THE RATIONAL POSTULATES OF THE RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT.
In philosophical discussions of religion as well as in popular
exhortations upon it, too exclusive stress has been laid upon its
emotional elements. “It is,” says Professor Bain, “an affair of the
feelings.”[87-1] “The essence of religion,” observes John Stuart Mill,
“is the strong and earnest direction of the emotions and desires towards
an ideal object.” “It must be allowed,” says Dr. Mansel,[87-2] “that it
is not through reasoning that men obtain their first intimation of their
relation to a deity.” In writers and preachers of the semi-mystical
school, which embraces most of the ardent revivalists of the day, we
constantly hear the “feeling of dependence” quoted as the radical
element of religious thought.[87-3] In America Theodore Parker, and in
Germany Schleiermacher, were brilliant exponents of this doctrine. To
the latter the philosopher Hegel replied that if religion is a matter of
feeling, an affectionate dog is the best Christian.
This answer was not flippant, but founded on the true and only worthy
conception of the religious sentiment. We have passed in review the
emotions which form a part of it, and recognize their power. But neither
these nor any other mere emotions, desires or feelings can explain even
the lowest religion. It depends for its existence on the essential
nature of reason. We cannot at all allow, as Dr. Mansel asks of us, that
man’s first intimations of Deity came in any other way than as one of
the ripest fruits of reason. Were such the case, we should certainly
find traces of them among brutes and idiots, which we do not. The slight
signs of religious actions thought to have been noticed by some in the
lower animals, by Sir John Lubbock in ants, and by Charles Darwin in
dogs, if authenticated, would vindicate for these species a much closer
mental kinship to man than we have yet supposed.
If we dispassionately analyze any religion whatever, paying less
attention to what its professed teachers say it is, than to what the
mass of the votaries believe it to be, we shall see that every form of
adoration unconsciously assumes certain premises in reason, which give
impulse and character to its emotional and active manifestations. They
are its data or axioms, or, as I shall call them, its “rational
postulates.” They can, I believe, be reduced to three, but not to a
lesser number.
Before the religious feeling acquires the distinctness of a notion and
urges to conscious action, it must assume at least these three
postulates, and without them it cannot rise into cognition. These, their
necessary character and their relations, I shall set forth in this
chapter.
They are as follows:--
I. There is Order in things.
II. This order is one of Intelligence.
III. All Intelligence is one in kind.
I. The conscious or unconscious purpose of the religious sentiment, as
I have shown in the last chapter, is the _fruition of a wish_, the
success of which depends upon unknown power. The votary asks help where
he cannot help himself. He expects it through an exertion of power,
through an efficient cause. Obviously therefore, he is acting on the
logical idea of Causality. This underlies and is essential to the
simplest prayer. He extends it, moreover, out of the limits of
experience into the regions of hypothesis. He has carried the analogy
of observation into the realm of abstract conceptions. No matter if he
does believe that the will of God is the efficient cause. Perhaps he is
right; at any rate he cannot be denied the privilege of regarding
volition as a co-operating cause. Limited at first to the transactions
which most concerned men, the conception of order as a divine act
extended itself to the known universe. Herodotus derives the Greek word
for God θεος from a root which gives the meaning “to set in order,” and
the Scandinavians gave the same sense to their word, _Regin_.[90-1]
Thus the abstract idea of cause or power is a postulate of all
religious thought. Let us examine its meaning.
Every reader, the least versed in the history of speculative thought for
the last hundred years, knows how long and violent the discussions have
been of the relations of “cause and effect.” Startled by the criticisms
of Hume, Kant sought to elude them by distinguishing between two spheres
of thought, the understanding and the reason. Sir William Hamilton at
first included the “principle of sufficient reason’[TN-6] in the laws of
thought, but subsequently rejected it as pertaining to judgments, and
therefore material, not formal. Schopenhauer claimed to have traced it
to a fourfold root, and Mill with most of the current English schools,
Bain, Austin, Spencer, &c., maintained that it meant nothing but
“uniformity of sequence.”
