United States or Argentina ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The illiterate may reflect on the disposition of the learned, who, amidst all the advantages of study and reflection, are commonly still diffident in their determinations: and if any of the learned be inclined, from their natural temper, to haughtiness and obstinacy, a small tincture of Pyrrhonism might abate their pride, by showing them, that the few advantages, which they may have attained over their fellows, are but inconsiderable, if compared with the universal perplexity and confusion, which is inherent in human nature.
It is only an aggravation of offence that, while, on the one hand, he solemnly pronounces everything to be 'a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery, he, on the other hand, cheerily exhorts us not to suffer the 'doubts raised by philosophy to affect our actions. 'Nature, he says, 'is always too strong for principles, will always maintain her rights, and prevail, in the end, against all reasoning whatever. 'The great subverter of Pyrrhonism, he continues, 'is actual employment and the occupations of common life, in presence of which its overstrained scruples 'vanish like smoke. Although real knowledge consists solely in knowing that we know nothing, and in doubting everything, and although sceptics may 'justly triumph' in principles which lead them to deny even the attraction of gravitation, still they had better beware how they act on these principles, lest by stepping unconcernedly out of window they come fatally to grief on the stones below, and so the sect and its tenets be annihilated together.
Hammond led her gradually to the contemplation of some of the gravest problems that have from time immemorial perplexed and maddened humanity, plunging one half into blind, bigoted traditionalism, and scourging the other into the dreary sombre, starless wastes of Pyrrhonism.
And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some reader exclaim, you have arrived at a fine pyrrhonism, at an equivalence and indifferency of all actions, and would fain teach us that if we are true, forsooth, our crimes may be lively stones out of which we shall construct the temple of the true God. I am not careful to justify myself.
In short, reasoning fairly, there is no medium between absolute Pyrrhonism and true Christianity: and if we reject the latter on account of its difficulties, we shall be still more loudly called upon to reject every other system which has been offered to the acceptance of mankind.
And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some reader exclaim, you have arrived at a fine Pyrrhonism, at an equivalence and indifferency of all actions, and would fain teach us that if we are true, forsooth, our crimes may be lively stones out of which we shall construct the temple of the true God! I am not careful to justify myself.
The one, in renouncing passion, has aspired to divinity; the other, in renouncing reason, has sunk to mere brutality. . . . The principles of the respective philosophies are so far true—Pyrrhonism, Stoicism, Atheism even. But the conclusions are false, because the opposite principles are equally true. . . . We labour under an incapacity of demonstrating all things invincible to Dogmatism.
In view of the proofs which seem to establish, and of the arguments which combat the existence of a God, some persons prefer to doubt and to suspend their judgment; but at the bottom, this uncertainty is the result of an insufficient examination. Is it, then, possible to doubt evidence? Sensible people deride, and with reason, an absolute pyrrhonism, and even consider it impossible.
The hero is taken over a route that was to become very familiar, the route from a narrow and gloomy type of Protestantism through liberalism, rationalism, skepticism, Pyrrhonism, and mental exhaustion to the repose of the Catholic Church. Of course the story was not to end there, but what the further developments were to have been one can only guess.
He would amuse himself for days together by pulling to pieces art, science, philosophy, to find their hidden wheels: so he came by a sort of Pyrrhonism, in which everything that was became only a figment of the mind, a castle in the air, which had not even the excuse of the geometric symbols, of being necessary to the mind.
Word Of The Day