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Updated: June 29, 2025
It is a bold prophecy, but who can doubt that all improbable and unverifiable traditional knowledge of all kinds will make way for the established facts of science and history when these last reach it in their onward movement? It may be remarked that he now speaks of science more respectfully than of old. I suppose this Essay was of later date than "Beauty," or "Illusions."
Concerning the latter inference we shall by and by have something to say. Meanwhile this whole speculation as to the final cessation of cosmical work seems to me as it does to my friend, Professor Clifford by no means trustworthy. The conditions of the problem so far transcend our grasp that any such speculation must remain an unverifiable guess.
The second part should deal with his entry into the world of books; into that account of a long series of collated experiments and partly verified hypotheses we call science; into the imperfectly developed system of inductive and deductive logic which determines mathematics and philosophy; into the long, inaccurate and largely unverifiable account of human blindness and error known as history; and into the realm of idealism, symbol, and pitiful pride we find in the story of poetry, letters, and religion.
The confusion of human opinion largely arises from the fact that the greater part of it is unverifiable, owing to the deficient culture or opportunity of those who hold it; and the persistency with which such opinion is argued, clung to, and cherished, is the cause of many of the permanent differences that array men in opposition.
As it is, the only result of these unverifiable hypotheses is to raise up confirmatory documents in a quarter where apologists have not hitherto claimed them. We are delaying, however, too long upon points of quite secondary importance.
Miracles, whether they are true or not, are at all events unverifiable, and no creed that claims to depend upon the acceptance of unverifiable events can have any vitality. But the personality, the force, the perception of Christ Himself emerges with absolute distinctness from the surrounding details.
In either case, we are in the world of the unverifiable; we take a step in the dark. Most of us, I fancy, will sympathize with George Eliot, who says in one of her letters: "To me the Development Theory, and all other explanations of processes by which things came to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery that lies under the processes."
Some hypotheses are, in the ordinary course of events, put to the test of verification. We are then made painfully aware that beliefs and truths are quite distinct things, and may not be in harmony. Now, the pragmatist does not apply his principle to this field. He confines it to what may not inaptly be called the field of the unverifiable.
One may do this with perfect sincerity, and without holding that philosophical truth is in any way different from scientific truth. But the other position goes beyond this; it assumes that man must be satisfied, and that only that can be true which satisfies him. I ask, is it not significant that such an assumption should be made only in the realm of the unverifiable?
This dilettante way of regarding his sources deserves all the censure Niebuhr has cast on it. If it were not for the fidelity with which he has incorporated without altering his better-informed predecessors, the investigations of Niebuhr and his successors would have been hopelessly unverifiable. Their publication dethroned him, nor has he yet been reinstated.
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