ART. II.--_Theism_--_Desiderata in the Theistic Argument._

It is a philosophical commonplace that all human questioning leads

back to ultimate truths which cannot be further analysed, and of which

no other explanation can be given than that _they exist_. Every

explanation of the universe rests and must rest on the inexplicable.

The borders of the known and the knowable are fringed with mystery,

and all the data of knowledge recede into it by longer or shorter

pathways. Thus, while it is the very mystery of the universe that has

given rise to human knowledge, by quickening the curiosity of man, it

is the same mystery which prescribes a limit to his insight, which

continues to overshadow him in his researches, and to girdle him, in

his latest discoveries, with its veil. In wonder all philosophy is

born; in wonder it always ends: and, to adopt a well-known

illustration, our human knowledge is a stream of which the source is

hid, and the destination unknown, although we may surmise regarding

both.

But the mystery which thus envelopes the origin and the destination of

the universe is not absolutely overpowering; nor does it lay an arrest

on the human faculties in their efforts to understand that universe as

a whole. Man strives to penetrate farther and farther into the shrine

of nature, and records in the several sciences the stages of his

progress. These sciences are of necessity inter-related and dependent.

Each section of human knowledge has a doorway leading into these on

either side, and one which opens behind into the region of first

principles. Separate inquirers may content themselves with their

special region of phenomena and its laws, which they seek to

understand more perfectly and to interpret more clearly, and never so

beyond their own domain. It is by such division of labour and

concentration of aim that the achievements of modern science have been

won. But it is only by forsaking the narrow region, and, without

entering the borderland of some new science, receding behind it, and

contemplating it from a distance, that its value as a contribution to

our knowledge of the universe can be discerned. Each of the sciences

has its own ideal, but the goal of universal science is the discovery

of one ultimate principle which will be explanatory of all observed

phenomenon.

And the speculative thinker has a similar aim. The perennial question

of philosophy is the discovery of the central principle of Existence,

its haunting problem is the ultimate explanation of the universe of

being. The universe--what is it? whence is it? whither is it tending?

can we know anything beyond the fleeting phenomena of its ever

unfolding and ever varying history? Is its source, and therefore its

central principle, accessible to our faculties of knowledge?

And this is the distinctive problem of rational theology. Philosophy

and science both lead up to theology as the apex of human knowledge.

The latter may be fitly called the _scientia scientiarum_. Questions

as to the nature and origin of Life upon our planet, the nature of

Force or energy, the problems of Substance and of Cause, the questions

of the Absolute and Infinite, all centre in this, are all the several

ways of expressing it from the point of view which the questioner

occupies, 'What is the ultimate principle of the universe, the ἀρχὴ

of all existence?' Speculative philosophy and science deal

proximately, it is true, with the problems of finite existence,

existence as presented to us in the surrounding universe, and the laws

which regulate it; but they covertly imply and remotely lead up to the

question we have stated. They are the several approaches to that

science which sits enthroned on the very summit of human knowledge.

Nevertheless, the science of speculative theology is as yet lamentably

incomplete. We have scores of treatises devoted to the subject, and

numerous professed solutions of the problem. But we have not, in the

English language, a single treatise which even contemplates a

philosophical arrangement and classification of the various theories,

actual and possible, upon the subject. It is otherwise with the great

questions of intellectual and ethical philosophy. We have elaborate

and almost exhaustive schemes of theories on the nature of perception,

or our knowledge of the external world, the laws of association, the

problem of causality, and the nature of conscience. But we look in

vain for any similar attempt to classify the several lines of

argument, or possible modes of theistic proof, so as to present a

tabular view of the various doctrines on this subject. We are limited

to the well-known but precarious scheme of proofs _à priori_ and _à

posteriori_,[11] and to the more accurate classification of Kant, the

ontological, the cosmological, and the physico-theological proofs,

with his own argument from the moral faculty or practical reason. In

addition, we are not aware of any English treatise specially devoted

to the history of this branch of philosophical literature, with the

exception of a brief essay by Dr. Waterland, in which he traverses a

small section of the whole area; and that not as the historian of

philosophical opinion, but in the interest of a special theory.[12]

The present condition of 'natural theology' in England is scarcely

creditable to the critical insight of the British mind. There has been

little earnest grappling with the problem in the light of the past

history of opinions; and traditionary stock-proofs have been relied

upon with a perilous complacency. The majority of theologians trust to

an utterly futile and treacherous argument, from what has long been

termed 'final causes,' and when beaten from that field, at once by the

rigour of speculative thought and the march of the inductive sciences,

the refuge that is taken in the region of our moral nature is scarcely

less secure, while the character of the theistic argument from

conscience is suffered to remain in the obscurity which still shrouds

it.

