Preaching and Paganism by Albert Parker Fitch
page 68 of 210 (32%)
page 68 of 210 (32%)
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anti-Socratic and discrediting analytical intellect, insists that
whatever unity may be had must come through instinct, not analysis. He refuses to recognize Plato's _One in the Many_, sees the whole universe as "a perpetual gushing forth of novelties," a universal and meaningless flux. Surrender to this eternal flux, he appears to say, and then we shall gain reality. So he relies on impulse, instinct, his _elan vital_, which means, I take it, on man's subrational emotions. We call it Intuitionism, but such philosophy in plain and bitter English is the intellectual defense and solemn glorification of impulse. "Time," says Bergson, "is a continuous stream, a present that endures."[16] Time apparently is all. "Life can have no purpose in the human sense of the word."[17] Essentially, then, James, Bergson and Croce appeal from intellect to feeling. They return to primitivism. [Footnote 15: Letter to C.E. Norton, June 30, 1904.] [Footnote 16: _Le Perception de Changement_, 30.] [Footnote 17: _L'evolution creatrice_, 55.] Here is a philosophy which obviously may be both as antihumanistic and as irreligious as any which could well be conceived. Here is license in conduct and romanticism in expression going hand in hand with this all but exclusive emphasis upon relativity in thought. Here is disorder, erected as a universal concept; the world conceived of as a vast and impenetrable veil which is hiding nothing; an intricacy without pattern. Obviously so ungoverned and fluid a universe justifies uncritical and irresponsible thinking and living. We have tried thus to sketch that declension into paganism on the |
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