And still more is this so when we look at the further interval
that lies between any perception of physical phenomena, any reasoning in
the abstract, or investigation of mathematical truth, and the
overmastering sense of obligation to the "moral law," or the action of
the soul in its instinctive possession of the conception of a Divine
Existence external to itself. It is because of this felt difference that
we talk of the "spiritual" as something beyond and above the "mental."
The distinction is real, though we must not allow ourselves to be led
too far in attempting to scan the close union that, from another point
of view, exists between the one and the other.
In a recent number of "The Edinburgh Review,[1]" the author complains of
Bishop Temple thus: "He uses the word spiritual in such a way that he
might be taken to imply that we had some other faculty for the
perception of moral truths, in addition to, and distinct from, our
reason." And the writer goes on to make an "uncompromising assertion of
reason as the one supreme faculty of man. To depreciate reason (he says)
to the profit of some supposed 'moral' illative sense, would be to open
the door to the most desolating of all scepticisms, and to subordinate
the basis of our highest intellectual power to some mere figment of the
imagination.
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