In the following pages we propose to show the invalidity of some of

the popular modes of proof, and to suggest a few desiderata in the

future working out of the problem.

It may be useful to preface our criticism by a classification of the

various theistic theories, rather as a provisional chart of opinion,

than as an exhaustive summary of all the arguments which have been

advanced, or of all possible varieties in the mode of proof. Many

thinkers, perhaps the majority, and notably the mediæval schoolmen,

have combined several distinct lines of evidence; and have

occasionally borrowed from a doctrine which they explicitly reject

some of the very elements of their argument. They have often forsaken

their own theory at a crisis, and not observed their departure from

the data on which they profess exclusively to build.

The first class of theories are strictly _ontological_ or

_ontotheological_. They attempt to prove the objective existence of

Deity from the subjective notion of necessary existence in the human

mind, or from the assumed objectivity of space and time which they

interpret as the attributes of a necessary substance.

The second are the _cosmological_ or _cosmo-theological_ proofs. They

essay to prove the existence of a supreme self-existent cause from the

mere fact of the existence of the world, by the application of the

principle of causality. Starting with the postulate of any single

existence whatsoever, the world or anything in the world, and

proceeding to argue backwards or upwards, the existence of one supreme

cause is held to be 'a regressive inference' from the existence of

these effects. As there cannot be, it is alleged, an infinite series

of derived or dependent effects, we at length reach the infinite or

uncaused cause. This has been termed the proof from contingency, as it

rises from the contingent to the necessary, from the relative to the

absolute. But the cosmological proof may have a threefold character,

according as it is argued: 1. That the necessary is the antithesis of

the contingent; or, 2. That because some being now exists, some being

must have always existed; or, 3. That because we now exist and have

not caused ourselves, some cause adequate to produce us, must also now

exist.

A third class of proofs are somewhat inaccurately termed

_physico-theological_, a phrase equally descriptive of them and of

those last mentioned. They are rather _teleological_ or

_teleotheological_. The former proof started from any finite

existence. It did not scrutinise its character, but rose from it to an

absolute cause, by a direct mental leap or inference. This scrutinises

the effect, and finds traces of intelligence within it. It detects the

presence or the vestiges of mind in the particular effect it examines,

viz., the phenomena of the world, and from them it infers the

existence of Deity. One branch of it is the popular argument from

design, or adaptation in nature, the fitness of means to ends

implying, it is said, an architect or designer. It may be called

_techno-theology_, and is variously treated according as the

technologist (α) starts from human contrivance and reasons to nature,

or (β) starts from nature's products and reasons toward man. Another

branch is the argument from the order of the universe, from the types

or laws of nature, indicating, it is said, an orderer or law-giver,

whose intelligence we thus discern. It is not, in this case, that the

adjustment of means to ends proves the presence of a mind that has

adjusted these. But the law itself, in its regularity and continuity,

implies a mind behind it, an intelligence animating the otherwise

soulless universe. It might be termed _nomo-theology_ or

_typo-theology_. Under the same general category may be placed the

argument from animal instinct, which is distinct at once from the

evidence of design and that of law or typical order. To take one

instance: The bee forms its cells, following unconsciously, and by

what we term 'instinct,' the most intricate, mathematical, laws. There

is mind, there is thought in the process; but whose mind, whose

thought? Not the animal's, because it is not guided by experience. The

result arrived at is a result which could be attained by man only

through the exercise of reason of the very highest order. And the

question arises, are we not warranted in supposing that a hidden pilot

guides the bee, concealed behind what we call its instinct. We do not,

meanwhile, discuss the merit of this argument; but merely indicate the

difference between it and the argument from design, and that from law

and order. It is not a question of the adjustment of phenomena. It is

the demand of the intellect for a cause adequate to account for a

unique phenomenon. It approaches the cosmo-theological argument as

closely as it approaches the techno-theological one; yet it is

different from both. The cosmo-theological rises from any particular

effect, and by a backward mental bound reaches an infinite first

cause. The techno-theological attempts to rise from the adjustment of

means to ends, to an adjuster or contriver. This simply asks, whence

comes the mind that is here in operation, perceived by its effects?

