a wide range of what may be assumed in different times and places to be ascertainable fact, from a reputation for character and intelligence or the diploma of a school to ecclesiastical ordination and the divine commission of a prophet, church or king; (3) Has it long enjoyed a wide recognition or is its recognition now increasing among men who consider their reliance upon it to have profited them? and (4) Is there traceable in its dictates hitherto an apparent trend of consistently developing purpose with which one has been in a general way in sympathy?[1]
As to an impulsion and desire of one's own, one may consider, for example, (1) whether it is persistent and strong enough to render impossible any harmonious re-ordering of one's life in which it does not play some part; (2) whether it is genuinely what it purports to be and not quite another and unlike desire in disguise that does not venture to appear in its true character; (3) whether it is one which, if given recognition, will be likely to get beyond control and weaken one's capability for consecutive and purposeful action; and (4) whether it will be a means of developing new interests coordinate with itself and perhaps tending to restrain and differentiate it, or prove to be more probably an engrossing central interest about which all others that survive must be subserviently grouped. Finally, as regards an appeal for sympathetic interest,[2] the following criteria are in point: (1) Is the need manifestly serious
- ↑ The third of these is in substance the principle of Vincent of Lerins (in Migne: Patrol. Lat, 50; 660) referred to by Newman in the Apologia, p. 108; "quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est" It is the principle against a crude travesty of which Matthew Arnold protests in Culture and Anarchy, pp. 88-91. (Between a 'travesty' and a fair application of a principle it is of course hardly possible to draw a logical line.) In general, on criteria for authority, cf. the "notes of a genuine development of an idea" set forth in Newman's Development of Christian Doctrine," Part II.
- ↑ "There is an expression in use in America which will be difficult for me to give in exact translation, the phrase 'give it a chance give a chance.' It seems to me that the essense of the American soul lies in this wish to 'give a chance' to all human activity, indeed to all activity which can awaken our symptathy. In Washington ... the proprietor [of a lawn on which young grass was growing] fixed a sign ... with this inscription: 'Give the grass a chance,' and no one trespassed. That proprietor knew the American soul." H. Bergson, in an address given to American students in France, reported in The Living Age (Boston), December 27, 1919.
