It is perhaps fortunate for our comfort
that we can none of us be cultivated upon very many subjects, so that
considerable scope for assurance will still remain to us; but however
this may be, we certainly observe it as a fact that those are the
greatest men who are most uncertain in spite of certainty, and at the
same time most certain in spite of uncertainty, and who are thus best
able to feel that there is nothing in such complete harmony with itself
as a flat contradiction in terms. For nature hates that any principle
should breed, so to speak, hermaphroditically, but will give to each an
help meet for it which shall cross it and be the undoing of it; as in the
case of descent with modification, of which the essence is that every
offspring resembles its parents, and yet, at the same time, that no
offspring resembles its parents. But for the slightly irritating
stimulant of this perpetual crossing, we should pass our lives
unconsciously as though in slumber.
Until we have got to understand that though black is not white, yet it
may be whiter than white itself (and any painter will readily paint that
which shall show obviously as black, yet it shall be whiter than that
which shall show no less obviously as white), we may be good logicians,
but we are still poor reasoners. Knowledge is in an inchoate state as
long as it is capable of logical treatment; it must be transmuted into
that sense or instinct which rises altogether above the sphere in which
words can have being at all, otherwise it is not yet incarnate.
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