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to hope, that the world must be as we have been obliged, or have been pleased, to think it. And so the irrational surd, which is at first boasted of as the essential kernel of fact,' is next evaded with a bombast circumstance,' and is in the last resort tacitly denied. The question is whether it is the qualitative diversity, or the conceptual identity, that is humanly projected into Nature.

We can now see that science's hope, at its ideal limit, is unreasonable, if rational. Scientific rationalisation consists, at the limit, in pretending that the world is something else than what it is: is cold wisdom waiting on superfluous folly.' The world is not through and through rational in this specific sense; and man is not the non-impulsive, disinterested spectator that science presupposes him to be. The key of science does not fit the lock; in the form of a different kind of rationality, we are free to try another. And even if science's conceptual scheme be valid of Nature, it is not on that account to be regarded as exhaustive of Nature. Her knowledge may be genuine without being the whole truth. Science knows but in part; is nothing if not selective. Her knowledge leaves room for other kinds of anthropomorphising, in which meaning, significance, and purpose, rather than skeleton-frame, are sought; in which the drama becomes the leading interest, not the stage-mechanism. In such a search, theology may go further than to institute resemblances between herself and science, or to point arguments of the tu quoque kind.

This brings us to the consideration of the sense of 'rationality' that is connected with the principle of sufficient reason rather than with the principles of identity and contradiction; to reason such as characterises induction, probability, and common sense; and to reasonableness, which, as distinct from logistic rationality, always suggests some tincture of the teleological and anthropic that rationality' affects to despise while, as has been suggested, possibly rooted in it. Theology claims to be reasonable while renouncing rational demonstrability. What 'reasonable' ultimately means is a question which recent inductive logic evokes, but does not seem as yet to have answered.

This question is raised in a particular and important

form when we ask why it is reasonable to believe a proposition enjoying more, rather than a proposition enjoying less, probability, when neither is demonstrable. Perhaps the 'rational' procedure would be to suspend judgment, in such a circumstance. But life does not always permit of that academic altitude. We sometimes have to act on a choice between probabilities; and though the unexpected and the logically improbable do sometimes happen, we should certainly deem a man unreasonable who generally chose to act on the less probable alternative. Choice of the more probable, we feel to be urged by a categorical imperative, which has indeed been identified with the moral.

error.

It is obvious that reasonableness is very far removed from the rationality which consists in seeing necessary connexions between ideas or propositions, as in pure, deductive sciences. The one out of several more or less probable propositions to which it is accounted reasonable to commit oneself, because it is the most probable of the set, may turn out to be the furthest from the truth; so that reasonableness may conduce to the embracing of However, we all understand what is meant by reasonable belief provided we do not look beneath the surface. We can then readily assent, e.g. to the teaching of Mr Keynes, when he tells us that probable belief is reasonable because it has some grounds in 'knowledge,' and so may be contrasted with irrational beliefs such as are the outcome of mere association, of inherited instincts, or are produced by entirely alogical causes of any kind. Believing the probable is thus not subjective caprice: the only subjective element in believing the merely probable is that probability is always relative to what, at a given time, we happen to know, as contrasted with what is simply unknown. And at this point it is only frank to admit that the fundamental tenets of theology have less probability, relatively to the corpus of human knowledge about the physical world, than is possessed by many scientific inductions: though of course that body of knowledge takes no account of man and his values, which are the mainstay of theological beliefs. But when we begin to look beneath the surface, we seem compelled to doubt the rationality of this reasonableness. We have forgotten that we have been dis

allowed any scientific knowledge' of the actual other than rests on 'probable' belief.

The whole corpus of so-called knowledge, relatively to which a given proposition is probable, has but probable grounds. Probability thus becomes a logical relation to the probable, and we touch no bottom. And further, if we grant that the probability of a particular induction be an objective and logical, if undefinable, relation to certain fundamental postulates, it seems plain that when these postulates are in turn called probable, that word must bear quite a different meaning from that which it bears when the particular induction is said to be probable relatively to them. Logicians have not told us anything as yet concerning this probability attributed to the basal induction-postulates, except that it is not numerically measurable. But much more will have to be said of it than that. And when it is said, it will be interesting to see whether appeal to the downright alogical, the psychologically inevitable, the vaguely-called instinctive, the expectation based on habit, the hope that springs perennial, and so forth, can be avoided: whether the basis of our corpus of so-called or presumptive knowledge is not essentially non-cognitive.