The next class of arguments are based upon the moral nature of man.

They may be termed in general _ethico-theological_; and there are, at

least, two main branches in this line of proof. The former is the

argument from conscience as a moral law, pointing to Another above it;

the law that is 'in us, yet not of us'--not the 'autonomy' of Kant,

but a _theonomy_--bearing witness to a legislator above. It is the

moral echo within the soul of a Voice louder and vaster without. And,

as evidence, it is direct and intuitive, not inferential. The latter

is the argument of Kant, (in which he was anticipated by several,

notably by Raimund of Sabunde.) It is indirect and inferential, based

upon the present phenomena of our moral nature. The moral law declares

that evil is punishable and to be punished, that virtue is rewardable

and to be rewarded; but in this life they are not so: therefore, said

Kant, there must be a futurity in which the rectification will take

place, and a moral arbiter by whom it will be effected.

Finally, there is the argument, which, when philosophically unfolded,

is the only unassailable stronghold of theism, its impregnable

fortress, that of _intuition_. As it is simply the utterance or

attestation of the soul in the presence of the Object which it does

not so much discover by searching, as _apprehend in the art of

revealing itself_, it may be called (keeping to the analogy of our

former terms) _eso-theological_ or _esoterico-theological_. It is not

an argument, an inference, a conclusion. It is an attestation, the

glimpse of a reality which is apprehended by the instinct of the

worshipper, and through the poet's vision, as much as by the gaze of

the speculative reason. It is not the verdict of one part of human

nature, of reason, or the conscience, the feelings, or the affections;

but of the whole being, when thrown into the poise or attitude of

recognition, before the presence of the self-revealing object. There

are several phases of this, which we term the eso-theological proof.

We see its most rudimental traces in the polytheism of the savage

mind, and its unconscious _personification_ of nature's forces. When

this crude conception of diverse powers in partial antagonism gives

place to the notion of one central power, the instinct asserts itself

in the common verdict of the common mind as to One above, yet kindred

to it. It is attested by the feeling of dependence, and by the

instinct of worship, which witnesses to some outward object

corresponding to the inward impulse, in analogy with all the other

instincts of our nature. It is farther attested by the poet's

interpretation of nature, the verdict of the great seers, that the

universe is pervaded by a supreme Spirit, 'haunted for ever by the

eternal mind.' We find its highest attestation in that consciousness

of the Infinite itself which is man's highest prerogative as a

rational creature. We have thus the following chart of theistic

theories.

I. Onto-theological--

1. From necessary notion to reality.

(α) Anselm's proof.

(β) Descartes' first argument.

2. From space and time, as attributes to their substance.

II. Cosmo-theological--

1. Antithetic.

2. Causal.

3. 'Sufficient reason.' (Leibnitz.)

III. Teleo-theological--

1. Techno-theology.

2. Typo-theology.

3. (Animal instinct.)

IV. Ethico-theological--

1. Deonto-theological. (direct.)

2. Indirect and inferential. (Kant.)

V. Eso-theological--

1. The infinite. (Fenelon. Cousin.)

2. The world soul.

3. The instinct of worship.

In addition, we might mention several subsidiary or sporadic proofs

which have little or no philosophical relevancy, but which have some

theological suggestiveness, viz., 1. The historical consensus. 2. The

felicity of the theist. 3. The testimony of revelation.

It is unnecessary to discuss all these alleged proofs at length; but

the powerlessness of the most of them to establish the transcendent

fact they profess to reach, demands much more serious thought than it

has yet received.

The ontological proof has always possessed a singular fascination for

the speculative mind. It promises, and would accomplish so much, if

only it were valid. It would be so powerful, if only it were

conclusive. But had demonstration been possible, the theistic

argument, like the proofs of mathematics, would have carried

conviction to the majority of thinkers long ago. The historical

failure is signal. Whether in the form in which it was originally cast

by Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, or in the more elaborate theory of

