This is true, of course, because of original sin. This kind of argument is necessary in the absolutist context of right and wrong that Christianity has always favored because it is so obviously unfair to require people to behave in a certain way on pain of eternal death if they fail when they have never heard of the new law of God occasioned by Christ's initial coming. Descartes, in his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences , confesses that he has fallen into profound doubt over the issue of whether the content of his dreams is more or less real than the content of his mind when he knows himself to be fully awake. Since the soul has always stood as the ultimate seat of human reason, making the leap from one idea to the other in Descartes' discourse, from mind to soul, as it were, is probably a perfectly legitimate thing to do. Descartes, then, moving through his profound doubt and relying on reason alone and science especially comes to the same place Origen left behind 1500 years earlier, a place Origen found through divine revelation with no science at all and clearly without any doubt either.
Truth is always truth.
When the answer is already in hand, methodology only finds it all over again. The fact that both the goat and the lion have or manifest a distinctive spirit-power uniquely their own and that any person can come to be guided by both the spirit of the goat and the spirit of the lion suggests to me that the elusive chimaera does in fact exist, not as an immutable truth of entity, but only as a passing potentiality of the human spirit, purely mortal and transitory, like everything else in the natural world. What always strikes me as most pitiful in Eurocentric discourse is the blind commitment it has always had to limiting potential rather than doing everything possible to extend and nurture it. That, I suppose, is the price you have to pay for believing you know what is certainly and absolutely true in a world that only passes you by because you were intent on finding something that does not exist. To return to Index click X in the upper right-hand corner of the page.