It would be vain to touch upon a discussion so extended as this. In the
first chapter I have remarked that the idea of cause does not enter into
the conceptions of pure logic or thought. It is, as Hamilton saw,
material. I shall only pause to show what is meant by the term “cause”
in the physical sciences. When one event follows another, time after
time, we have “uniformity of sequence.” Suppose the constitution of the
race were so happy that we slept at night only, and always awoke a few
moments before sunrise. Such a sequence quite without exception, should,
if uniform experience is the source of the idea of cause, justly lead to
the opinion that the sun rises because man awakes. As we know this
conclusion would be erroneous, some other element beside sequence must
complete a real cause. If now, it were shown that the relation of cause
to effect which we actually entertain and cannot help entertaining is in
some instances flatly contrary to all experience, then we must
acknowledge that the idea of cause asks to confirm it something quite
independent of experience, that is abstract. But such examples are
common. We never saw two objects continue to approach without meeting;
but we are constrained to believe that lines of certain descriptions can
forever approach and never meet.
The uniformity of sequence is, in fact, in the physical sciences never
assumed to express the relation of cause and effect, until the
connection between the antecedent and consequent can be set forth
abstractly in mathematical formulæ. The sequence of the planetary
motions was discovered by Kepler, but it was reserved for Newton to
prove the theoretical necessity of this motion and establish its
mathematical relations. The sequence of sensations to impressions is
well known, but the law of the sequence remains the desideratum in
psychology.[92-1]
Science, therefore, has been correctly defined as “the knowledge of
system.” Its aim is to ascertain the laws of phenomena, to define the
“order in things.” Its fundamental postulate is that order exists, that
all things are “lapped in universal law.” It acknowledges no exception,
and it considers that all law is capable of final expression in
quantity, in mathematical symbols. It is the manifest of reason, “whose
unceasing endeavor is to banish the idea of Chance.”[93-1]
We thus see that its postulate is the same as that of the religious
sentiment. Wherein then do they differ? Not in the recognition of
chance. Accident, chance, does not exist for the religious sense in any
stage of its growth. Everywhere religion proclaims in the words of
Dante:--
“le cose tutte quante,
Hann’ ordine tra loro;”
everywhere in the more optimistic faiths it holds this order, in the
words of St. Augustine, to be one “most fair, of excellent
things.”[93-2]
What we call “the element of chance” is in its scientific sense that of
which we do not know the law; while to the untutored religious mind it
is the manifestation of divine will. The Kamschatkan, when his boat is
lost in the storm, attributes it to the vengeance of a god angered
because he scraped the snow from his shoes with a knife, instead of
using a piece of wood; if a Dakota has bad luck in hunting, he says it
is caused by his wife stepping over a bone and thus irritating a
spirit. The idea of cause, the sentiment of order, is as strong as ever,
but it differs from that admitted by science in recognizing as a
possible efficient motor that which is incapable of mathematical
expression, namely, a volition, a will. _Voluntas Dei asylum
ignorantiæ_, is no unkind description of such an opinion.
So long as this recognition is essential to the life of a religious
system, just so long it will and must be in conflict with science, with
every prospect of the latter gaining the victory. Is the belief in
volition as an efficient cause indispensable to the religious sentiment
in general? For this vital question we are not yet prepared, but must
first consider the remaining rational postulates it assumes. The second
is
II. This order is one of intelligence.
By this is not meant that the order is one of _an_ Intelligence, but
simply that the order which exists in things is conformable to man’s
thinking power,--that if he knows the course of events he can appreciate
their relations,--that facts can be subsumed under thoughts. Whatever
scheme of order there were, would be nothing to him unless it were
conformable to his intellectual functions. It could not form the matter
of his thought.[94-1]
Science, which deals in the first instance exclusively with phenomena,
also assumes this postulate. It recognizes that when the formal laws,
which it is its mission to define, are examined apart from their
material expression, when they are emptied of their phenomenal contents,
they show themselves to be logical constructions, reasoned truths, in
other words, forms of intelligence. The votary who assumes the order one
of volition alone, or volition with physical necessity, still assumes
the volitions are as comprehensible as are his own; that they are
purposive; that the order, even if not clear to him, is both real and
reasonable. Were it not so, did he believe that the gods carried out
their schemes through a series of caprices inconceivable to
intelligence, through absolute chance, insane caprice, or blind fate, he
could neither see in occurrences the signs of divine rule, nor hope for
aid in obtaining his wishes. In fact, order is only conceivable to man
at all as an order conformable to his own intelligence.
