Beliefs About Man Audiobook By Minot J. Savage cover art

Beliefs About Man

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Beliefs About Man

By: Minot J. Savage
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 A series of discourses concerning Man. I shall have to make this first one more or less abstract and theoretical, dealing with first principles, with what on the one hand may strike you as commonplace and unimportant; on the other hand, with those things that may seem to you so theoretical and far away as to be, if not difficult of comprehension, still hardly able to thrill you with any feeling of interest. And yet work like this always has to be done. Before a train of cars, lighted, decorated, fragrant with flowers, full of a happy company, with laughter and song, can rush in its speed across the country, there must first be the dull, drudging work of laying out the way, building the road-bed, laying down the ties and rails, and driving spike after spike to hold things in their places. So in the treatment of any great subject like this there must first be well-prepared work, the laying down of first principles, taking our starting-point, making our definitions, settling where we are and how we are to begin.

The story is related of the German philosopher, Schopenhauer, that, as he was walking the street one day with his head down, profoundly meditating on some deep theme of man or the universe, some one, engaged in the practical business of life, having no time to spare for philosophy, came into violent collision with him on the sidewalk. Angry, as such a man would be, thus stopped by one whom he supposed to be some old, self-absorbed man carelessly crossing his way, he broke out with the words, “Who are you?” The old philosopher, looking up kindly in his face, said, “Ah, friend, I would give the world to the man who would answer me that question.”

This, then, is the great question of the world,— Who are you? Who am I? If I could answer this there would be no mystery left for me in the universe. You remember how beautifully the poet Tennyson, in words that I have quoted to you more than once, addresses the “flower in the crannied wall,” and declares that if he could understand this flower, root in all, and all in all, he would know what God is and what man is. Much more, then, may we say: If I could answer the question, Who are you, who am I? I should be able to understand the flower in the crannied wall; I should be able to understand the infinite mystery of the universe. You will readily understand, then, that I do not expect to be able satisfactorily and completely to answer this question, What is man? All I can attempt, or all any man in the present state of knowledge can attempt, is simply to indicate the limits of knowledge and of ignorance, to say what we know, what we do not know; to say, in this direction there is no use for farther search, it is decided that nothing more there can be known; this way is the line of inquiry that promises future developments, the path toward which, then, we should set our investigating feet. This is all that we can undertake.

Man,— who is he? Christianity Philosophy Theology
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