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Updated: May 16, 2025
The passages from the excellent theologians who speak of this triumph of faith can and should receive a meaning appropriate to the principles I have just affirmed. There appear in some objects of faith two great qualities capable of making it triumph over reason, the one is incomprehensibility, the other is the lack of probability.
It is an inconsistency. But how the earth moves on its axis, what is that law that makes it move, is an incomprehensibility. An incomprehensibility is one thing, an inconsistency is another thing. The one conflicts with our reason, the other is beyond it.
Now Arcesilaus was so far from desiring any glory by being a bringer-in of new opinions, and from arrogating to himself those of the ancients, that the sophisters of that time blamed him for attributing to Socrates, Plato, Parmenides, and Heraclitus the doctrines concerning the retention of assent, and the incomprehensibility of things; having no need so to do, but only that he might strengthen them and render them recommendable by ascribing them such illustrious personages.
Presently the Squire, thinking it time to close the contest, pulled his scalp forward, adjusted his glass eye, which had been examining his nose long enough, and turned over the leaves of the book to the great words at the place known to spellers as "incomprehensibility," and began to give out those "words of eight syllables with the accent on the sixth."
If 'God' exists and is incomprehensible, His incomprehensibility is an admirable reason for being silent about Him, but can never justify the affirmation of self-contradictory propositions, and the threatening of people with damnation if they do not accept them." "The belief of the Atheist stops where his evidence stops.
Why he had done it, what could have provoked him to such a breach of hospitality, and so suddenly turned all his partial regard for their daughter into actual ill will, was a matter which they were at least as far from divining as Catherine herself; but it did not oppress them by any means so long; and, after a due course of useless conjecture, that "it was a strange business, and that he must be a very strange man," grew enough for all their indignation and wonder; though Sarah indeed still indulged in the sweets of incomprehensibility, exclaiming and conjecturing with youthful ardour.
In fine, if the incomprehensibility of a system does not authorize the denial of its existence, it is at least certain that the incompatibility of the attributes with which it is clothed, authorizes the assertion, that those which unite them cannot be any thing more than chimeras, of which the existence is impossible.
I had been greatly drawn towards the work on learning the opinion of an English critic, who candidly confessed that he respected German philosophy because of its complete incomprehensibility, as instanced by Hegel's doctrines, until the study of Schopenhauer had made it clear to him that Hegel's lack of lucidity was due not so much to his own incapacity as to the intentionally bombastic style in which this philosopher had clothed his problems.
But one must beware of adding thereto the third quality whereof M. Bayle speaks, and of saying that what one believes is indefensible: for that would be to cause reason in its turn to triumph in a manner that would destroy faith. Incomprehensibility does not prevent us from believing even natural truths.
Not, of course, that he denied the Divine incomprehensibility itself, with certain heretics of old; but he maintained that in Revelation all that was mysterious had been left out, and nothing given us but what was practical, and directly concerned us.
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