This second postulate embraces what has been recently called the
“Principle of continuity,” indispensable to sane thought of any kind. A
late work defines it as “the trust that the Supreme Governor of the
Universe will not put us to permanent intellectual confusion.”[96-1]
Looked at closely, it is the identification of order with reason.
The third and final postulate of the religious sentiment is that
III. All intelligence is one in kind.
Religion demands that there be a truth which is absolutely true, and
that there be a goodness which is universally and eternally good. Each
system claims the possession, and generally the exclusive possession,
of this goodness and truth. They are right in maintaining these views,
for unless such is the case, unless there is an absolute truth,
cognizable to man, yet not transcended by any divine intelligence, all
possible religion becomes mere child’s play, and its professed
interpretation of mysteries but trickery.
The Grecian sophists used to meet the demonstrations of the
mathematicians and philosophers by conceding that they did indeed set
forth the truth, so far as man’s intelligence goes, but that to the
intelligence of other beings--a bat or an angel, for example--they might
not hold good at all; that there is a different truth for different
intelligences; that the intelligence makes the truth; and that as for
the absolutely true, true to every intelligence, there is no such thing.
They acknowledged that a simple syllogism, constructed on these
premises, made their own assertions partake of the doubtful character
that was by them ascribed to other human knowledge. But this they
gracefully accepted as the inevitable conclusion of reasoning. Their
position is defended to-day by the advocates of “positivism,” who
maintain the relativity of all truth.
But such a conclusion is wholly incompatible with the religious mind. It
must assume that there are some common truths, true infinitely, and
therefore, that in all intelligence there is an essential unity of kind.
“This postulation,” says a close thinker, “is the very foundation and
essence of religion. Destroy it, and you destroy the very possibility of
religion.”[97-1]
Clear as this would seem to be to any reflective mind, yet, strange to
say, it is to-day the current fashion for religious teachers to deny it.
Scared by a phantasm of their own creation, they have deserted the only
position in which it is possible to defend religion at all. Afraid of
the accusation that they make God like man, they have removed Him
beyond the pale of all intelligence, and logically, therefore,
annihilated every conception of Him.
Teachers and preachers do not tire of telling their followers that God
is incomprehensible; that his ways are past finding out; that he is the
Unconditioned, the Infinite, the Unknowable. They really mean that he is
another order of intelligence, which, to quote a famous comparison of
Spinoza, has the same name as ours, but is no more one with it than the
dog is one with his namesake, the dog-star!
They are eagerly seconded in this position by a school of writers who
distinctly see where such a doctrine leads, and who do not hesitate to
carry it home. Mr. Mill is right in his scorn for those who “erect the
incurable limitations of the human conceptive faculty into laws of the
outward universe,” if there are such limitations. And Mr. Spencer is
justified in condemning “the transcendent audacity which passes current
as piety,” if his definition of the underlying verity of religion is
admitted--that it is “the consciousness of an inscrutable power which,
in its nature, transcends intuition, and is beyond imagination.”[98-1]
They are but following the orthodox Sir William Hamilton, who says:
“Creation must be thought as the incomprehensible evolution of power
into energy.”[99-1] We are to think that which by the terms of the
proposition is unthinkable! A most wise master!
Let it be noted that the expressions such as inscrutable,
incomprehensible, unknowable, etc., which such writers use, are avowedly
not limited to man’s intelligence in its present state of cultivation,
but are applied to his _kind_ of intelligence, no matter how far
trained. They mean that the inscrutable, etc., is not merely not _at
present_ open to man’s observation--that were a truism--but that it
cannot be subsumed under the laws of his reasoning powers. In other
words, they deny that all intelligence is one in _kind_. Some accept
this fully, and concede that what are called the laws of order, as shown
by science, are only matters of experience, true here and now, not
necessarily and absolutely true.
This is a consistent inference, and applies, of course, with equal force
to all moral laws and religious dogmas.
