Feeling Versus Intellect

A question is asked to me.

I think of an answer.

I go over the impressions of my memory and senses.

I carry my thoughts from them to the objects commonly conjoined with them.

I feel a stronger conception on one side than on the other.

I prepare an answer based on this strong conception.

I re-examine my answer.

I realize that it is:

• sometimes correct and sometimes wrong.
• as regulated by contrary principles or causes.

In balancing these contrary causes, I reduce the assurance of my first answer.

I prepare a new answer, which is liable to another doubt.

This process can go on for infinity.

Then how can we retain belief in philosophy or common life?

Feeling Versus Intellect

I answer that, after the first and second answer:

• the mind’s action becomes forced and unnatural, and
• the ideas become faint and obscure

When the mind finds thinks of difficult things:

• The attention is stretched.
• The posture of the mind is uneasy.
• The spirits are diverted from their natural course.
  • They move differently from when they flowed in their usual channel.

Metaphysics is an example of this.

It is easier to think of history or politics than metaphysics.

The regular flow of our feelings are hindered by the straining of the imagination.

We watch a tragedy emotionally without any subtle reasoning and reflection.

The mind and the physical body uses force in one action only at the expense of all the rest.

The different natures of our actions divert the mind’s force and changes its disposition.

It renders us:

• incapable of a sudden transition from one action to the other, and
• incapable of performing both actions at once.

Conviction from a subtle reasoning decreases the more the imagination struggles to enter into that reasoning.

Dogma and Skepticism are Both Based on Doubt, But Operate in Opposite Ways

Belief is a lively conception.

It can never be entire if it is not founded on something natural and easy.

This is the true state of the question.

Some people use an expeditious way to totally reject the arguments of skeptics without examination.

We cannot approve of this expeditious way.

People say that:

• if the skeptical reasonings are strong, then it prove that reason has some authority
• if the skeptical reasonings are weak, then reason is weak to invalidate our understanding

I think those arguments are not fair.

• This is because skeptical reasonings are successively strong and weak, based on the mind’s successive dispositions.

Reason initially takes the throne.

• It prescribes laws and imposes maxims with an absolute authority.

Her enemy is doubt.

• It takes shelter under reason’s protection*.

Doubt uses rational arguments to prove the fallaciousness and imbecility of reason.

Her arguments have power proportional to the current authority of reason where it comes from.

But doubt is contradictory to reason.

And so it gradually reduces the force of reason and its own force at the same time.

Until finally they both vanish into nothing.

The skeptical and dogmatical reasons are of the same kind.

• But they are contrary in their operation.

Where the skepticism is strong, it has an enemy of equal force in dogma.

Their forces were at first equal.

They still continue to be equal as long as either of them subsists.

None of them loses any force in the contest, without taking as much from its antagonist.

It is happy that nature:

• breaks the force of all skeptical arguments in time, and
• keeps skeptical arguments from having any considerable influence on the understanding.

Skeptical arguments never self-destruct.

If nature did not break them, they would have:

• subverted all conviction, and
• totally destroyed human reason.