Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/185

 immediate knowledge, an unreasoning faith, a feeling devoid of thought, as the only way of grasping and having within oneself divine truth. It is asserted that that kind of knowledge which is insufficient for the higher kind of truth is the exclusive and sole kind of knowledge. The two assumptions are most closely connected. On the one side, we have, in the investigation of what we have undertaken to consider, to free that knowledge from its one-sidedness, and in doing so at the same time to show by facts that there exists another kind of knowledge than that which is given out as the only kind. On the other side, the pretension which faith as such sets up against knowledge is a prejudice which occupies too firm and sure a position not to make a stricter investigation necessary. In view of this pretension it must be borne in mind that the true, unsophisticated faith, the more it in case of dire necessity might reasonably make pretensions, the less it does make them, and that the case of necessity exists only for the merely rationalising, dry, and polemical assertion of faith.

But I have elsewhere already explained how the matter stands as regards that faith or immediate knowledge. It is not possible that in the forefront of any attempt to deal at the present time with the proofs of the existence of God, the position taken up by faith can be set aside as done with; the chief points from which it is to be criticised, and the place to be assigned to it, must at least be called to mind.