The arguments brought against such opinions have been various. The old
reply to the sophists has been dressed in modern garb, and it has been
repeatedly put that if no statement is really true, then this one, to
wit “no statement is really true,” also is not true; and if that is the
case, then there are statements which really are true. The theory of
evolution as a dogma has been attacked by its own maxims; in asserting
that all knowledge is imperfect, it calls its own verity into question.
If all truth is relative, then this at least is absolutely true.
It has also been noted that all such words as incomprehensible,
unconditioned, infinite, unknowable, are in their nature privatives,
they are not a thought but are only one element of a thought. As has
been shown in the first chapter, every thought is made up of a positive
and a privative, and it is absurd and unnatural to separate the one from
the other. The concept man, regarded as a division of the higher concept
animal, is made up of man and not-man. In so far as other animals are
included under the term “not-man” they do not come into intelligent
cognition; but that does not mean that they cannot do so. So “the
unconditioned” is really a part of the thought of “the conditioned,” the
“unknowable” a part of the “knowable,” the “infinite” a part of the
thought of the “finite.” Under material images these privatives, as
such, cannot be expressed; but in pure thought which deals with symbols
and types alone, they can be.
But if the abstract laws of thought themselves are confined in the
limits of one kind of intelligence, then we cannot take an appeal to
them to attack this sophism. Therefore on maintaining their integrity
the discussion must finally rest. This has been fully recognized by
thinkers, one of whom has not long since earnestly called attention to
“the urgent necessity of fathoming the psychical mechanism on which
rests all our intellectual life.”[101-1]
In this endeavor the attempt has been made to show that the logical laws
are derived in accordance with the general theory of evolution from the
natural or material laws of thinking. These, as I have previously
remarked, are those of the association of ideas, and come under the
general heads of contiguity and similarity. Such combinations are
independent of the aim of the logical laws, which is _correct_ thinking.
A German writer, Dr. Windelband, has therefore argued that as
experience, strengthened by hereditary transmission, continued to show
that the particular combinations which are in accord with what we call
the laws of thought furnished the best, that is, the most useful
results, they were adopted in preference to others and finally assumed
as the criteria of truth.
Of course it follows from this that as these laws are merely the outcome
of human experience they can have no validity outside of it.
Consequently, adds the writer I have quoted, just as the study of optics
teaches us that the human eye yields a very different picture of the
external world from that given by the eye of a fly, for instance, and
as each of them is equally far from the reality, so the truth which our
intelligence enables us to reach is not less remote from that which is
the absolutely true. He considers that this is proven by the very nature
of the “law of contradiction” itself, which must be inconsistent with
the character of absolute thought. For in the latter, positive truth
only can exist, therefore no negation, and no law about the relation of
affirmative to negative.[102-1]
The latter criticism assumes that negation is of the nature of error, a
mistake drawn from the use of the negative in applied logic. For in
formal logic, whether as quantity or quality, that is, in pure
mathematics or abstract thought, the reasoning is just as correct when
negatives are employed as when positives, as I have remarked before. The
other criticism is more important, for if we can reach the conclusion
that the real laws of the universe are other than as we understand them,
then our intelligence is not of a kind to represent them.
Such an opinion can be refuted directly. The laws which we profess to
know are as operative in the remotest nebulae as in the planet we
inhabit. It is altogether likely that countless forms of intelligent
beings inhabit the starry wastes, receiving through sensory apparatus
widely different from ours very diverse impressions of the external
world. All this we know, but we also know that if those beings have
defined the laws which underlie phenomena, they have found them to be
the same that we have; for were they in the least different, in
principle or application, they could not furnish the means, as those we
know do, of predicting the recurrence of the celestial motions with
unfailing accuracy. Therefore the demonstrations of pure mathematics,
such as the relation of an absciss to an ordinate, or of the diameter to
the circumference, must be universally true; and hence the logical laws
which are the ultimate criteria of these truths must also be true to
every intelligence, real or possible.[103-1]
Another and forcible reply to these objections is that the laws which
our intelligence has reached and recognizes as universally true are not
only not derived from experience, but are in direct opposition to and
are constantly contradicted by it. Neither sense nor imagination has
ever portrayed a perfect circle in which the diameter bore to the
circumference the exact proportion which we know it does bear. The very
fact that we have learned that our senses are wholly untrustworthy, and
that experience is always fallacious, shows that we have tests of truth
depending on some other faculty. “Each series of connected facts in
nature furnishes the intimation of an order more exact than that which
it directly manifests.”[104-1]
But, it has been urged, granted that we have reached something like
positive knowledge of those laws which are the _order_ of the
manifestation of phenomena, the real Inscrutable, the mysterious
Unknowable, escapes us still; this is the _nature_ of phenomenal
manifestation, “the secret of the Power manifested in Existence.”[104-2]
At this point the physicist trips and falls; and here, too, the
metaphysician stumbles.
