Discussions Quotes

“In favor of monism there is left, then, only the craving for excessive simplification, and the repugnance to the mystery of the origin of contingent beings. Against it stand the fatal contradictions to necessary intuitions and real facts of experience. Monism asks: How does even an infinite age produce an actual beginning of real beings ex nihilo? Sound philosophy must answer: It does not know; it cannot explain that action to human comprehension. But sound philosophy can show that this is no objection, because it can be proved that such explanation lies beyond the conditions of human knowledge. Those conditions understood, we see that we had no right to expect to be able to comprehend the beginning ex nihilo of contingent beings, nor to be stumbled at the fact...We say to the monist, then: Pause; both of you and we are out of our depth; we are in a region of ontology where we can safely neither affirm, nor deny, nor comprehend, nor explain. Let us lay our hands upon our mouths. The conclusion of that matter is to confess with the apostle (Hebrews xi. 3), that the doctrine of the begging of contingent being is one of faith, not of philosophy...And here is strong evidence of his acquaintance with the whole range of speculative human thought. He says at once to the Pythagorean, the Eleatic, the atomist, the Platonist, the Stagyrite: Vain men, you are out of your depth. The same inspired caution is as good for Spinoza the most modern idealist or monist.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney, Discussions: Secular

“Here it is claimed is the fatal defect of all monistic schemes: they disclose hopeless contradiction of our necessary laws of thought and truths of experience, as their inevitable corollaries. Thus Spinoza, having assumed that all real existence must be absolute, existence and therefore one is obliged to teach that modes of extension and modes of thought can both qualify and at the same time be the law; and thus, that phenomenal beings as real and true to our experience as any a priori cognition, or as this very law itself, are both modes of the One, although a part of them are qualified by size, figure, ponderosity, impenetrability, color; and the other part universally and utterly lack every one of these qualities, and are qualified by thought, sensibility, desire, spontaneity, and self-action. But this is not a mystery, it is a self-contradiction. The qualities of matter and extension cannot be relevant to spirit, nor those of thought, feeling, and volition to matter. They utterly exclude each other. Descartes was right: the common sense of mankind is right in thus judging. The proof is that just so soon as we attempt to ascribe intelligence and will to matter, or qualities of extension to spirit, utterly absurd and impossible fancies are asserted. Spinoza teaches us that the Absolute Being must inevitably have an immutable sameness and necessity of being so strict, as to necessitate its absolute unity. Yet he has to teach, in order to carry out this monism, that this monad exists, at the same instant of time, not only in numberless diversities of mode, but in utterly opposite modes, as for instance, as solid, liquid, and gaseous at the same instant...Or, worse yet, that this One so necessary, eternal and absolute in its unity, may at the same moment of time, hate a Frenchman and love a Frenchman in the two modal manifestations of German and Gaul, and may hate sin and love the same sin in the two manifestations, at the same moment, of good souls and bad souls! Yet this Spinoza could not admit that infinite, eternal power and wisdom can make a beginning of real being objective to itself. Truly, this is 'straining out the gnat and swallowing the camel.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney, Discussions: Secular

“The Popish prohibition of free enquiry and private judgement in religion is, if possible, still more fatal to the mind. The Council of Trent ordained no one should presume to understand the Scriptures, except according to the doctrines of Rome and the unanimous consent of her Fathers. Rome enjoins her children an implicit faith, which believes on the authority without evidence. The faith of the Protestant is an intelligent conviction, the result of the free and manly exercise of the
faculties God gave him, guided by divine fear and help. The papist collects the dicta of the Fathers and Councils, only to wear them as shackles on his understanding. The Protestant brings all the dicta to the test of reason, and still more, of that Word, to which his reason has spontaneously bowed as the supreme and infallible truth. Rome bids us listen to her authority and blindly submit; Protestantism commands: 'Prove all things; hold fast to that which is good..' Happily, the prohibition of private judgement is as impossible to be obeyed as it is absurd.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney, Discussions: Secular