Descartes, or as presented by the ponderous English minds of Cudworth,

Henry More, and Dr. Samuel Clarke, it is altogether a _petitio

principii_. Under all its modifications, it reasons from the necessary

notion of God, to his necessary existence; or from the necessary

existence of space and time, which are assumed to be the properties or

attributes of a substance, to the necessary existence of that

substance. A purely subjective necessity of the reason is carried from

within, and held conclusive in the realm of objective reality. But the

very essence of the problem is the discovery of a valid pathway by

which to pass from the notions of the intellect to the realities of

the universe beyond it; we may not, therefore, summarily identify the

two, and at the outset take the existence of the one as demonstrative

of the other. In the affirmation of real existence we pass from the

notion that has entered the mind (or is innate), to the realm of

objective being, which exists independently of us who affirm it; and

how to pass warrantably from the ideal world within to the real world

without is the very problem to be solved. To be valid at its

starting-point, the ontological argument ought to prove that the

notion of God is so fixed in the very root of our intelligent nature

that it cannot be dislodged from the mind; and this some thinkers,

such as Clark, have had the hardihood to affirm. To be valid as it

proceeds, it ought to prove that the notion thus necessary in thought,

has a real counterpart in the realm of things, in order to vindicate

the step it so quietly takes from the ideal notion to the world of

real existence. It passes from thought to things, as it passes from

logical premiss to conclusion. But to be logical, it must rest

contented with an ideal conclusion deduced from its ideal premises.

And thus, the only valid issue of the ontological argument is a system

of absolute idealism, of which the theological corollary is pantheism.

But as this is not the Deity the argument essays to reach, it must be

pronounced illogical throughout.

Thus the ontological argument identifies the logical and the real. But

the illicit procedure in which it indulges would be more apparent than

it is to _à priori_ theorists, if the object they imagine they have

reached were visible in nature, and apprehensible by the senses. To

pass from the ideal to the real sphere by a transcendant act of

thought is seen at once to be unwarrantable in the case of

sense-perception. In this case, it is the presence of the object that

alone warrants the transition, else we should have as much right to

believe in the real existence of the hippogriff as in the reality of

the horse. But when the object is invisible, and is at the same time

the supreme being in the universe, the speculative thinker is more

easily deceived. We must, therefore, in every instance ask him, where

is the bridge from the notion to the reality? What is the plank thrown

across the chasm which separates these two regions, (to use an old

philosophical phrase) 'by the whole diameter of being?' We can never,

by any vault of logic pass from the one to the other. We are

imprisoned within the region of mere subjectivity in all _à priori_

demonstration, and how to escape from it, is (as we said before) the

very problem to be solved.

Anselm, who was the first to formulate the ontological proof, argued

that our idea of God is the idea of a being than whom we can conceive

nothing greater. But inasmuch as real existence is greater than mere

thought, the existence of God is guaranteed in the very idea of the

most perfect being; otherwise the contradiction of one still more

perfect would emerge. The error of Anselm was the error of his age,

the main blot in the whole mediæval philosophy. It first seemed to him

that reason and instinctive faith were separated by a wide interval.

He then wished to have a reason for his faith, cast in the form of a

syllogism. And he failed to see, or adequately to understand, that all

demonstrative reasoning hangs upon axiomatic truths which cannot be

demonstrated, not because they are inferior to reason, but because

they are superior to reasoning--the pillars upon which all

ratiocination rests. This was his first mistake. Dissatisfied with the

data upon which all reasoning hangs, he preferred the stream to the

fountain-head, while he thought (contradictory as it is) that _by

going down the stream_ he could reach the fountain! But his second

mistake was the greater of the two. He confounded the necessities of

thought with the necessities of the universe. He passed _without a

warrant_ from his own subjective thought to the region of objective

reality. And it has been the same with all who have since followed him

in this ambitious path. But after witnessing the elaborate tortures to

which the mediæval theologians subjected their intellects in the

process, we see their powers fail, and the chasm still yawning between

the abstract notions of the mind and the concrete facts of the

universe. It is remarkable that any of them were satisfied with the

accuracy of their reasonings. We can explain it only by the

intellectual habit of the age, and the (misread) traditions of the

Stagyrite. They made use, unconsciously, of that intuition which

carries us across the gulf, and they misread the process by which they

reached the other side. They set down to the credit of their intellect

what was due to the necessities of the moral nature, and the voice of

the heart.

