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Updated: June 17, 2025
Hence the distinction between subjective and objective Certitude. The former is a fact of consciousness; it is simply the undoubting assent which we yield to certain judgments, whether these judgments be true or false; it exists in us, and not in the objects of thought; it denotes a condition of our minds, which may, or may not, be in accordance with the actual state of things.
As to the objection, that the theory attributes an almost inconceivable rapidity to some of our mental operations, it may be answered, in the first place, that there is no reason, surely, why mind should not be capable of as rapid action as its handmaid, matter; and, in the second place, that our ideas of time are relative, quite as much as our ideas of space; and if the microscope has revealed a world of wonders too minute in point of space to be observed by the naked eye, in whose existence we yet believe with undoubting confidence, we may without greater difficulty believe in the existence of mental acts crowded into so narrow a point of time, so rapid and transitory in their occurrence, as to leave no impression upon the memory.
The characteristic arrogance the undoubting anticipation of victory the utter thoughtlessness the unsinking vivacity of the French soldiery, were then at the highest pitch.
But her resolution was dogged by the shadow of that previous resolve which had at first come as the undoubting movement of her whole being. While she lay on her pillow with wide-open eyes, "looking on darkness which the blind do see," she was appalled by the idea that she was going to do what she had once started away from with repugnance.
But instead of water from the white marble fountain, he would have desired a cup of wine to drink beneath the boughs of the sheltering trees. And he could not have joined without doubt or fear in the fervent devotions of the undoubting men, who came here to steep their wills in the great will that flowed about them like the ocean about little islets of the sea.
Now I believe the Lord has taken you in hand, and I shall not presume to meddle. Bow with me in prayer that he may speedily bring you into his marvellous light and knowledge." And the good man knelt and spread his hands toward heaven, and prayed with the simplicity and undoubting faith of an ancient patriarch. Was his faith contagious?
With these philosophic financiers, this universal medicine made of church mummy is to cure all the evils of the state. These gentlemen, perhaps, do not believe a great deal in the miracles of piety; but it cannot be questioned, that they have an undoubting faith in the prodigies of sacrilege. Is there a debt which presses them? Issue assignats.
There was moreover, frankly, a sharpness of point in it that she enjoyed; it gave an accent to the truth she wished to illustrate the truth that the surface of her recent life, thick-sown with the flower of earnest endeavour, with every form of the unruffled and the undoubting, suffered no symptom anywhere to peep out.
'That message, he said, resuming his place on the couch, 'is a last word on the tragedy, and will, no doubt, produce some modification in the final stage of its history. And now, Shiel, let us sit together and confer on this matter. From the manner in which you have expressed yourself, it is evident that there are points which puzzle you you do not get a clean coup d'oeil of the whole regiment of facts, and their causes, and their consequences, as they occurred. Let us see if out of that confusion we cannot produce a coherence, a symmetry. A great wrong is done, and on the society in which it is done is imposed the task of making it translucent, of seeing it in all its relations, and of punishing it. But what happens? The society fails to rise to the occasion; on the whole, it contrives to make the opacity more opaque, does not see the crime in any human sense; is unable to punish it. Now this, you will admit, whenever it occurs, is a woful failure: woful I mean, not very in itself, but very in its significance: and there must be a precise cause for it. That cause is the lack of something not merely, or specially, in the investigators of the wrong, but in the world at large shall we not boldly call it the lack of culture? Do not, however, misunderstand me: by the term I mean not so much attainment in general, as mood in particular. Whether or when such mood may become universal may be to you a matter of doubt. As for me, I often think that when the era of civilisation begins as assuredly it shall some day begin when the races of the world cease to be credulous, ovine mobs and become critical, human nations, then will be the ushering in of the ten thousand years of a clairvoyant culture. But nowhere, and at no time during the very few hundreds of years that man has occupied the earth, has there been one single sign of its presence. In individuals, yes in the Greek Plato, and I think in your English Milton and Bishop Berkeley but in humanity, never; and hardly in any individual outside those two nations. The reason, I fancy, is not so much that man is a hopeless fool, as that Time, so far as he is concerned, has, as we know, only just begun: it being, of course, conceivable that the creation of a perfect society of men, as the first requisite to a régime of culture, must nick to itself a longer loop of time than the making of, say, a stratum of coal. A loquacious person he is one of your cherished "novel"-writers, by the way, if that be indeed a Novel in which there is nowhere any pretence at novelty once assured me that he could never reflect without swelling on the greatness of the age in which he lived, an age the mighty civilisation of which he likened to the Augustan and Periclean. A certain stony gaze of anthropological interest with which I regarded his frontal bone seemed to strike the poor man dumb, and he took a hurried departure. Could he have been ignorant that ours is, in general, greater than the Periclean for the very reason that the Divinity is neither the devil nor a bungler; that three thousand years of human consciousness is not nothing; that a whole is greater than its part, and a butterfly than a chrysalis? But it was the assumption that it was therefore in any way great in the abstract that occasioned my profound astonishment, and indeed contempt. Civilisation, if it means anything, can only mean the art by which men live musically together to the lutings, as it were, of Panpipes, or say perhaps, to triumphant organ-bursts of martial, marching dithyrambs. Any formula defining it as "the art of lying back and getting elaborately tickled," should surely at this hour be too primitive too Opic to bring anything but a smile to the lips of grown white-skinned men; and the very fact that such a definition can still find undoubting acceptance in all quarters may be an indication that the true [Greek: idéa] which this condition of being must finally assume is far indeed far, perhaps, by ages and aeons from becoming part of the general conception. Nowhere since the beginning has the gross problem of living ever so much as approached solution, much less the delicate and intricate one of living together:
Over and over he turned the question in his mind; again and again the spouting blood of his foe, and the death-look in his eye, rose before him; and the youth who at school could never fight with a companion because he was not sure that he was in the right, was alone in the midst of undoubting men of war, amongst whom he was driven helplessly along, upon the waves of a terrible necessity.
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