The Works of Matthew Arnold (Volume 8); God & the Bible (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE GOD OF METAPHYSICS There remain the grounds for asserting God to be a person who thinks and loves which are supplied by metaphysics. Continuo auditae voces, vagitus et ingens. At the mention of that name metaphysics, lo, essence, existence, substance, finite and infinite, cause and succession, something and nothing, begin to weave their eternal dance before us ! with the confused murmur of their combinations filling all the region governed by her, who, far more indisputably than her late - born rival, political economy, has earned the title of the Dismal Science. Yet even here we will ask the reader of- Literature and Dogma, if he does not disdain so unsophisticated a compani-on, to enter with us. And here, possibly, we may after all find reason to retract, and to own that the theologians are right. For metaphysics we know from the very name to be the science of things which come after natural things. Now, the things which come after natural things are things not natural. Clearly, therefore, if any science is likely to be able to demonstrate to us the magnified and non-natural man, it must be the science of non-naturals. Professor Huxley's interesting discourse the other day at Belfast drew attention to a personage who once was in the thoughts of everybody who tried to think, ?Rene Descartes. But in this great man there were, in truth, two men. One was the anatomist, the physicist, the mechanical philosopher who exclaimed: ' Give me matter and motion, and I will make the world !' and of whom Pascal said that the only God he admitted was a God who was useless. This is the Descartes on whom Professor Huxley has asked us to turn once more our eyes: and no man could ask it better or more persuasively. But there is another Descartes who had of late year...