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

in a word, are so related to God's will that, knowing them, we know it-knowing
it, we know them.
Self-contradiction.
We admit that there are ideas, or what are called ideas, which are
self-contradictory, and to which, therefore, there can be no corresponding
realities. Yet, in regard to the great mass of things, which the uncultured
mind would assert to be absolutely self-contradictory, and not necessarily
merely such to our faculties, it may be affirmed, that the deepest thinkers
would deny that they were demonstrably absolutely contradictory. Most
things are said to be self-contradictory because we have never seen them,
nor are we able to conceive of them, in harmony. But with finite faculties,
this only demonstrates their relative, not their absolute, self-contradiction.
Over an immense field of thought, we are not safe in affirming or denying
certain things to be self-consistent or self-contradictory. Any man, who
will take up the systems of human speculation wrought out by the greatest
minds of all ages, will find that there is almost nothing, in the way of
supposition, which can be set aside on the ground that the human mind
invariably rejects it as impossible. It is wonderful how few things there
are not only not demonstrably absolutely impossible, but which are
relatively impossible to all minds.
Mill.
John Stuart Mill (one of the most vigorous and most skeptical of the
speculative thinkers of our day) maintains that, in a certain course which is
conceivable, the human mind would come to consider the proposition that
twice two are five as fixed, as it now considers the proposition that twice
two are four. A few extracts from the examination of Hamilton's
Philosophy, by this illustrious thinker, will show what results are
compatible with the ripest philosophical thinking. He presents the
following among the results of the latest speculation:
"If things have an inmost nature, apart, not only from the impressions
which they produce, but from all those which they are fitted to produce, on
any sentient being, this inmost nature is unknowable, inscrutable, and
inconceivable, not to us merely, but to every other creature." "Time and
Space are only modes of our perceptions, not modes of existence; and
higher