Page:Scepticism and Animal Faith.djvu/28

 dogmatists angrily confident of maintaining them all. Integral minds, pupils of a single coherent tradition, regard their religion, whatever it may be, as certain, as sublime, and as the only rational basis of morality and policy. Yet in fact religious belief is terribly precarious, partly because it is arbitrary, so that in the next tribe or in the next century it will wear quite a different form; and partly because, when genuine, it is spontaneous and continually remodelled, like poetry, in the heart that gives it birth. A man of the world soon learns to discredit established religions on account of their variety and ae although he may good-naturedly continue to conform to his own; and a mystic before long begins fervently to condemn current dogmas, on account of his own different inspiration. Without philosophical criticism, therefore, mere experience and good sense suggest that all positive religions are false, or at least (which is enough for my present purpose) that they are all fantastic and insecure.

Closely allied with religious beliefs there are usually legends and histories, dramatic if not miraculous; and a man who knows anything of literature and has observed how histories are written, even in the most enlightened times, needs no satirist to remind him that all histories, in so far as they contain a system, a drama, or a moral, are so much literary fiction, and probably disingenuous. Common sense, however, will still admit that there are recorded facts not to be doubted, as it will admit that there are obvious physical facts; and it is here, when popular philosophy has been reduced to a kind of positivism, that the speculative critic may well step upon the scene.

Criticism, I have said, has no first principle, and its desultory character may be clearly exhibited at this point by asking whether the evidence of science or that of history should be questioned first. I might