"The fewer the better," said Father Payne. "One may learn to discriminate
between things, and to observe differences; but that is very different from
saying that you have got at the ultimate essence of any one thing. I am all
for clearness--we ought not to confuse things with each other, or use the
same names for different things; but I'm all against claiming absolute and
impeccable knowledge. It may be a comfortable system for a man who doesn't
want to be bothered; but he is only deferring the bother--he is like a man
who stays in bed because he doesn't like dressing. But it isn't a solution
to stay in bed--it is only suspending the solution. No, we mustn't have any
regard for human consistency--it's a very paltry attribute; it's the
opposite of anthropomorphism. That makes out God to be in the image of man,
but consistency claims for man the privilege of God. And that isn't
wholesome, you know, either for a man or his friends!"
"I give up," said Rose: "can nothing be logical?"
"Hardly anything," said Father Payne, "except logic itself. You have to
coin logical ideas into counters to play with. No two things, for instance,
can ever be absolutely equal, except imaginary equalities--and that's the
mischief of logic applied to life, that it presumes an exact valuation of
the ideas it works with, when no two people's valuations of the same idea
are identical, and even one person's valuation varies from time to time;
and logic breeds a phantom sort of consistency which only exists in the
imagination.
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