I have already spoken of our aptitude to be frightened by a chimera, and
deceived by such words as “nature” and “cause.” Laws and rules, by which
we express Order, are restrictive only in a condition of intelligence
short of completeness, only therefore in that province of thought which
concerns itself with material facts. The musician is not fettered by the
laws of harmony, but only by those of discord. The truly virtuous man,
remarks Aristotle, never has occasion to practise self-denial. Hence,
mathematically, “the theory of the intellectual action involves the
recognition of a sphere of thought from which all limits are
withdrawn.”[105-1] True freedom, real being, is only possible when law
as such is inexistent. Only the lawless makes the law. When the idea of
the laws of order thus disappears in that of free function consistent
with perfect order, when, as Kant expresses it, we ascend from the
contemplation of things acting according to law, to action according to
the representation of law,[105-2] we can, without audacity, believe that
we have penetrated the secret of existence, that we have reached the
limits of explanation and found one wholly satisfying the highest
reason. Intelligence, not apart from phenomena, but parallel with them,
not under law, but through perfect harmony above it, _power one with
being_, the will which is “the essence of reason,” the emanant cause of
phenomena, immanent only by the number of its relations we have not
learned, this is the satisfying and exhaustive solution. The folly lies
not in claiming reason as the absolute, but in assuming that the
absolute is beyond and against reason.
There is nothing new in this explanation; and it is none the worse for
being old. If Anaxagoras discerned it dimly, and many a one since him
has spoken of Intelligence, Reason, Nous or Logos as the constructive
factor of the creation; if “all the riper religions of the Orient
assumed as their fundamental principle that unless the Highest
penetrates all parts of the Universe, and itself conditions whatever is
conditioned, no universal order, no Kosmos, no real existence is
thinkable;”[106-1] such inadequate expressions should never obscure the
truth that reason in its loftiest flights descries nothing nobler than
itself.
The relative, as its name implies, for ever presupposes and points to
the absolute, the latter an Intelligence also, not one that renders ours
futile and fallacious, but one that imparts to ours the capacity we
possess of reaching eternal and ubiquitous truth. The severest
mathematical reasoning forces us to this conclusion, and we can dispense
with speculation about it.
Only on the principle which here receives its proof, that man has
something in him of God, that the norm of the true holds good
throughout, can he know or care anything about divinity. “It takes a
god to discern a god,” profoundly wrote Novalis.
When a religion teaches what reason disclaims, not through lack of
testimony but through a denial of the rights of reason, then that
religion wars against itself and will fall. Faith is not the acceptance
of what intelligence rejects, but a suspension of judgment for want of
evidence. A thoroughly religious mind will rejoice when its faith is
shaken with doubt; for the doubt indicates increased light rendering
perceptible some possible error not before seen.
Least of all should a believer in a divine revelation deny the oneness
of intelligence. For if he is right, then the revealed truth he talks
about is but relative and partial, and those inspired men who claimed
for it the sign manual of the Absolute were fools, insane or liars.
If the various arguments I have rehearsed indicate conclusively that in
the laws of thought we have the norms of absolute truth--and skepticism
on this point can be skepticism and not belief only by virtue of the
very law which it doubts--some important corollaries present themselves.
