original ideas are here presented. Indeed, I
suppose it would nowadays be impossible to present
any idea touching religion, which has not at some
time or another been presented previously. Still
much may be done in the furthering of one’s
thought by changing points of view, selecting and
arranging ideas already more or less familiar, so that
they may be built into new combinations; and this,
I think, I have in no small degree accomplished as
regards the microcosm of my own mind. But I state
this much only for the sake of adding a confession
that, as far as introspection can carry one, it does
not appear to me that the modifications which my views
have undergone since the publication of my previous
Candid Examination are due so much to purely
logical processes of the intellect, as to the sub-conscious
(and therefore more or less unanalyzable) influences
due to the ripening experience of life. The extent
to which this is true [i.e. the extent to which experience
modifies logic][36] is seldom, if ever, realized, although
it is practically exemplified every day by the sobering
caution which advancing age exercises upon the mind.
Not so much by any above-board play of syllogism as
by some underhand cheating of consciousness, do the
accumulating experiences of life and of thought slowly
enrich the judgement. And this, one need hardly
say, is especially true in such regions of thought
as present the most tenuous media for the progress
of thought by the comparatively clumsy means of syllogistic
locomotion. For the further we ascend from the
solid ground of verification, the less confidence
should we place in our wings of speculation, while
the more do we find the practical wisdom of such intellectual
caution, or distrust of ratiocination, as can be given
only by experience. Therefore, most of all is
this the case in those departments of thought which
are furthest from the region of our sensuous life—viz.
metaphysics and religion. And, as a matter of
fact, it is just in these departments of thought that
we find the rashness of youth most amenable to the
discipline in question by the experience of age.
However, in spite of this confession, I have no doubt
that even in the matter of pure and conscious reason
further thought has enabled me to detect serious errors,
or rather oversights, in the very foundations of my
Candid Examination of Theism. I still think,
indeed, that from the premises there laid down the
conclusions result in due logical sequence, so that,
as a matter of mere ratiocination, I am not likely
ever to detect any serious flaws, especially as this
has not been done by anybody else during the many
years of its existence. But I now clearly perceive
two wellnigh fatal oversights which I then committed.
The first was undue confidence in merely syllogistic
conclusions, even when derived from sound premises,
in regions of such high abstraction. The second
was, in not being sufficiently careful in examining
the foundations of my criticism, i.e. the validity
of its premises. I will here briefly consider
these two points separately.