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Relatively to these, Systematic Theology, and even Apologetics, receded into the background. Secure in his "aliquid inconcussum," he came increasingly to regard the life of the individual Christian and the collective life of the Church as the most convincing of all witnesses to the Unseen and the Supernatural. Meanwhile the apologetic of his own life was becoming ever more impressive.
He has no reason to trust the one class of beliefs which he has not, to trust the other.... To minds thus favoured, this forms a point d'appui which can never be overturned an aliquid inconcussum corresponding to the 'cogito ergo sum' of Descartes. Their faith bears its own signature, and they have only to look within to discover its authenticity.
The "aliquid inconcussum" appears to have remained with him all through the experience. This seems clear from a passage in a letter written in 1848 to his brother David, then a student in Sir William Hamilton's class, in which he says; "I never found my religious susceptibilities injured by metaphysical speculations.
"Right down through the storm-zone of the nineteenth century," writes one who knew him well, "he comes untroubled by the force of the 'aliquid inconcussum. Edinburgh, Germany, Berwick; Hamilton, Kant, Hegel, Strauss, Renan, it is all the same. The cause seems to me luminously plain. Saints are never doubters.
There was in it the "aliquid inconcussum" the "unshaken somewhat" which made him independent of other arguments, and which kept him untouched by all the intellectual attacks on Christianity.
What! that fool of a Descartes imagined that philosophy needed an immovable base an aliquid inconcussum on which the edifice of science might be built, and he was simple enough to search for it!
It is concerned with finding the principle that rules and explains everything. In the invention of his theory the metaphysician gives his measure, and permits us to value his imaginative power. But the hypothesis, which in science is always provisional and revocable, is here the supreme reality, the fixed position, the inconcussum quid.
His religious intuitions were so deep and clear that he was able always to find his way by their aid. They gave him his independent certainty, his 'aliquid inconcussum." His influence on the religious life of his time was largely due to the spiritual faculty in him that is here referred to.
Now Hegel found that his idea of an immanent movement through the field of concepts by way of 'dialectic' negation played most beautifully into the hands of this rationalistic demand for something absolute and inconcussum in the way of truth. It is easy to see how.
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