228 INTRODUCTION
validity in thought and its abiding supremacy in conduct. When he writes, April 29, 1862, "I believe — I hope — I had almost said I fear — all is for the best," we must remember that he had already written, February 5, 1857, "I have never found in myself the faculty of realizing to my belief anything which was not demonstrated to my understanding;" again, March 13, 1863: "As for truth, nothing with me is true which is not proven ; " and again, June 3, 1879, " Imagination and Reason join in the faith that the greatest powers cannot fail to be the best." These are stronger, bolder, and truer statements than I can recall in Emerson or in Carlyle, neither of whom, I fancy, would have made them. In Carlyle, there was a mystical background of "faith ; " in Emerson, there was a transcendental background of " intuition ; " but in Ran- dall there was a scientific background of " the understand- ing." If, taken as a general principle, Randall's statement means that, for the intelligejit, strength of belief is inevita- bly and necessarily proportioned to strength of evidence, it shows clearly to what test belief in the Moral Law must be submitted when the world becomes on a wide scale intelligent : namely, the test of human reason.
Is not that principle fundamental to all science and all philosophy . If so, and if the world continues to become more scientific as it becomes older, then Randall is in this age prophetic of the age that is at hand. No observant student of the times can doubt that men's hitherto traditional or instinctive or conventional accept- ance of the Moral Law is destined to undergo in the immediate future a severer trial than it has ever yet undergone. The call now is for courage — for undaunted and resolute reliance on the power of human reason to meet the profoundest intellectual needs of human life, and
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