“If we look on man’s whole mental life as it exists, on the life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and Science, and that they inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the part of which “Rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial.” -Prof. James.
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It is the part that has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs and chop logic, and put you down with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same, if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions. If you have intuitions at all they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which rationalism inhabits. Your whole sub-conscious life, your impulses,, your faiths, your needs, your divinations have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely knows that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever that may contradict it. The inferiority of the rationalistic level in founding belief is just as manifest when rationalism argues for religion as when it argues against it. Our impulsive belief is here always what sets up the original body of truth, and our articulately verbalized philosophy is but its showy translation into formulas. The unreasoned and immediate assurance is the deep thing in us. The reasoned argument is but a surface exhibition.
“Even admitted truths,” says Mill, “are apt to lose their interest – for us unless stimulated by collision with the contradictory error.”
And progress goes on by conflict through struggle. True! But here is also the other side of the question. We believe in Euclid or in the ordinary principles of conduct, is it necessary then for some people to be constantly denying that two sides of a triangle are greater than the third, or doubting that murder is objectionable? An opinion, sirs, gains vividness rather from constant application to conduct than from habitual opposition.
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The talent of silence.
The suffering man ought to consume his own smoke; there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire, which in the metaphorical sense too, all smoke is capable of becoming.
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A man that cannot hold his peace till the time come for speaking and acting is no right man.
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A man is not strong who takes convulsive fits, though six men cannot hold him then.
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He that can walk under the heaviest weight without staggering, is strong.
Religions usually claim to be wonderful inner paths (trap door) to a supernatural kind (subterranean tunnel) of happiness.