Descartes was the most illustrious thinker, who, at the dawn of modern

philosophy, developed the scholastic theism. While inaugurating a new

method of experimental research, he nevertheless retained the most

characteristic doctrine of mediæval ontology. He argues that necessary

existence is as essential to the idea of an all-perfect being, as the

equality of its three angles to two right angles is essential to the

idea of a triangle. But though he admits that his 'thought imposes no

necessity on things,' he contradicts his own admission by adding, 'I

cannot conceive God except as existing, and hence it follows that

existence is inseparable from him.' In his 'Principles of Philosophy'

we find the following argument:--

'As the equality of its three angles to two right angles is

necessarily comprised in the idea of the triangle, the mind

is firmly persuaded that the three angles of a triangle

_are_ equal to two right angles; _so_ from its perceiving

necessary and external existence to be comprised in the

idea which it has of an all-perfect being, it ought

manifestly to conclude that this all-perfect being

exists.'--(Pt. i. sec. 14.)

This argument is more formally expounded in his 'Reply to Objections

to the Meditations,' thus:--

'Proposition I. The existence of God is known from the

consideration of His nature alone. Demonstration: To say

that an attribute is contained in the nature or in the

concept of a thing, is the same as to say that this

attribute is true of this thing, and that it may be

affirmed to be in it. But necessary existence is contained

in the nature or the concept of God. Hence, it may be with

truth affirmed that necessary existence is in God, or that

God exists.'

A slight amount of thought will suffice to show that in this elaborate

array of argumentation, Descartes is the victim of a subtle fallacy.

Our conception of necessary existence cannot include the fact of

necessary existence, for (to repeat what we have already said) the one

is an ideal concept of the mind, the other is a fact of real

existence. The one demands an object beyond the mind conceiving it,

the other does not. All that the Cartesian argument could prove would

be that the mental concept was necessary, not that the concept had a

counterpart in the outer universe. It is, indeed, a necessary judgment

that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles,

because this is _an identical proposition_; the subject and the

predicate are the same, the one being only an expansion of the other.

We cannot, therefore, destroy the predicate and leave the subject

intact. But it is otherwise when we affirm that any triangular object

_exists_, we may then destroy the predicate 'existence,' and yet leave

the subject (the notion of the triangle) intact in the mind.

It is true that Descartes has not limited himself to this futile _à

priori_ demonstration. He has buttressed his formal ontology by a much

more suggestive though logically as inconclusive an argument. He again

reasons thus in his 'Principles:' We have the idea of an all-perfect

being in the mind, but whence do we derive it? It is impossible that

we can have an idea of anything, unless there be an original somewhere

in the universe whence we derive it, as the shadow is the sign of a

substance that casts it. But it is manifest that the more perfect

cannot arise from the less perfect, and that which knows something

more perfect than itself is not the cause of its own being. Since,

therefore, we ourselves are not so perfect as the idea of perfection

which we find within us, we are forced to believe that this idea in us

is derived from a more perfect being above us, and consequently that

such a being exists.

It will be observed that this second argument of Descartes is partly

cosmological,--though ultimately it merges in the ontological, and

falls back upon it for support. Hence, Descartes himself called it an

_à posteriori_ argument. And it may therefore serve as a link of

connection and transition to the second class of arguments.

But before passing to these, we may observe that all the _à priori_

theorists, professing to conduct us to the desired conclusion on the

level road of demonstration (while they all contradict their own

principles, and furtively introduce the contingent facts of

experience), have but a faint conception of the magnitude of the

question at issue. To work out a demonstration as with algebraic

formulæ, to contemplate the problem as one of mathematical science,

under the light and guidance of the reason alone, and unaided by the

moral intuitions, betokens a lack of insight into the very problem in

question. The object of which we are in search is not a blank

colourless abstraction, or necessary entity. Suppose that a supreme

existence were demonstrable, that bare entity is not the God of

theism, the infinite Intelligence and Personality, of whose existence

the human spirit desires some assurance, if it can be had. And a

formal demonstration of a primitive source of existence (_more

geometrico_) is of no theological value. It is an absolute zero,

inaccessible alike to the reason and to the heart, before which the

human spirit freezes; and as a mere _ultimatum_ its existence is

conceded by every philosophic school.

The germs of the cosmological argument (as of the ontological) are

found in the scholastic philosophy, though its elaboration was left to

the first and second periods of the modern era. Diodorus of Tarsus,

John Damascenus, Hugo of St. Victor, and Peter of Poitiers, have each

contributed to the development of this mode of proof. It is the

argument _à contingentia mundi_, or _ex rerum mutabilitate_; and may

be briefly stated thus: If the contingent exists, the necessary also

exists. I myself, the world, the objects of sense, are contingent

existences, and there must be a cause of these, which cause must be

also an effect. Go back, therefore, to the cause of that cause, and to

its cause again, and you must at length pause in the regress; and by

rising to a First Clause, you escape from the contingent and reach the

necessary. From the observation of the manifold sequences of nature

you rise to the causal fountain-head, as you cannot travel backwards

for ever along an infinite line of dependent sequences.

