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Knowledge and Faith

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Extract

We have but faith: we cannot know; For knowledge is of things we see.” So Tennyson wrote in the nineteenth century, using the same distinction that in the first of our era Paul the Apostle used, writing to his converts of the walking by faith that looks not to the things seen and temporal, but to the things eternal and unseen. (2 Cor. iv. 18, v. 7.)

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1956

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References

page 132 note 1 Essays Ancient and Modern (Faber, 1936), p. 187.Google Scholar

page 132 note 2 St. Paul had perhaps looked with sympathy at these interactions when he wrote of the whole creation that groans and travails waiting for redemption, so also the earlier writer who dreamed of a holy condition when lambs would no longer suffer, mangled by lions; but in later centuries men seemed almost to lose the power of looking upon nature directly with sympathy for the inner lives of the creatures.

page 132 note 3 The Perennial Scope of Philosophy, by Jaspers, Karl, trans. Manheim, Ralph (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950), pp. 910.Google Scholar

page 133 note 1 Op. cit., p. 210.

page 133 note 2 Before and After Socrates by Cornford, F. M. (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1932), pp. 27–8,50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 134 note 1 To certain of our sub–human fellow–beings also we tend to attribute an inner history, Where, observing behaviour, we recognize “acquirement of meaning” in the biological sense, we incline—in the case of animals with whom we live in sympathy—to interpret this behaviour in terms of such meaning and memory as we experience, though where communication through speech is absent we can have no assurance of any such memory as can create for the individual a continuous inner history.

Such an inner history for the human individual begins—in contrast to the public history beginning at birth—with some remembered moment, perhaps of dawning self–consciousness: in my own case a memory of lying in my nurse's arms, aware of my body moved by hers as she breathed, and somehow, dimly wordlessly, wondering at the contact. That moment I recognize as having continuity of meaning, through all change and development, with my later awareness of myself as a being in contact with others.

page 135 note 1 I use the Golden Treasury translation of The Republic.

page 135 note 2 Apologia pro vita sua (Longmans, 1878), pp. 2, 4.Google Scholar

page 136 note 1 The Concept of Mind by Ryle, Gilbert (London, 1949), pp. 1114.Google Scholar

page 136 note 2 I use the term “myth” here in the sense of an imaginative rendering of what appears to the thinker a truth which cannot be expressed in terms of the intellect.

page 137 note 1 Article on the Soul (Christian) Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (edited James Hastings, 2nd impression 1934).

page 137 note 2 Op. cit., pp. 62, 64.

page 139 note 1 As well as to the writings of Karl Jaspers, I would refer here particularly to the articles of Professor Hallett, where he speaks of the “fatal error” of “radical objectivism”—the “identification of the real with the objective”— (Philosophy XIV. 54) and of the “possession” of the self and of “other minds in mutuality” as distinct from knowledge of them as objects (Ibid., 172): also of knowledge of the self, “too immediate easily to fall under the prima facie interpretation of knowledge as a relation of a subject to an object.” (Philosophy XX. 77, p. 241) and of knowledge of other minds as agents that—unlike bodies—“do not appear as intrinsic objects of qualified spatio–temporal contents” (Ibid., 242).

page 140 note 1 Theories of Religious Knowledge from Kant to Jasper by Milmed, Bella K.. Philosophy XXIX. 110, pp. 112–13.Google Scholar

page 140 note 2 The Perennial Scope of Philosophy, p. 30.

page 140 note 3 Ibid., p. 22.

page 141 note 1 Romans viii. 22–3.