Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Impassioned Reasoning and Impassioned Feeling

Impassioned reasoning, guided by what Newman calls the heart and the eye for truth, leads to truth. But an equal amount of passion, without the sense of responsibility and of the importance of truth, carries the mind to any prejudice which it is set on defending, much as wine may enliven and render more intelligent the discourse of a serious man, while it gets the better of another and stops his speech altogether.

Wilfrid Philip Ward, "The Wish to Believe" in Witnesses to the Unseen, and Other Essays (1893), p. 283.