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But if scientific method, operating in the region of history, of philology, of archaeology, in the course of the last thirty or forty years, has become thus formidable to the theological dogmatist, what may not be said about scientific method working in the province of physical science?
It may be necessary for the education of the real philosopher that he himself should have once stood upon all those steps upon which his servants, the scientific workers of philosophy, remain standing, and MUST remain standing he himself must perhaps have been critic, and dogmatist, and historian, and besides, poet, and collector, and traveler, and riddle-reader, and moralist, and seer, and "free spirit," and almost everything, in order to traverse the whole range of human values and estimations, and that he may BE ABLE with a variety of eyes and consciences to look from a height to any distance, from a depth up to any height, from a nook into any expanse.
Its sphere cannot be determined except from its origin. Whether the critical philosopher stands nearer to the skeptic or to the dogmatist is rather an idle question. He is specifically distinct from both, in that he summons and guides the reason to self-contemplation, to a methodical examination of its capacity for knowledge.
Fields's "Village Dogmatist" was asked what caused the rain, or the fog, he leaned upon his cane and answered, with an air of profound wisdom, that "when the atmosphere and hemisphere come together it causes the earth to sweat, and thereby produces the rain," or the fog, as the case may be.
Liberal theology puts its one hand on the dogmatist who tells him to accept literal infallibility, and its other on the sincere lover of men who has lost his Bible entirely.
He is infallible and he is sufficient unto himself. In politics he is a blind partisan, in theology an arrogant dogmatist, in art an ignorant propagandist. What he accepts, believes, or has, is not only the best of its kind, but nothing better can ever supersede it. To this spirit the spirit of culture is antipodal; between the two there is inextinguishable antagonism.
And here, very properly, the sceptic steps in and riddles the ad hoc metaphysic of the dogmatist with unanswerable objections. No Cambridge Rationalist can presume to deny that I feel a certain emotion, but the moment I attempt to prove the existence of its object I lay myself open to a bad four hours.
Human intelligence, which the dogmatist had approached with unreasoned trust and the skeptic with just as unreasoned distrust, is subjected, according to the plan of the critical philosopher, to a searching examination. For this reason Kant termed his standpoint "criticism," and his undertaking a "Critique of Reason."
Her very nature, her "deductive spirit," as Mr. Buckle puts it prettily for her, makes woman essentially a dogmatist. She has none of the larger intercourse with other minds and adverse circumstances which often creates the form, if not the spirit, of tolerance in the narrowest of men.
He was never a dogmatist, however, and he sought in Christianity for that which unites rather than for that which separates Christians. In the course of October he publicly joined the church at Dort. The happy termination of the siege of Alkmaar was followed, three days afterwards, by another signal success on the part of the patriots.
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