Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949. Walter Hooper. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Walter Hooper
Издательство: HarperCollins
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Жанр произведения: Биографии и Мемуары
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780007332663
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Harwood’s first suggested to me that God might be defined as ‘a Being who spends his time having his existence proved and disproved’.)20 The particular one you quote (‘I have the idea of a perfect being’)21 seems to me to be valid or invalid according to the meaning you give the words ‘have an idea of’. I used to work it out by the analogy of a machine. If I have the idea of a machine which I, being unmechanical, couldn’t have invented on my own, does this prove that I have received the idea from some really mechanical source—e.g. a talk with the real inventor? To which I answer ‘Yes, if you mean a really detailed idea’: but of course there is another sense in which e.g. a lady novelist ‘has an idea’ of a new airship invented by her hero—in the sense that she attached some vague meaning to her words, which proves nothing of the sort. So that if anyone asks me whether the idea of God in human minds proves His existence, I can only ask ‘Whose idea?’ The Thistle-Bird’s22 idea, for instance, clearly not, for it contains nothing whereof his own pride, fear, and malevolence could not easily provide the materials (cf. McAndrew’s Hymn ‘Yer mother’s God’s a grasping deil, the image of yourself’).23

      This subject has drawn me into a longer digression (if indeed digression is possible in my type of letter!) than I had intended. I do wish you could see the Kilns now. We have had very cold weather (the last few mornings have been white with frost) and little wind: most of the leaves have become yellow and red without dropping from their branch, and those that have fallen lie in smooth circular carpets at the foot of their tree. The firs in the top wood are getting slowly barer, and working these afternoons in the high countries I begin to get the real autumn beauties.