One does not glory in this threatened conclusion that reasonableness is at bottom non-rational, if it shall be thrust upon us. It is somewhat humbling to proper human pride and aspiration. The theologian, as well as the devotee of science, would prefer things to be otherwise.

For one will not derive very profound comfort from the doctrine that probability is the measure of belief that it is reasonable, or one's moral duty, to entertain, if to be moral in this connexion consists ultimately in being alogical in one way rather than in another.

However, whether one likes it or not, it looks as if human reasonableness is at bottom anthropic interpretativeness as if faith and hope are more fundamental than the knowledge which is to vanish away, and which indeed in one sense has already vanished away. It seems that, whether as scientific knowers or as religious believers, we must be content to 'feel that we are greater than we know': to recognise that it is trust of some such feeling as that, that in all our knowledge (such as

it is) and all our reason (whatever that be) has prompted and guided our intellectual search: that the superficial success of the reason that is everywhere thwarted and baffled in its quest for certain knowledge about the world, is the substantiation of things hoped for: and that if it be also the evidencing of things unseen, that evidencing is in the last resort a matter of psychological certitude, not of logical certainty.

If theology be right in her interpretation of the world, which does include man and his valuations in the Nature which it would interpret, she will have to be in earnest with her belief that in man there is something more God-like than the cold dry light of reason, and to justify her fundamental belief in a Personal God by pleading that the development of this faculty requires a revelation that is obscure, a world that mirrors, a reason that analogises and interprets and sees but in a riddle. For, so far as we can as yet discern, the reasonable is what stands in the relation of probability to presumptive knowledge: this knowledge rests on belief: the belief is grounded on hope. At bottom, there is no difference between the reasonableness of theology and science. Superficially, it is a difference in degree of probability relatively to what we politely allow to pass as knowledge. F. R. TENNANT.

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Art. 10.-MATTHEW ARNOLD.

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THERE are three impressions of Matthew Arnold now in circulation. The first, and most common, is that of 'Isaiah in white kid gloves,' an elderly bird pecking at grapes on a trellis.' The second is a degree higher, and is held by the majority of cultivated persons, as that of a coiner of phrases-Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace,' 'Knowledge of ourselves and the world,' the Not ourselves which makes for righteousness'-with all the traditions which go with an apostle of culture. A third impression, and one not yet sufficiently understood, is that of a true progressive, a thinker who, besides being -the foremost English critic of letters and no mean poet, was ahead of his time in matters regarding education, religion, State control of popular affairs, and international relationships.

Great writers inevitably pass through the 'anecdote' stage before their status is finally settled, and Matthew Arnold is passing through his 'anecdote' stage now. His personality is epigrammatically perverted by those who insist upon regarding him as belonging to either of the first two categories mentioned above, and omit consideration of the third. Expressly opposed to a biography of himself, happily saved from unsavoury gossip by the white light of his own clean living, he is cited as a conceited wearer of ill fitting clothes,' or a phrasemaker whose 'sweetness and light' travelled the rounds of London dinner-tables. But, mostly, he is quarried without acknowledgment and without continuity in articles which would advance the knowledge of God, the world, and ourselves.' These are wind-straws of a personality not yet understood; they result naturally from Arnold's purposely assumed 'amateurism,' from his airy attacks upon subjects which he approached too often without sufficient depth of knowledge, and from an assumption that his contemporaries were excellent in their intentions but faulty in their execution. His thoughts are the common property of reviewers and 'belletrists.' It is not necessary to study his sources, for competent students have investigated his indebtedness to Goethe and SainteBeuve as well as to the Classics; it is superfluous to talk about his poetry, for his weaker work has been discarded

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