Thomas Halyburton

Abstract

Converging lines of thought suggest that it may be timely to revive the memory of the ‘great, little man’, Thomas Halyburton. There is a new emphasis on the distinction between the knowledge of hearsay and the knowledge of the heart (the distinction which Robert Barclay had in mind when he contrasted ‘the saving heart-knowledge’ with ‘the soaring, airy head-knowledge’). A whole school of thought has grown up around the importance of the I-Thou relation. Karl Heim made a particularly notable contribution to the discussion of the theological problem uncovered by this philosophy, namely the question to what extent our knowledge of God is analogous with our knowledge of the other person; and in his God Transcendent he underlines the fact that, when we pass from one ‘dimension’ of thought to another, it is not by the way of syllogistic reasoning, but by a species of illumination. Side by side with this movement of thought has gone an increasing interest in the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, who, drawing a sharp distinction between the natural sciences on the one hand and the humanistic studies on the other, sums up his wide and stimulating research in the principle, ‘We explain nature; but we understand the human spirit’.