But this argument is as illusory as the ontological one, from which,

indeed, it borrows its strength, and of which it shares the weakness.

For why should we ever pause in the regressive study of the phenomena

of the universe, of which we only observe the slow evolution through

immeasurable time? How do we reach a fountain-head at all? We are not

warranted in saying that because we cannot think out an endless

regress of infinite antecedents, _therefore_ we must assume a first

cause. For that assumption of the ἀρχὴ, of an uncaused cause, when we

have wearied ourselves in mounting the steps of the ladder of finite

agency, is to the speculative reason equally illicit as is its

assumption while we are standing on the first round of the ladder. Why

should we not assume it, step over to it at the first, if we may do

so, or are compelled to do so, at the last? The argument starts from

the concrete and works its way backward along the channel of the

concrete, till it turns round, bolts up, takes wing, and 'suddenly

scales the height.' The speculative reason at length essays to cross

over the chasm between the long series of dependent sequences, and the

original or uncreated cause; but it does so furtively. It crosses over

by an unknown path to an unknown source, supposed to be necessary.

But again, what light is cast by this ambitious regress on the nature

of the fountain-head. How is the being we are supposed to have reached

at length, the source of that series of effects which are supposed to

have sprung from his creative fiat? If we experienced a difficulty in

our regress in connecting the last link of the chain with the _causa

causans_, we experience the same or a counter-difficulty in our

descent, in connecting the first link of the chain with the creative

energy. And how, it may be asked, do we connect that supreme cause

with intelligence, or with personality? We have called the assumption

of this ἀρχὴ a leap in the dark, and we ask how can we ever

escape from the phenomenal series of effects which we perceive in

nature, to the noumenal source of which we are in search? By the

observation of what is or what has been, we merely ascend backwards in

time, through the ever-changing forms of phenomenal energy (our

effects being but developed causes, and our causes potential effects),

but we never reach a noumenal source. That is reserved for the flight

of the speculative reason vainly soaring into the empyrean, beyond the

very atmosphere of thought.

The admission that _some kind_ of being or substance must have always

existed in the universe, is the common property of all the systems of

philosophy. Materialist and idealist, theist and atheist, alike admit

it, but its admission is _theologically worthless_. 'The notion of a

God,' says Sir William Hamilton, in his admirable manner, 'is not

contained in the notion of a mere first cause; for, in the admission

of a first cause, atheist and theist are as one.' The being that is

assumed to exist is, therefore, a mere blank essence, a zero, an

'everything = nothing,' so far as this argument can carry us. Nature

remains a fathomless abyss, telling us nothing of its whence and

whither. It is still the fountain-head of inscrutable mystery, which

overshadows and overmasters us. The _natura naturata_ casts no light

on the _natura naturans_. The systole and diastole of the universe

goes on; the flux and reflux of its phenomena are endless. That

something always was, every one admits. The question between the rival

philosophic schools is as to what that something was and is. We may

choose to call it 'the first cause,' (an explanation which implies

that our notion of endless regression has broken down) and we may say

that we have reached the notion of an uncaused cause. But is that a

notion at all? Is it intelligible, conceivable? Do we not, in the very

assumption, bid farewell to reason, and fall back on some form of

faith?

Finally, the moment that supposed cause is reached, does not the

principle that was supposed to bring us to it break down? And by thus

destroying the bridge behind us, the very principle of casuality which

was valid in our progress and ascent, valid in the limited area of

experience--now emptied of all philosophical meaning when we desert

experience and rise to the transcendental--invalidates the whole

series of effects which are supposed to have sprung from it? We need

not rise above any single event, contingent and finite, to any other

event as the proximate cause of it; if, when we have essayed to carry

out the regress, we stop short, and, crying εὕρηκα, congratulate

ourselves that we have at length reached an uncaused cause.

