Truths have once for all this
desperate instinct of self-preservation and of desire to extinguish
whatever contradicts them. My belief in the Absolute, based on the
good it does me, must run the gauntlet of all my other beliefs.
Grant that it may be true in giving me a moral holiday.
Nevertheless, as I conceive it,--and let me speak now
confidentially, as it were, and merely in my own private person,--it
clashes with other truths of mine whose benefits I hate to give up
on its account. It happens to be associated with a kind of logic of
which I am the enemy, I find that it entangles me in metaphysical
paradoxes that are inacceptable, etc., etc.. But as I have enough
trouble in life already without adding the trouble of carrying these
intellectual inconsistencies, I personally just give up the
Absolute. I just TAKE my moral holidays; or else as a professional
philosopher, I try to justify them by some other principle.
If I could restrict my notion of the Absolute to its bare holiday-
giving value, it wouldn't clash with my other truths. But we cannot
easily thus restrict our hypotheses. They carry supernumerary
features, and these it is that clash so. My disbelief in the
Absolute means then disbelief in those other supernumerary features,
for I fully believe in the legitimacy of taking moral holidays.
Pages:
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79