Regarding in the first place the nature of these laws, we find them very
different from those of physical necessity--those which are called the
laws of nature. The latter are authoritative, they are never means to an
end, they admit no exception, they leave no room for error. Not so with
the laws of reasoning. Man far more frequently disregards than obeys
them; they leave a wide field for fallacy. Wherein then lies that
theoretical necessity which is the essence of law? The answer is that
the laws of reasoning are _purposive_ only, they are regulative, not
constitutive, and their theoretical necessity lies in the end, the
result of reasoning, that is, in the knowing, in the recognition of
truth. They are what the Germans call _Zweckgesetze_.[108-1]
But in mathematical reasoning and in the processes of physical nature
the absolute character of the laws which prevail depends for its final
necessity on their consistency, their entire correspondence with the
laws of right reasoning. Applied to them the purposive character of the
laws is not seen, for their ends are fulfilled. We are brought,
therefore, to the momentous conclusion that the manifestation of Order,
whether in material or mental processes, “affords a presumption, not
measurable indeed but real, of the fulfilment of an end or
purpose;”[108-1][TN-7] and this purpose, one which has other objects in
view than the continuance of physical processes. The history of mind,
from protoplasmic sensation upward, must be a progression, whose end
will be worth more than was its beginning, a process, which has for its
purpose the satisfaction of the laws of mind. This is nothing else than
correct thinking, the attainment of truth.
But this conclusion, reached by a searching criticism of the validity of
scientific laws, is precisely that which is the postulate of all
developed creeds. “The faith of all historical religions,” says Bunsen,
“starts from the assumption of a universal moral order, in which the
good is alone the true, and the true is the only good.”[109-1]
The purposive nature of the processes of thought, as well as the manner
in which they govern the mind, is illustrated by the history of man. His
actions, whether as an individual or as a nation, are guided by ideas
not derived from the outer world, for they do not correspond to actual
objects, but from mental pictures of things as he wants them to exist.
These are his hopes, his wishes, his ideals; they are the more potent,
and prompt to more vigorous action, the clearer they are to his mind.
Even when he is unconscious of them, they exist as tendencies, or
instincts, inherited often from some remote ancestor, perhaps even the
heir-loom of a stage of lower life, for they occur where sensation
alone is present, and are an important factor in general evolution.
It is usually conceded that this theory of organic development very much
attenuates the evidence of what is known as the argument from design in
nature, by which the existence of an intelligent Creator is sought to be
shown. If the distinction between the formal laws of mathematics, which
are those of nature, and logic, which are those of mind, be fully
understood, no one will seek such an argument in the former but in the
latter only, for they alone, as I have shown, are purposive, and they
are wholly so. The only God that nature points to is an adamantine Fate.
If religion has indeed the object which Bunsen assigns it, physical
phenomena cannot concern it. Its votaries should not look to change the
operation of natural laws by incantations, prayers or miracles.
Whenever in the material world there presents itself a seeming
confusion, it is certain to turn out but an incompleteness of our
observation, and on closer inspection it resolves itself into some
higher scheme of Order. This is not so in the realm of thought. Wrong
thinking never can become right thinking. A profound writer has said:
“One explanation only of these facts can be given, viz., that the
distinction between _true_ and _false_, between _correct_ and
_incorrect_, exists in the processes of the intellect, but not in the
region of a physical necessity.”[111-1] A religion therefore which
claims as its mission the discovery of the true and its identification
with the good,--in other words the persuading man that he should always
act in accordance with the dictates of right reasoning--should be
addressed primarily to the intellect.
As man can attain to certain truths which are without any mixture of
fallacy, which when once he comprehends them he can never any more
doubt, and which though thus absolute do not fetter his intellect but
first give it the use of all its powers to the extent of those truths;
so he can conceive of an Intelligence in which all truth is thus without
taint of error. Not only is such an Intelligence conceivable, it is
necessary to conceive it, in order to complete the scientific induction
of “a sphere of thought from which all limits are withdrawn,” forced
upon us by the demonstrations of the exact sciences.[111-2]
Thus do we reach the foundation for the faith in a moral government of
the world, which it has been the uniform characteristic of religions to
assert; but a government, as thus analytically reached, not easily
corresponding with that which popular religion speaks of. Such feeble
sentiments as mercy, benevolence and effusive love, scarcely find place
in this conception of the source of universal order. In this cosmical
dust-cloud we inhabit, whose each speck is a sun, man’s destiny plays a
microscopic part. The vexed question whether ours is the best possible
or the worst possible world, drops into startling insignificance.
