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But, taking man as he is, we shall commonly find him dissatisfied with a demonstrative process from an undemonstrated premiss, and, when he has once begun to reason, he will seek to prove the point from which his reasoning starts, as well as that at which it arrives.
He must DO a thing, leave it undemonstrated; once done, it will itself tell what kind of thing it is, by and by. Men of genius have a hard time, I perceive, whether born on the throne or off it; and must expect contradictions next to unendurable, the plurality of blockheads being so extreme!
And yet the most enthusiastic admirer of this gentleman will be forced to admit, when driven to the wall of actual controversy, that one-half, if not two-thirds, of his more formidable statements, put forth in the name of science, remain undemonstrated as scientific truths.
We have already seen repeatedly that the intensity of the imaginary conception is in direct ratio to the accompanying belief, or rather, that the two phenomena are really one merely the two aspects of one and the same state of consciousness. But faith i.e., the adherence of the mind to an undemonstrated assertion is here at its maximum.
Now I almost know that I put that thing right up here." "'Zounds, man, will you listen to me!" "Yes, sir, go ahead. He says she won't marry me. That's his opinion, undemonstrated a mere assertion; he has given me no proof." "Ah, have you any proof, Mr. Hawes?" the old man asked.
But this degree of reality can become less and less through an infinite series of smaller degrees. For consciousness itself has always a degree, which may be lessened.* Consequently the faculty of being conscious may be diminished; and so with all other faculties. The permanence of the soul, therefore, as an object of the internal sense, remains undemonstrated, nay, even indemonstrable.
Boethus began, and said: When I was a novice in letters, I then made use of geometrical postulates, and assumed as undoubted truths some undemonstrated suppositions; and now I shall make use of some propositions which Epicurus hath demonstrated already. Bodies move in a vacuum, and there are a great many spaces interspersed among the atoms of the air.
In being disposed to found it upon undemonstrated theories, they founded it upon nothing; in deriving it from imaginary sources, of which each individual forms to himself his own notion, generally adverse to that of his neighbour; in resting it upon obscure oracles, always delivered ambiguously, frequently interpreted by men in the height of delirium, sometimes by knaves, who had immediate interests to promote, they rendered it unsteady devoid of fixed principle, too frequently left it to the mercy of the most crafty of mankind.
"History shows that philosophy has done nothing but transform ideas of mystic production, substituting for the form of images and undemonstrated statements the form of assertions of a rational system." This declaration of a metaphysician saves us from dwelling on the subject long.
Once more he ventured, with bolder, more menacing front. He reared, pranced, kicked, savaged the air not an item of all his pentup wickedness being undemonstrated. Then George dismounted suddenly, and calling in soothing tones, Christmas realised that the appalling creature was but a temporary compound of his playmate and the abject Jonah.
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