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When reason employs conceptions alone, only one proof of its thesis is possible, if any. When, therefore, the dogmatist advances with ten arguments in favour of a proposition, we may be sure that not one of them is conclusive.
The works written after his recall show a marked advance in his conceptions of life. He is no longer the abstract dogmatist, but the supple thinker who finds that there is room for the philosopher in the world, at court, even in the inner chamber of the palace. It is full of digressions and repetitions, a common fault of his style, but contains some very powerful thought.
Not, surely, everyone who thinks he has. It will never do to let every dogmatist vote for himself and condemn all others. That way war and madness lie. Until there is absolute agreement, there cannot be absolute truth. But absolute truth may still be reverenced as an ideal, to save us from the scepticism to which a complete relativity of truth would lead. But would it save us?
The bigot and dogmatist in all ages have entertained no doubt of their own loyalty to truth; but it was loyalty to their own very limited perceptions, and to their profound conviction that all outside of their own sphere of perception was falsehood or nonentity, and should be received with supercilious scorn or crushing blows whenever presented.
In a dialogue with the ghost of Sir Thomas More, he takes the opportunity of introducing descriptions of scenery, literary digressions, and quaint illustrations from his vast stores of reading to the confusion of all definite arrangement. Southey is in the awkward position of a dogmatist defending a compromise. An Anglican claiming infallibility is necessarily inconsistent.
The spirit in which he could write that he was 'much revived by having an opportunity of abusing Whistler to a knot of his special admirers, is a spirit apt to be misconstrued. He was not a dogmatist, even about Whistler.
"Man is perishable. That may be; but let us perish resisting, and if it is nothingness that awaits us, do not let us so act that it shall be a just fate." Change this sentence from its negative to the positive form "And if it is nothingness that awaits us, let us so act that it shall be an unjust fate" and you get the firmest basis of action for the man who cannot or will not be a dogmatist.
If this should appear vague to the dogmatist who finds it impossible either to love God or to do the will of Christ without going into the arithmetic of Athanasius, and reciting an unintelligible creed, and celebrating in Christian forms the rites of those mystery religions which competed with each other for the superstition of the Greco-Roman world in the third century, he will find no vagueness at all in Dr.
The professor of one sect commanded me to avoid the dogmatist of another as the propagator of moral poison; and the dogmatist retaliated on the professor: but I avoided neither; I read both, and turned all 'into honey and fine gold. No inquiry into wisdom, however superficial, is undeserving attention.
Wolff gives no explanation how it comes about that the deliverances of the reason agree so beautifully with the facts of experience; in his naïve, unquestioning belief in the infallibility of the reason he is a typical dogmatist.
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