Page:The kernel and the husk (Abbott, 1886).djvu/270

254 attack other people's notions about the semi-material resurrection; but you are not equally ready to explain your own notions about a spiritual resurrection. You cannot even tell us what a spiritual body is, except that it has the power of loving and being loved." Precisely so; I am quite ignorant. Yet in my knowledge of this matter I am superior to a very great number of other theologians. For they think they know, whereas I know that neither I nor they know. Let me go a little further in my confession of ignorance and admit that I do not really possess knowledge about a number of other matters about which many profess with great glibness to know everything. I am certain that I exist; but I doubt whether I can analyse and explain the reasons for my certainty, and I am quite sure I cannot prove my existence by logic. If I am pressed for a proof, I should say (as I have stated in a previous letter) that my belief in my existence was largely due to the Imagination. Cogito, ergo sum, "I think, therefore I am,"—if intended as a serious proof, and if there is any real meaning in the "ergo"—appears to me to be the most babyish of arguments. I respect the gigantic intellect of the arguer, but not even a giant can make ropes of sand; and it needs but a little grammar to dissolve this reasoning to nothing. "I think" means "I am one thinking." In some languages, in Hebrew for example, you might have no other way of expressing the proposition than in this form: "I am one thinking." What sort of reasoning then is this! "I am one thinking, therefore I am." "This is white paper, therefore it is!" Surely a ridiculous offspring to issue from great logical travail! And besides, what infinite assumptions are presupposed in that monosyllable "I"! How do I know that "I think," and that it is not the great world-spirit who thinks in me, as well as rains outside me? Why ought I not to say "it thinks," just as I say "it rains"? What do you