, a more careful analysis of old facts, with "the correction of opinions that is sure to follow. It does cast suspicion on a movement, that it pre-supposes the