Thus when the cosmological theorist asks: Does the universe contain

its own cause within itself? and answering in the negative, asserts

that it must therefore have sprung from a supra-mundane source, we may

validly reply, may it not have been eternal? May not its history be

but the ceaseless evolution, the endless transformation of unknown

primeval forces? So far as this argument conducts us, we affirm that

it may. And to pass from the present contingent state of the universe

to its originating source, the theorist must make use of the

ontological inference, of which we have already indicated the double

flaw. There is one point of affinity between all forms of the

cosmological and ontological arguments. They all profess to reach a

necessary conclusion. They are not satisfied with the contingent or

the probable. But the notion of necessity is a logical notion of the

intellect. It exists in thought alone. Whoever, therefore, would

escape from that ideal sphere must forego the evidence of necessity.

Real existence is not and never can be synonymous with necessary

existence. For necessary existence is always ideal. It is reached by

a formal process. It is the product of pure thought.

But the _teleological_ argument is that which has been most popular in

England. It has carried (apparent) conviction to many minds that have

seen the futility of the _à priori_ processes of proof. It is the

stock argument of British 'natural theology;' in explanation and

defence of which volume upon volume has been written. It is, as Kant

remarked, 'the oldest, the clearest, and the most adapted to the

ordinary human reason.' Nevertheless, its failure is the more signal,

considering that its reputation has been so great, and its claim so

vast. The argument has at least three branches, to which we have

already referred. We confine ourselves meanwhile to the first of the

three, the techno-theological argument, or that which reasons from the

phenomena of design.

Stated in brief compass, that argument amounts to the following

inference. We see marks of adaptation, of purpose, or of foresight in

the objects which, as we learn from experience, proceed from the

contrivance of man. We see similar marks of design or adaptation in

nature. We are therefore warranted in inferring a world-designer; and

from the indefinite number of these an infinite designer; and from

their harmony His unity. Or thus,--we see the traces of wise and

various purpose everywhere in nature. But nature could not of herself

have fortuitously produced this arrangement. It could not have fallen

into such harmony by accident. Therefore the cause of this wise order

cannot be a blind, unintelligent principle, but must be a free and

rational mind. The argument is based upon analogy (and might be termed

analogical as strictly as technological). It asserts that because mind

is concerned in the production of those objects of art which bear the

traces of design, therefore a resembling mind was concerned in the

production of nature.

The objections to this mode of proof are indeed 'legion.' In the

_first_ place, admitting its validity so far, it falls short of the

conclusion it attempts and professes to reach. For,

1. The effects it examines, and from which it infers a cause, are

finite, while the cause it assumes is infinite; but the infinity of

the cause can be no valid inference, from an indefinite number of

finite effects. The indefinite is still the finite; and we can never

perform the intellectual feat of educing the infinite from the finite

by any multiplication of the latter. It has been said by an acute

defender of the teleological argument, that the number of designed

phenomena (indefinitely vast) with which the universe is filled, is

sufficient to suggest the infinity of the designing cause. And it may

be admitted that it is by the ladder of finite designs that we rise to

some of our grandest conceptions of divine agency; but this ascent and

survey are only possible after we have discovered from some other

source that a divine being _exists_. The vastest range of design is of

no greater validity than one attested instance of it, so far as proof

is concerned. It is not accumulation, but relevancy of data that we

need. But,

2. At the most we only reach an artificer or protoplast, not a

creator,--one who arranged the phenomena of the world, not the

originator of its _substance_,--the architect of the cosmos, not the

maker of the universe. Traces of mind discoverable amid the phenomena

of the world cast no light upon the fact of its creation, or the

nature of its source. There is no analogy between a human artificer

arranging a finite mechanism, and a divine creator originating a world;

nor is there a parallel between the order, the method, and the plan of

nature, and what we see when we watch a mechanician working according

to a plan to produce a designed result. The only real parallel would

be our perception by sense of a world slowly evolving from chaos

according to a plan previously foreseen. From the product you are at

liberty to infer a producer only after having seen a similar product

formerly produced. But the product which supplies the basis of this

argument is unique and unparalleled, 'a singular effect,' in the

language of Hume, whose reasoning on this point has never been

successfully assailed. And the main difficulty which confronts the

theist, and which theism essays to remove, is precisely that which the

consideration of design does not touch, viz., the _origin_ and not the

arrangements of the universe. The teleological analogy is therefore

worthless. There is no parallel, we repeat, between the process of

manufacture, and the product of creation, between the act of a

carpenter working with his tools to construct a cabinet, and the

evolution of life in nature. On the contrary, there are many marked

and sharply defined contrasts between them. In the latter case there

is fixed and ordered regularity, no deviation from law; in the former

contingency enters, and often alters and mars the work. Again, the

artificer simply uses the materials, which he finds lying ready to

hand in nature. He _detaches_ them from their 'natural' connections.

