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Credo quia impossibile; I repeated Tertullian's words at first doggedly, at last triumphantly. I fasted as penance for my involuntary sin of unbelief. I remembered that the Bible must not be carelessly read, and that St.

Any such appearance would be included among sensibilia. If per impossibile there were a complete human body with no mind inside it, all those sensibilia would exist, in relation to that body, which would be sense-data if there were a mind in the body. What the mind adds to sensibilia, in fact, is merely awareness: everything else is physical or physiological.

Yet, in face of all this, borne home to us every hour of every day, we cling to the creed of universal law; and on the flux of chaos write our 'credo quia impossibile. "Well, that is a heresy of mine I have never found anyone to share. But no matter. My case is so strong I can afford to give it away point by point.

There is a class of minds much more ready to believe that which is at first sight incredible, and because it is incredible, than what is generally thought reasonable. Credo quia impossibile est, "I believe, because it is impossible," is an old paradoxical expression which might be literally applied to this tribe of persons.

"Ma! Impossibile! And they have never ?" "Never so much as a finger." "But what? Are they ? Don't they ?" Ippolita shrugged, pouting. "Chi lo sa? I tell you, Nannina, I shall go mad in this place." "And why not?" cried the other, with a snort. "You have examples enough about you, my conscience! What is all their singing and stuff about?" "I think it is about me, Nannina." "And their disputing?"

But if, instead of concluding straight to the particular case, we place before ourselves an entire class of factsthe whole contents of a general proposition, every tittle of which is legitimately inferrible from our premisses, if that one particular conclusion is so; there is then a considerable likelihood that if the premisses are insufficient, and the general inference, therefore, groundless, it will comprise within it some fact or facts the reverse of which we already know to be true; and we shall thus discover the error in our generalization by what the schoolmen termed a reductio ad impossibile.

Twenty-eight pounds fourteen shillings and eight pence! Quod impossibile. again. When he saw Larkin, that conscientious guardian of his client's interests scrutinised the bill of costs very jealously, and struck out between four and five pounds.

And these limits, within which I say that human reason proves this, are the limits of rationality, of what is known by demonstration. Beyond these limits is the irrational, which, whether it be called the super-rational or the infra-rational or the contra-rational, is all the same thing. Beyond these limits is the absurd of Tertullian, the impossible of the certum est, quia impossibile est.

Austin's great work, the "City of God;" and Tertullian's "De Carne Christi," in which the paradoxical sentence "Mortuus est Dei filius; credible est quia ineptum est: et sepultus resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile est," occupied my undivided time, for many weeks of laborious and fruitless investigation.

Our faith is not unmixed with apprehension when we think of the immediate future, yet it is an abiding faith nevertheless; and with the experience of the last four years to sustain us, we are willing to believe almost anything good of the American people, and to say with the saint, Credimus quia impossibile est.