Fashionable Philosophy eBook

Laurence Oliphant
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 105 pages of information about Fashionable Philosophy.

Fashionable Philosophy eBook

Laurence Oliphant
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 105 pages of information about Fashionable Philosophy.

Rollestone.  If, then, you admit that the human organism not only cannot generate force, but that the emotions which control the body are in their turn generated by a force which is behind it, and that this force is dependent for its manifestation on its own special conditions, as well as on those of its transmitting organic medium, I venture to assert that experiment in the direction I have suggested will prove to our consciousness that the moral or spiritual quality of the original invading force is a pure one, and that the degree of its pollution in the human frame is the effect of inherited and other organic conditions; and the question which presents itself to the experimentalist is, whether by an effort of the will this same force may not be evoked to change and purify those conditions.  Indeed the very effort is in itself an invocation, and if made unflinchingly, will not fail to meet with a response.  Much that has heretofore been to earnest seekers unknowable will become knowable, and a love, Mr Coldwaite, higher, if that be possible, than the love of humanity, yet correlative with and inseparable from it, will be found pressing with an irresistible potency into those vacant spaces of the human heart, which have from all time yearned for a closer contact with the Great Source of all love and of all force.  It is in this attempt to sever the love of humanity from its Author, that the Positivist philosophy has failed:  it is the worship of a husk without the kernel, of a body without the soul; and hence it will never satisfy the human aspiration.  That aspiration is ever the same; it needs, if you will allow me to say so, Lady Fritterly, no new religion to satisfy its demands.  If the world is of late beginning to feel dissatisfied with Christianity, it is not because the moral standard which that religion proposes is not sufficiently lofty for its requirements, but because, after eighteen hundred years of effort, its professors have altogether failed to reach that standard.  Christianity seems a failure because Christians have failed—­have failed to understand its application to everyday life, have failed to embody it in practice, and have sought an escape from the apparent impossibility of doing so, by smothering it with dogmas, and diverting its scope from this world to the next.  It will be time to look for a new religion, when we have succeeded in the literal application of the ethics of the one we have got to the social and economic problems of daily life.  It is not by any intellectual effort or scientific process that the discovery will be made of how this is to be done, but by the introduction into the organism of new and unsuspected potencies of moral force which have hitherto lain dormant in nature, waiting for the great invocation of wearied and distressed humanity.  There can be no stronger evidence of the approach of this new force, destined to make the ethics of Christianity a practical social standard, than the growing demand of society for a new religion.  It is the inarticulate utterance of the quickened human aspiration, in itself a proof that these new potencies are already stirring the dry bones of Christendom, and a sure earnest that their coming in answer to that aspiration will not be long delayed.

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Fashionable Philosophy from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.