Augustine: Earlier Writings (continued)
THE SOLILOQUIES 55 do you torment me? R.—U a thing, A, existing in another thing, B, lasts for ever, B must last for ever. All scientific learning is in a subject, the mind. Therefore, if learning is eternal, the mind also must be eternal. Moreover, scholastic learning is Truth and, as reason persuaded us at the beginning of this book, Truth is eternal. Therefore the mind is eternal and cannot die. He alone will reasonably deny that the mind is immortal who proves that some of our propositions have not been correctly agreed to. xiv, 25. A,—I want to break out into rejoicing straight away, but two things cause me to hesitate. In the first place, I observe that we have used a circuitous route following a lengthy chain of reasoning, when the whole problem could quite as easily have been demonstrated briefly, as it has at last been demonstrated. What makes me anxious is that our talk has wandered round and round so long, as if an ambush were being laid. And secondly, I do not see how a scholastic discipline can be in the mind eternally; especially dialectic, seeing so few know it, and these have had to be indoctrinated from their youth. We cannot say that the minds of the unlearned are not minds, or that they have learning and do not know it. That would be utterly absurd. It remains either that truth is not always in a mind, or that scholastic discip Hne is not truth.
26. R,—Not in vain has our reasoning taken these circuitous ways. Our problem was, What is Truth? and I see that not even as it is have we been able to investigate it thoroughly, though we have tried almost every path, however rough, through the thicket. What are we to do? Shall we give up the attempt and wait till some other man's book comes into our hands and gives a satisfactory answer to our question? I think that before our time many books have been written which we have not read, and, not to speak of what we do not know, many are written in verse and prose, by men whose writings cannot escape our notice, and whose genius we know to be such that we cannot despair of finding in them what we want. Especially before our eyes there is Ambrose, in whom we recognize that eloquence has perfectly come to life again, which we had mourned as dead.
Will he who by his writings has taught us the true manner of living allow us to be ignorant of the nature of living? ^.—For myself I think not, and I have great hopes from that source.
But one thing I am sorry for, that I have had no opportunity to reveal to him as I wish my assiduity towards himself and towards wisdom. For assuredly he would have pity on my