FOR A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 



71 



Its first principles are as much a matter of dispute as thej 

 were 2,000 years ago. 



" Philosophy was the parent of Positive Science. It nourished 

 the infant mind of humanity but its office has been fulfilled. 

 The only interest it can have is an historic interest." 



" Philosophy in all its highest speculations is but a more or 

 less ingenious playing upon words." 



Bishop Thornton asked where the intuitions of a corporate 

 Christian conscience were to be found 1 



Archdeacon Potter said that it was difficult for him to criticise 

 quite impartially the paper, which he felt was an interesting and 

 instructive one, as it seems to start from a standpoint which differs 

 largely from his own. He looked on Philosophy as the Queen of 

 Sciences, which must impartially take up the data belonging to each 

 science, and co-ordinate them into a consistent whole. Therefore 

 in his view it must begin, as Descartes said, with no assumption but 

 a bare " cogito, ergo sum." A Christian philosophy, if it is to be a 

 philosophy at all, must not be the servant of dogmatic theology, but 

 work upwards from the very bottom, and systematise the results 

 attained in all the sciences with Christian beliefs, so far as they can 

 be found to agree. But it must discard all that will not thus work 

 into a unity, not as untrue, but as unproved. Doubtless all spiritual 

 truth that was really taught by our Lord would be found to be 

 capable of this agreement, but not necessarily all that had been 

 formulated in later periods by the Christian Church. 



Eeal spiritual experience might be taken as intuitions. But we 

 must distinguish between the real and imaginary. The Archdeacon 

 then instanced the case of a lady who, replying to the question, 

 " how did she know that our Lord was Divine, and now existent," 

 said that she had met Christ, spoken to Him, and so on. But 

 though doubtless she had experienced a real religious intuition of a 

 spiritual presence, that intuition was no proof that the power present 

 was the historical Jesus of Nazareth. It might be quite true. But 

 the intuition did not prove it. 



Therefore the speaker could not approve, what seemed to be a 

 main thought in the paper, that we should " start with the conscious- 

 ness of redemption as the foundation of the Church's existence," or 

 " give to the formulated theology which is the primary expression of 

 (religious) experience the priority over all other forms of thought," 



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