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He did not care to reason about a thing when reasoning would not strengthen his convictions, perhaps involve him in doubts and perplexities. Reason is finite and clouded and warped. Hence, absolute certainty of the existence of God, as it appeals to consciousness, like the "Cogito, ergo sum."
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 essence, in short, of the Coleridgian ontology consists in the alteration of a single though a very important word in the well-known Cartesian formula. Cogito ergo sum had been shown by Hume to involve an illicit process of reasoning. Descartes, according to the Scottish sceptic, had no right to have said more than Cogito ergo cogitationes sunt.
And he arrives at the cogito ergo sum, which St. Augustine had already anticipated; but the ego implicit in this enthymeme, ego cogito, ergo ego sum, is an unreal that is, an ideal ego or I, and its sum, its existence, something unreal also.
On the other hand if we find universal recognition of some fundamental truth, a common cogito ergo sum, or the like, acknowledged by all philosophers, we have made a discovery as satisfactory in its way as is acceptance of the complex system of philosophy offered by Plato or Descartes.
The former, erected a few years since, is a very honor- able production; the pedastal of the latter could, as a matter of course, only be inscribed with the Cogito ergo Sum. The two statues mark the two opposite poles to which the brilliant French mind has travelled; and if there were an effigy of Balzac at Tours, it ought to stand midway between them.
The famous cogito stupefies me. Ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we understand very slightly is explained by means of words which we don't understand at all substance, extension, force, matter, and soul. So much abstraction, imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know in what way He is, if He is at all.
But, on the other hand, History, the process of culture, finds its perfection and complete effectivity only in the individual; the end of History and Humanity is man, each man, each individual. Homo sum, ergo cogito; cogito ut sim Michael de Unamuno. The individual is the end of the Universe. And we Spaniards feel this very strongly, that the individual is the end of the Universe.
We cannot find the absolute basis of matter; we only know it by its properties; neither know we the soul in any other way. Cogito ergo sum is the only thing that we certainly know. Hamilton's analysis of the Absolute, once learned, was never forgotten. It was a philosophic touchstone, understood by the boy, applied by the man.
After stating that in the solution of life and soul problems, science stops short at germs and nucleated cells, he proceeds with the usual tirade against metaphysics: "Take Descartes' fundamental axiom: Cogito ergo sum.... Is it really an axiom?... If the fact that I am conscious of thinking proves the fact that I exist, is the converse true that whatever does not think does not exist?... Does a child only begin to exist when it begins to think?
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