resenting to itself.[8]

No one, I hope, will accuse me, after I have said all this, of
underrating the reasons in favor of subjectivism. And now that I
proceed to say why those reasons, strong as they are, fail to convince
my own mind, I trust the presumption may be that my objections are
stronger still.

I frankly confess that they are of a practical order. If we
practically take up subjectivism in a sincere and radical manner and
follow its consequences, we meet with some that make us pause. Let a
subjectivism {171} begin in never so severe and intellectual a way, it
is forced by the law of its nature to develop another side of itself
and end with the corruptest curiosity. Once dismiss the notion that
certain duties are good in themselves, and that we are here to do them,
no matter how we feel about them; once consecrate the opposite notion
that our performances and our violations of duty are for a common
purpose, the attainment of subjective knowledge and feeling, and that
the deepening of these is the chief end of our lives,--and at what
point on the downward slope are we to stop? In theology, subjectivism
develops as its 'left wing' antinomianism. In literature, its left
wing is romanticism. And in practical life it is either a nerveless
sentimentality or a sensualism without bounds.

Everywhere it fosters the fatalistic mood of mind. It makes those who
are already too inert more passive still; it renders wholly reckless
those whose energy is already in excess. All through history we find
how subjectivism, as soon as it has a free career, exhausts itself in
every sort of spiritual, moral, and practical license. Its optimism
turns to an ethical indifference, which infallibly brings dissolution
in its train. It is perfectly safe to say now that if the Hegelian
gnosticism, which has begun to show itself here and in Great Britain,
were to become a popular philosophy, as it once was in Germany, it
would certainly develop its left wing here as there, and produce a
reaction of disgust. Already I have heard a graduate of this very
school express in the pulpit his willingness to sin like David, if only
he might repent like David. You may tell me he was only sowing his
wild, or rather his tame, oats; and perhaps he was. But the point is
{172} that in the subjectivistic or gnostical philosophy oat-sowing,
wild or tame, becomes a systematic necessity and the chief function of
life. After the pure and class