Religion has taught the abnegation of self; science is first to teach
the humiliation of the race. Not for man’s behoof were created the
greater and the lesser lights, not for his deeds will the sun grow dark
or the stars fall, not with any reference to his pains or pleasure was
this universe spread upon the night. That Intelligence which pursues its
own ends in this All, which sees from first to last the chain of causes
which mould human action, measures not its purposes by man’s halting
sensations. Such an Intelligence is fitly described by the
philosopher-poet as one,
“Wo die Gerechtigkeit so Wurzel schläget,
Und Schuld und Unschuld so erhaben wäget
Dass sie vertritt die Stelle aller Güte.”[112-1]
In the scheme of the universe, pain and pleasure, truth and error, has
each its fitness, and no single thought or act can be judged apart from
all others that ever have been and ever shall be.
Such was the power that was contemplated by the Hebrew prophet, one from
which all evil things and all good things come, and who disposes them
all to the fulfilment of a final purpose:
“I am the Lord and there is none else. I form the light and create
darkness; I make peace and create evil.”
“I am God and there is none like me, declaring the end from the
beginning, and from ancient times the things which are not yet
done.”[113-1]
In a similar strain the ancient Aryan sang:--
“This do I ask thee, tell me, O Ahura!
Who is he, working good, made the light and also darkness?
Who is he, working good, made the sleep as well as waking?
Who the night, as well as noon and the morning?”
And the reply came:
“Know also this, O pure Zarathustra: through my wisdom, through
which was the beginning of the world, so also its end shall
be.”[113-2]
Or as the Arabian apostle wrote, inspired by the same idea:--
“Praise the name of thy Lord, the Most High,
Who hath created and balanced all things,
Who hath fixed their destinies and guideth them.”
“The Revelation of this book is from the Mighty, the Wise. We have
not created the Heavens and the Earth and all that is between them
otherwise than with a purpose and for a settled term.”[113-3]
FOOTNOTES:
[87-1] _The Emotions and Will_, p. 594. So Professor Tyndall speaks of
confining the religious sentiment to “the region of emotion, which is
its proper sphere.”
[87-2] H. L. Mansel, _The Limits of Religious Thought_, p. 115. (Boston,
1859.)
[87-3] “The _one relation_ which is the ground of all true religion is a
total dependence upon God.” William Law, _Address to the Clergy_, p. 12.
“The essential germ of the religious life is concentrated in the
absolute feeling of dependence on infinite power.” J. D. Morell, _The
Philosophy of Religion_, p. 94. (New York, 1849.) This accomplished
author, well known for his _History of Philosophy_, is the most able
English exponent of the religious views of Schleiermacher and Jacobi.
[90-1] “Weil sie die Welt _eingerichtet_ haben.” Creuzer, _Symbolik und
Mythologie der alten Vœlker_, Bd. I. s. 169. It is not of any importance
that Herodotus’ etymology is incorrect: what I wish to show is that he
and his contemporaries entertained the conception of the gods as the
authors of order.
[92-1] This distinction is well set forth by A. von Humboldt, _Kosmos_,
p. 388 (Phila., 1869).
[93-1] “Ueberall den Zufall zu verbannen, zu verhindern, dass in dem
Gebiete des Beobachtens und Denkens er nicht zu herrschen scheine, im
Gebiete des Handelns nicht herrsche, ist das Streben der Vernunft.”
Wilhelm von Humboldt, _Ueber Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea_, iv.
[93-2] “Iste ordo pulcherrimus rerum valde bonarum.” _Confessiones_,
Lib. xiii. cap. xxxv.
[94-1] “The notion of a God is not contained in the mere notion of
Cause, that is the notion of Fate or Power. To this must be added
Intelligence,” etc. Sir Wm. Hamilton, _Lectures on Metaphysics_, Lecture
ii.
[96-1] _The Unseen Universe_, p. 60.
[97-1] James Frederick Ferrier, _Lectures on Greek Philosophy_, p. 13
(Edinburgh, 1866). On a question growing directly out of this, to wit,
the relative character of good and evil, Mr. J. S. Mill expresses
himself thus: “My opinion of this doctrine is, that it is beyond all
others which now engage speculative minds, the decisive one between
moral good and evil for the Christian world.” _Examination of Hamilton’s
Philosophy_, p. 90.
