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The great room of the Casino was full to the doors, and one saw a fairly large number of white heads. December 13, 1859. He quotes Strauss, Renan, Scherer, but he touches only the letter of them, not the spirit. Everywhere one sees the Cartesian dualism and a striking want of the genetic, historical, and critical sense.
With a mind free from prejudice and open to conviction, he studied the various systems of belief which he found established in Western Asia the Cabalism of the Babylonian Jews, the Dualism of the Magi, the mysterious doctrines of the Christians, and even the Buddhism of India.
No wonder there is a battle in his breast when he tries to single out one element or the other as his most distinctive quality of soul. Yet, were it not unsafe to generalize when our data apply to only one country, we should venture the assertion that the dualism of the poet's desires is not an insular characteristic, but is typical of his race in every country.
Three pairs of thoughts captivate him and incite him to think them through: first, the rationalistic belief in the power of the human spirit to possess itself of the truth by pure thought, together with confidence in the omnipotence of the mathematical method; second, the concept of substance, together with the dualism of extension and thought; finally, the fundamental mechanical position, together with the impossibility of interaction between matter and spirit, held in common with the occasionalists, but reached independently of them.
His government was extremely conciliatory in Ireland, even to the recalcitrant corporation of Limerick. Not to mention less serious and less respected Tory Ministers, Lord Salisbury talked at Newport about the dualism of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy with the air of a man who desired to have a workable scheme, analogous, if not similar, suggested for Ireland and Great Britain.
Along with Virchow, we must name another of the older generation, the physiologist William Preyer, who combated “vitalism,” “dualism,” and “mechanism” with equal vehemence, and issued a manifesto, already somewhat solemn and official, against “vital force.” And yet he must undoubtedly be regarded as a vitalist by mechanists and vitalists alike.
Then, going from one idea to another, he thought of an observation that he had made, which appeared to prove that with many subjects there is less firmness in the morning than in the evening. Was this the result of dualism of the nervous centres, and was the human personality double like the brain?
The great error, however, lies here. Because this fact is theoretically true, it is not practically true also. We may admit the one; we cannot accept the other. He says: "We cannot be permanently satisfied with dualism, but it is possible to be over-hasty and also too precisely insistent.
When it gets beyond dualism as many philosophies do in form it can only be by appeal to something higher than anything found in experience, by a flight to some transcendental realm. And in denying duality in name such theories restore it in fact, for they end in a division between things of this world as mere appearances and an inaccessible essence of reality.
But if you wish to travel in the "Inferno" or the "Paradiso" you must take other guides. Their home is on the earth, in the region of the finite, the changing, the historical, and the diverse. Their logic never goes beyond the category of mechanism nor their metaphysic beyond dualism. When they undertake anything else they are doing violence to themselves. April 24th.
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