Intuitions Of Reality
(5.) There are other evidences of this depth and hidden nature of things,
towards which an examination of our knowledge points. For "in feeling and
intuition appearance points beyond itself to real being." So ran our fifth
proposition. This subject indeed is delicate, and can only be treated of
in the hearing of willing ears. But all apologetic counts upon willing
ears; it is not conversion of doubters that is aimed at, it is relig
on
which seeks to reassure itself. Our proposition does not speak of dreams
but of facts, which are not the less facts because they are more subtle
than others. What we are speaking of are the deep impressions, which
cannot properly be made commensurable at all, which may spring up directly
out of an inward experience, an apprehension of nature, the world and
history, in the depths of the spirit. They call forth in us an
"anamnesis," a "reminiscence" in Plato's sense, awakening within us moods
and intuitions in which something of the essence and meaning of being is
directly experienced, although it remains in the form of feeling, and
cannot easily, if at all, find expression in definable ideas or clear
statements. Fries, in his book, "Wissen, Glaube, und Ahnung," unhappily
too much forgotten, takes account of this fact, for he places this region
of spiritual experience beside the certainties of faith and knowledge, and
regards these as "animated" by it. He has in mind especially the
impressions of the beautiful and the sublime which far transcend our
knowledge of nature, and to which knowledge and its concepts can never do
adequate justice, facts though they undoubtedly are. In them we experience
directly, in intuitive feeling, that the reality is greater than our power
of understanding, and we feel something of its true nature and meaning.
The utterances of Schleiermacher(3) in regard to religion follow the same
lines. For this is precisely what he means when he insists that the
universe must be experienced in intuition and feeling as well as in
knowing and doing. He is less incisive in his expressions than Fries, but
wider in ideas. He includes in this domain of "intuitive feeling" not only
the aesthetic experiences of the beautiful and sublime, but takes the much
more general and comprehensive view, that the receptive mind may gather
from the finite impressions of the infinite, and may through its
experiences of time gain some conception of the eternal. And he rightly
emphasises, that such intuition has its true place in the sphere of mind
and in face of the events of history, rather than in the outer court of
nature. He, too, lays stress on the fact that doctrinal statements and
ideas cannot be formulated out of such subtle material.
The experience of which we are speaking may be most directly and
impressively gained from the great, the powerful, the sublime in nature.
It may be gained from the contemplation of nature's harmonies and
beauties, but also of her overflowing abundance and her enigmatical
daemonic strength, from the purposeful intelligibility as well as the
terrifying and bewildering enigmas of nature's operations, from all the
manifold ways in which the mind is affected and startled, from all the
suggestive but indefinable sensations which may be roused in us by the
activity of nature, and which rise through a long scale to intoxicated
self-forgetfulness and wordless ecstasy before her beauty, and her
half-revealed, half-concealed mystery. If any or all of these be stirred
up in a mind which is otherwise godless or undevout, it remains an
indefinite, vacillating feeling, bringing with it nothing else. But in the
religious mind it immediately unites with what is akin to it or of similar
nature, and becomes worship. No dogmas or arguments for disputatious
reasoning can be drawn from it. It can hardly even be expressed, except,
perhaps, in music. And if it be expressed it tends easily to become
fantastic or romantic pomposity, as is shown even by certain parts of the
writings of Schleiermacher himself.