THE AFFIRMATIVE SIDE OF AGNOSTICISM.
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Mr. Walden also quotes De Quincey as saying:
In my opinion the Greek, word metanoia concealed a most profound meaning—a meaning of prodigious compass—which tore no allusion to any ideas whatever of repentance. The meta carried with it an emphatic expression of its original idea—the idea of transfer, of translation—or, if we prefer a Grecian to a Roman appareling, the idea of a metamorphosis. And this idea, to what is it applied? Upon what object is the idea of spiritual transfiguration made to bear? Simply upon the noetic or intellectual faculty—the faculty of shaping and conceiving things under their true relations. The holy herald of Christ, and Christ himself, the finisher of prophecy, made proclamation alike of the same mysterious summons, as a baptism or rite of initiation, namely, Μετανοῖτε—henceforth transfigure your theory of moral truth; the old theory is laid aside as infinitely insufficient; a new and spiritual revelation is established. Metanoeite! Contemplate moral truth as radiating from a new center; apprehend it under transfigured relations.
No exhibition of blank power—not the arresting of the earth's motion—not the calling back of the dead to life, can approach in grandeur to this miracle which we daily behold—namely, the inconceivable mystery of having written and sculptured upon the tablets of man's heart a new code of moral distinctions, all modifying—many reversing—the old ones. What would have been thought of any prophet, if he should have promised to transfigure the celestial mechanics; if he had said: I will create a new pole-star, a new zodiac, and new laws of gravitation; briefly, I will make a new earth and new heavens? And yet a thousand times more awful it was to undertake the writing of new laws upon the spiritual conscience of man. Metanoeite! (was the cry from the wilderness). Wheel into a new center your moral system—geocentric has that system been up to this hour—that is, having earth and the earthly for its starting-point; henceforth make it heliocentric (that is, with the sun, or the heavenly, for the principle of motion).
In an appendix Mr. Walden also prints an extract from a letter of Rev. Philip Schaff, D. D., in which the latter expresses "cordial approval" of the "able, excellent, and truthful article on the meaning of metanoia" and states that "conservatism prevented a change, and the difficulty of substituting a precise equivalent word," doubtless referring to the proper substitute in the new version for the word "repentance."
Attention may here be called to the fact that Hamilton says, "I would employ the word noetic to express all those cognitions which originate in the mind itself." Why not rather employ the words metanoetic or metagnostic for that purpose? It is to be remembered also that Lewes, in the Foundations of a Creed, says that he found it necessary to invent the new word metempirical, to "clearly designate" the "province where sense has no footing, where experiment can exercise no control, and where calculation ends in impossible quantities," the region of the "supersensible"; and to distinguish it from the province of the empirical, the region of the sensible and the extrasensible. But that word does not seem to have been generally accepted, and is not adequate for our purpose.
