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Normal consciousness, to change the figure, is just one brilliantly illuminated center in a world of shadow deepening into darkness. The light grows more murky, the shadows more insistent, as we pass down, or out, or back from that illumined center. We cannot tell how much of the shadow is really a part of us, nor do we dare to be dogmatic about what may, or may not, there be taking place.
All individuals also have occasional cravings to get away from responsibility and back to rest and pleasure. We long to get back to a theoretical state of childhood, as the infant longs to return to his mother's body. For a number of reasons this not a work to be criticized. The author does not mean to be dogmatic. His dicta, while they may have the ipse dixit flavor, are not meant to be axioms.
Laing would not ask, that the speculative side of the new religion is fully defined and worked out, and ready to displace the old dogmatic creeds, yet its practical aspect is so vague that he writes: "I think the time is come when the intellectual victory of agnosticism is so far assured, that it behoves thinking men to begin to consider what practical results are likely to follow from it."
As a prince well, you are in the wrong trade. It is perhaps philosophical to recognise it as you do. 'Perhaps philosophical? repeated Otto. 'Yes, perhaps. I would not be dogmatic, answered Gotthold. 'Perhaps philosophical, and certainly not virtuous, Otto resumed. 'Not of a Roman virtue, chuckled the recluse.
'There is one thing, that I don't mention as an excuse for a fault which really does exist, but simply as a fact, viz., that being always, even now, pressed for time, I write very abruptly, and so seem to be much more positive and dogmatic than I hope, and really think, is the case.
Have you never doubted yourself?" This with a glance that pierced him through. "Good Heavens! are you turned preacher?" said he, bitterly. "Will you measure a heart by its dogmatic beliefs?" "For shame, Reuben!" And for a time both were silent. At last Adèle spoke again, "There is a sense of coming trouble that oppresses me strangely, that tells me I must not listen to you, Reuben."
When I listen to their dogmatic opinions on subjects of which most of them were in abysmal ignorance prior to the Armistice, I am always reminded of a remark once made to me by Sir Edwin Pears, the celebrated historian and authority on Turkish affairs. "I don't pretend to understand the Turkish character," Sir Edwin remarked dryly, "but, you see, I have lived here only forty years."
The Catholic solution of our problem, of our unique vital problem, the problem of the immortality and eternal salvation of the individual soul, satisfies the will, and therefore satisfies life; but the attempt to rationalize it by means of dogmatic theology fails to satisfy the reason. And reason has its exigencies as imperious as those of life.
Later, when he was less disinterested, perhaps, he writes to another friend: "Mme. du Deffand hates the philosophers, so you must give them up to her. She and Mme. Geoffrin are no friends; so if you go thither, don't tell her of it Indeed you would be sick of that house whither all the pretended beaux esprits and false savants go, and where they are very impertinent and dogmatic."
The manner of Coleridge was emphatic rather than dogmatic, and thus he was generally and satisfactorily listened to. It might be said of Coleridge, as Cowper has so happily said of Sir Philip Sidney, that he was 'the warbler of poetic prose. There was always this characteristic feature in his multifarious conversation, it was always delicate, reverend, and courteous.
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