The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

world are in conflict here with the Church's faith. But those who are
familiar with the speculations of the last three centuries are aware that so
far from this being the case, the whole history of metaphysical thought
during that era has shown, with increasing force, the entire inability of
philosophy to disturb, by any established results, the simple faith which
rests on the direct testimony of the word. A glance at the various modern
schools will demonstrate this.
Why, then, if we ask for the light of that modern philosophy which it
is thought can clear up the mystery left by revelation, why, in any case, do
we believe, or know, or think we know, that there is a human body
objectively in our presence? It is regarded by the mass of thinkers as
certain that we never saw a human body, never felt it; but that the
consciousness of the human soul is confined to its own modifications and
impressions, and that our conviction that the modification we perceive,
when we are convinced that a human body is before us. is the result of an
objective body, and consequently presupposes its substantial existence, is
an act not of cognition, but of faith--a faith which has been repudiated by
the whole school of pure idealists, by many of the greatest European
speculators, and in the philosophy of nearly the entire Orient. So far as
philosophy, therefore, can determine it, we have no more absolute
cognition of the objective, visible presence of a natural body than we have
of the objective, supernatural, invisible presence of a supernatural body.
Our persuasion of either presence is an inference, an act of belief,
conditioned by testimony. We may think we have more testimony for the
first inference than for the second; but it is none the less inference: it-is not
cognition. We believe that bread is there, on the evidence of the senses; we
believe that Christ's body is there, on the evidence of the word. The
knowledge or belief of the nonego, or external world, involves one of the
grandest problems of speculative philosophy. The popular idea that we are
cognizant of the very external things in themselves which we are said to
see, hear, and feel, is entirely false. All accurate thinkers, of every school,
admit this. This is the common ground of the extremest idealism and of
the extremest realism.