Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/331

306 quered as to be the master of a manly and many-sided system of doctrine. We think him responsible for this system; and we hold that any such man ought to admit the responsibility.

To study briefly the nature of the process involved in all such cases will be important for our whole doctrine. We shall see thereby how much our theory of the world must itself tend to fall under the head of the purely practical. We shall appreciate also the limitations of ordinary thought, and the need of some higher ideal standard to rescue us from the pure subjectivity of mere postulates. And we shall be contributing by the way to a question of applied ethics, the question of the morality of belief.

Every one recognizes that at least our more abstract knowledge depends largely upon our own mental activity. Knowing is not mere passive reception of facts or of truths. Learning is not solely an affair of the memory. The man that without reflection commits things to memory is justly compared to a parrot, and might yet more justly be compared to the sponge of Hamlet’s figure: “It is but squeezing you, and, sponge, you shall be dry again.” No knowledge, then, without active hospitality in the mind that receives the knowledge. But as soon as we recognize in mental life this our power to modify our knowledge by means of our own activity, just so soon do all the old comparisons of the mind to a wax tablet, to a sheet of paper, or to other like passive subjects of impression, lose for us their meaning. Mental life becomes for us, in view of these facts, a field of constant activity. The com-