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Updated: June 19, 2025
That was the disservice, in a manner, of one's having so much imagination: the mysterious values of other types kept looming larger before you than the doubtless often higher but comparatively familiar ones of your own, and if you had anything of the artist's real feeling for life the attraction and amusement of possibilities so projected were worth more to you, in nineteen moods out of twenty, than the sufficiency, the serenity, the felicity, whatever it might be, of your stale personal certitudes.
Plato and Augustine maintained that they are eternal verities, not to be explained by definitions, appealing to consciousness, in the firm belief in which the soul sustains itself; that there can be no certain knowledge without a recognition of these; that from these only sound deductions of moral truth can be drawn; that without a firm belief in these eternal certitudes there can be no repose and no lofty faith.
Thus arose the celebrated "definitions," the first step in Greek philosophy, intending to show what is, and what is not. After demonstrating what is not, Socrates advanced to the demonstration of what is, and thus laid a foundation for certain knowledge: thus he arrived at clear conceptions of justice, friendship, patriotism, courage, and other certitudes, on which truth is based.
But there was only an indistinct humming, and nothing precise came to her. It seemed, however, as if mysterious whispers encouraged her to persevere. At last she grew impatient of these too slow certitudes, and as she fell asleep she surprised herself by saying: "To-morrow I will speak to Monseigneur." When she awoke, her proposed plan seemed not only quite natural but necessary.
The present age is not merely an epoch of discovery; it is also a period of revision of the various elements of knowledge. Having recognised that there are no phenomena of which the first cause is still accessible, science has resumed the examination of her ancient certitudes, and has proved their fragility. To-day she sees her ancient principles vanishing one by one.
They transcended their experience, went beyond the limits of their thoughts, and sought spiritual certitudes which they disdained. The philosophy of Aristotle was nearly as distasteful to the Romans as that of Plato, and it was less lofty. It had a skeptical tendency, and excluded scientific light from the sphere of activity, and inculcated a proud and self-reliant spirit.
Before Socrates or Plato speculated on the great certitudes of philosophy, temples and statues were the pride and boast of their countrymen. And as the taste for art precedes the taste for letters, so it survives, when the literature has lost its life and freshness.
On it alone, as I believe, hinges the whole answer to the question 'If a man die, shall he live again? This generation is brought, in my reading of it, right up to this alternative Christ's Resurrection, or we die like the brutes that perish. 'All the promises of God in Him are yea. II. And now a word as to the second portion of my text viz. man's certitudes, which answer to God's certainties.
They build the Eiffel Tower, the Queen Anne house, the Mary Jane house, the Modern-Style house, the Carlton, the Ritz, the Grand Palais, the Trocadero, Olympia, Euston, the Midhurst Sanatorium, and old Beit's Palace in Park Lane. They are not to be defeated, they have immortal certitudes. "Have you considered their lines and their drawings and their cunning plans?" said Wandering Peter.
Mere physical research, its achievements, its certitudes, even its conflicting and self-contradictory hypotheses, having got lumped together in many minds under this one title Science, the title is now sacred. It is used as a priestly title, as an immediate estopper to doubt or criticism. The next step is a very interesting one for the student of psychical pathology to note.
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