[98-1] _First Principles_, pp. 108, 127.
[99-1] _Lectures on Metaphysics_, Vol. I., p. 690.
[101-1] Professor Steinthal in the _Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie_.
[102-1] Dr. W. Windelband, _Die Erkenntnissiehre unter dem
voelkerpsychologischem Gesichtspunkte_, in the _Zeitschrift für
Völkerpsychologie_, 1874, _Bd. VIII._ S. 165 _sqq._
[103-1] I would ask the reader willing to pursue this reasoning further,
to peruse the charming essay of Oersted, entitled _Das ganze Dasein Ein
Vernunftreich_.
[104-1] Geo. Boole, _An Investigation of the Laws of Thought_, p. 407.
[104-2] Herbert Spencer, _First Principles_, p. 112. Spinoza’s famous
proposition, previously quoted, _Unaquæque res quantum in se est, in suo
esse perseverare conatur_, (_Ethices, Pars III., Prop. VI._,) expresses
also the ultimate of modern investigation. A recent critic considers it
is a fallacy because the conatus “surreptitiously implies a sense of
effort or struggle for existence,” whereas the logical concept of a res
does not involve effort (S. N. Hodgson, _The Theory of Practice_, vol.
I. pp. 134-6, London, 1870.) The answer is that identity implies
continuance. In organic life we have the fact of nutrition, a function
whose duty is to supply waste, and hence offer direct opposition to
perturbing forces.
[105-1] Geo. Boole, _The Laws of Thought_, p. 419.
[105-2] Kant, _The Metaphysic of Ethics_, p. 23 (Eng. Trans. London,
1869.)
[106-1] Creuzer, _Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Voelker_, Bd. I. s.
291.
[108-1] See this distinction between physical and thought laws fully set
forth by Prof. Boole in the appendix to _The Laws of Thought_, and by
Dr. Windelband, _Zeitschrift für Voelkerpsychologie_, Bd. VIII., s. 165
sqq.
[108-2] Geo. Boole, u. s. p. 399.
[109-1] “Der Glaube aller geschichtlichen Religionen geht aus von dieser
Annahme einer sittlichen, in Gott bewusst lebenden, Weltordnung, wonach
das Gute das allein Wahre ist, and das Wahre das allein Gute.” _Gott in
der Geschichte_, Bd. I. s. xl. Leipzig, 1857.
[111-1] Geo. Boole, _Laws of Thought_, p. 410.
[111-2] The latest researches in natural science confirm the expressions
of W. von Humboldt: “Das Streben der Natur ist auf etwas Unbeschränktes
gerichtet.” “Die Natur mit endlichen Mitteln unendliche Zwecke
verfolgt.” _Ueber den Geschlechtsunterschied, etc._
[112-1] Wilhelm von Humboldt, _Sonnette_, “Höchste Gerechtigkeit.”
[113-1] Isaiah, xlv. 7; xlvi. 10.
[113-2] _Khordah--avesta_, _Ormazd--Yasht_, 38, and _Yaçna_, 42.
[113-3] _The Koran_, Suras lxxxvii., xlvi.
THE PRAYER AND ITS ANSWER.
SUMMARY.
Religion starts with a Prayer. This is an appeal to the unknown,
and is indispensable in religious thought. The apparent exceptions
of Buddhism and Confucianism.
All prayers relate to the fulfilment of a wish. At first its direct
object is alone thought of. This so frequently fails that the
indirect object rises into view. This stated to be the increase of
the pleasurable emotions. The inadequacy of this statement.
The answers to prayer. As a form of Expectant Attention, it exerts
much subjective power. Can it influence external phenomena? It is
possible. Deeply religious minds reject both these answers,
however. They claim the objective answer to be Inspiration. All
religions unite in this claim.
Inspirations have been contradictory. That is genuine which teaches
truths which cannot be doubted concerning duty and deity. A certain
mental condition favors the attainment of such truths. This
simulated in religious entheasm. Examples. It is allied to the most
intense intellectual action, but its steps remain unknown.