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280
Hereditary Genius
This is the ideal form of the most extreme scepticism, to which
some few may nearly approach, but it is questionable if any have
ever reached. On the other hand, the support of a stronger arm, and
of a consoling voice, are absolute necessities to a man who has a
religious disposition. He is conscious of an incongruity in his nature,
and of an instability in his disposition, and he knows his insufficiency
to help himself. But all humanity is more or less subject to these
feelings, especially in sickness, in youth, and in old age, and women
are more affected by them than men. The most vigorous are
conscious of secret weaknesses and failings, which give them, often
in direct proportion to their intellectual stoicism, agonies of self-
distrust. But in the extreme and ideal form which we are supposing,
the incongruity and instability would be extreme; he would not be fit
to be a freeman, for he could not exist without a confessor and a
master. Here, then, is a broad distinction between the natural
dispositions of the two classes of men. The man of religious
constitution considers the contented sceptic to be foolhardy and sure
to fail miserably; the sceptic considers the man of an extremely pious
disposition to be slavish and inclined to superstition.
It is sometimes said, that a conviction of sin is a characteristic of a
religious disposition; I think, however, the strong sense of sinfulness in
a Christian, to be partly due to the doctrines of his intellectual creed.
The sceptic, equally with the religious man, would feel disgust and
shame at his miserable weakness in having done yesterday, in the
heat of some impulse, things which to-day, in his calm moments, he
disapproves. He is sensible that if another person had done the same
thing, he would have shunned him; so he similarly shuns the
contemplation of his own self. He feels he has done that which
makes him unworthy of the society of pure-minded
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