The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 42
On faith in the veracity of our faculties
On faith in the veracity of our faculties.
"Faith in the veracity of our faculties, if it means anything, requires us to believe that things are as they appear—that is, appear to the mind in the last and highest resort; and to deal with the fact that they ' only appear' as if it constituted an eternal exile from their reality is to attribute lunacy to universal reason. . . . The infinite is no doubt the negation of the finite; but so also is the finite of the infinite. . . . Both are not indeed alike 'conceivable,' if by that word be meant presentable in imagination; but both are alike cogitable, and take their place among the objects of assured belief at the same moment and in the same act. The experience which gives to my perception a body of certain shape and size, simultaneously gives to my knowledge the boundless space in which it lies. The definite object is seen upon the infinite ground."
Rev. Principal Martineau.
"The psychologist may fearlessly throw himself into the deepest waters of speculative inquiry in regard to the relation between his mind and its bodily instrument, provided that he trusts to the inherent buoyancy of that great fact of consciousness that we have within us a self-determining power which we call Will. And we may even find in the evidence of the intimate relation between mental activity and physical changes in the brain the most satisfactory grounds which science can afford for his belief that the phenomena of the Material Universe are the expressions of an Infinite Mind and Will, of which man's is the finite representation."
Dr. William B. Carpenter.