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Updated: May 31, 2025
This seemed to settle a very important question, and drew the sceptic's attention away from his own capabilities of belief to the claims of the proposed object of his faith. He read His words with an interest that was painfully intense, and almost groaned his prayerful longing to know if they were true.
The sceptic's sneer, that the shifting systems of philosophy illustrate only the changing fashions of a great illusion about man's capacity for truth, plunges dogmatism into a 'Dilemma, from which it can emerge only by finding a way of discriminating a 'truth' from an 'error, and so solving the 'problem of Truth and Error. The weird verbalism of the traditional Logic suggests a problem which strikes deeper even than the question, 'What do you mean by truth? viz.: 'Do you mean anything? and so the 'problem of Meaning' is propounded by the failure of Formal Logic.
The latter, if there were such a thing, would be ungrounded, and would justify the sceptic's suspicions. The confusion is possible here simply because the subject-matter of the judgment in question is itself a judgment. It could scarcely arise in the parallel cases. The lever cannot be defined except in relation to its fulcrum.
This he illustrated, among other ways, by introducing a domestic scene from the life of the children of Israel in the Wilderness at the time the brazen serpent was lifted up. The dramatis personae were a Young Convert, a Sceptic, and the Sceptic's Mother.
Sceptics on ghostly phenomena are generally pretty full of explanations when they are told of a ghost having been seen in a particular spot, and the teller may be put down as hyper-imaginative, or as having been deluded by moonlight playing through the trees; while cases are not wanting where a reputation for temperance has been lost by a man telling his experiences of a ghost he happens to have met along some country lane; and the fact that there are cases where an imaginative and nervous person has mistaken for a ghost a white goat or a sheet hanging on a bush only strengthens the sceptic's disbelief and makes him blind to the very large weight of evidence that can be arrayed against him.
But Kalinitch was endowed with powers which even Hor recognised; he could charm away haemorrhages, fits, madness, and worms; his bees always did well; he had a light hand. Hor asked him before me to introduce a newly bought horse to his stable, and with scrupulous gravity Kalinitch carried out the old sceptic's request. Kalinitch was in closer contact with nature; Hor with men and society.
If, therefore, the hypothesis upon which the various ways of divining the future are based seem absurd, the facts remain. Remark that it is not really more wonderful that the seer should foretell the chief events of the future than that he should read the past. Past and future, on the sceptic's system, equally lie beyond the limits of knowledge.
The vow, we may be sure, was soon forgotten, but the story shows how seriously in one respect the man of letters in France was worse off than his brother in England. The world would have suffered no irreparable loss if the police had thrown the Sceptic's Walk into the fire. It is an allegory designed to contrast the life of religion, the life of philosophy, and the life of sensual pleasure.
The truth surely is that Blackstone had, upon all these questions, only the most confused sort of notions. He had to preface his work with some sort of philosophic theory because the conditions of the age demanded it. The one source of enlightenment when he wrote was Hume; but for some uncertain reason, perhaps his piety, Blackstone makes no reference to the great sceptic's speculations.
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