Note 121 — Chapter III · SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS

It is this dissatisfaction at once with the abstractions of science and of rationalism and with the contradictions that seem to exist between them all and the facts of life and experience as we feel them that constitutes the great dualism, or the great opposition of modern times. I do not wish to emphasize this dualism, nor do I wish to set forth faith or belief in opposition to reason when I extract from both Pragmatism and Idealism the position that it is belief rather than knowledge that is our fundamental estimate of reality. I do not believe, as I indicate in the text above, that this dualism is ultimate. It has come about only from an unfortunate setting of some parts of our nature, or of our experience in opposition to the whole of our nature, or the whole of our experience. That the opposition, however, between reason and faith still exists in many quarters, and that it is and has been the opposition of modern times, and that the great want of our times is a rational faith that shall recall the world of to-day out of its endless “distraction” (the word is Dr. Bosanquet’s), I am certainly inclined to maintain. In proof of this statement it is enough to recall things like the words of Goethe about the conflict of belief and unbelief as the unique theme of the history of the world, or the “ethical headache which was literally a splitting headache,” that Mr. Chesterton finds in the minds of many of our great Victorian writers. I shall take leave of it here with three references to its existence taken from the words or the work of living writers. The first shall be the opposition which Mr. Bertrand Russell finds in his Philosophical Essays (in the “Free Man’s Worship”) between the “world which science presents for our belief” and the “lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day.” The second shall be the inconsistency that exists in Mr. Hugh S. R. Elliot’s book upon Modern Science and the Illusions of Professor Bergson, between his initial acceptance of the mechanical, evolutionary system of modern science and his closing acceptance of feeling and poetry and love as the “deepest forms of happiness.” The third shall be the declaration of Professor Sir Henry Jones of Glasgow (in the Hibbert Journal, 1903) that “one of the characteristics of our time is the contradiction that exists between its practical faith in morality and its theoretical distrust of the conceptions on which they rest.”