And it is
needless to say that experience shows, even among well-informed and
accurate reasoners, how large an allowance must thus be made for personal
equations. To some men the facts of external nature seem to proclaim a God
with clarion voice, while to other men the same facts bring no whisper of
such a message. All, therefore, that a logician can here do is to remark,
that the individuals in each class--provided they bear in mind the strictly
_relative_ character of their belief--have a similar right to be regarded
as holding a rational creed: the grounds of belief in this case logically
vary with the natural disposition and the subsequent training of different
minds.[34]
It only remains to show that disputants on either side are apt to endow
this test of relative inconceivability with far more than its real logical
worth. Being accustomed to apply this test of truth in daily life, and
there finding it a trustworthy test, most men are apt to forget that its
value as a test must clearly diminish in proportion to the distance from
experience at which it is applied. This, indeed, we saw to be the case even
with the test of absolute inconceivability (see Chapter V.), but much more
must it be the case with this test of relative inconceivability. For,
without comment, it is manifest that our acquired sense of probability, as
distinguished from our innate sense of possibility, with regard to any
particular question of a transcendental nature, cannot be at all comparable
with its value in the case of ordinary questions, with respect to which our
sense of probability is being always rectified by external facts.
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