He arranges them in a special fashion. But in nature, in the successive

evolution of her organisms there is no detachment, no displacement,

no interference or isolation. All things are linked together. Every

atom is dependent on every other atom, while the organisms seem to

grow and develop 'after their kind' by some vital force, but by no

manipulation similar to the architect's or builder's work. And yet

again, in the one case, the purpose is comprehensible--the end is

foreseen from the beginning. We know what the mechanician desires to

effect; but in the other case we have no clue to the 'thought' of the

architect. Who will presume to say that he has adequately fathomed the

purposes of nature in the adjustment of one of her phenomena to

another? But,

3. The only valid inference from the phenomena of design would be that

of a _phenomenal_ first cause. The inference of a personal Divine

Agent or substance from the observation of the mechanism of the

universe is invalid. What link connects the traces of mind which are

discerned in nature (those _vestigia animi_) with an agent who

produced them? There is no such link. And thus the divine personality

remains unattested. The same may be said of the divine _unity_. Why

should we rest in our inductive inference of one designer from the

phenomena of design, when these are so varied and complex? Or grant

that in all that we observe a subtle and pervading 'unity' is found,

and as a consequence all existing arrangements point to one designer,

why may not that Demiurgos have been at some remote period himself

designed? And so on _ad infinitum_.

But, in the _second_ place, not only is the argument defective

(admitting its validity so far as it goes), even partial validity

cannot be conceded to it. The phenomena of design not only limit us to

a finite designer, not only fail to lead us to the originator of the

world, or to a personal first cause, but they confine us within the

network of observed designs, and do not warrant faith in a being

detached from or independent of these designs, and therefore able to

modify them with a boundless reserve of power. These designs only

suggest mechanical agency, working in fixed forms, according to

prescribed law. In other words, the phenomena of the universe which

distantly resemble the operations of man, do not in the least suggest

an agent exterior to themselves. We are not intellectually constrained

to ascribe the arrangement of means to ends in nature to anything

supra-mundane. Such constraint would proceed from our projecting the

shadow of ourselves within the realm of nature, and investing _it_

with human characteristics, a procedure for which we have no warrant.

Why may not the arrangements of nature be due to a principle of life

imminent in nature, the mere endless evolution and development of the

world itself? We observe that phenomenon A fits into phenomena B, C,

and D, and we therefore infer that A was fitted to its place by an

intelligent mind. But suppose that A did not fit into B, C, or D, it

might in some way unknown fit into X, Y, or Z,--it would in any case

be related to its antecedent and consequent phenomena. But our

perception of the fitness or relationship gives us no information

beyond the _fact of fitness_. Any other (larger) conclusion is

illegitimate.

It is often asserted that the phenomenal changes which we observe in

nature, bear witness to their being _effects_. But what are effects?

Transformed causes, modified by the transformation--mere changed

appearances. We see the effects of volitional energy in the phenomena

which our consciousness forces us to trace back to our own personality

as the producing cause. But where do we see in nature, in the

universe, phenomena which we are similarly warranted in construing as

the effects of volitional energy, or of constructive intelligence? We

are not conscious of the power of creation, nor do we perceive it. We

have never witnessed the construction of a world. We only perceive the

everlasting flux and reflux of phenomena, the ceaseless pulsation of

nature's life,--evolution, transformation, birth, death, and birth

again. But nature is herself dumb as to her whence or whither. And, as

we have already hinted, could we detect a real analogy between the

two, we are not warranted in saying that the constructive intelligence

which explains the one class of phenomena is the only possible

explanation of the other.[13]

And thus it is that no study of the arrangements and disposition of

the mechanism can carry us beyond the mechanism itself. The

teleological argument professes to carry us above the chain of natural

sequence. It proclaims that those traces of intelligence everywhere

visible hint that long ago _mind_ was engaged in the construction of

the universe. It is not that the phenomena 'give forth at times a

little flash, a mystic hint' of a living will within or behind the

mechanism, a personality kindred to that of the artificer who observes

it. With that we should have no quarrel. But the teleological argument

is said to bring us authentic tidings of the origin of the universe.

If it does not carry us beyond the chain of dependent sequence it is

of no value. Its advocates are aware of this, and assert that it can

thus carry us beyond the adamantine links. But this is precisely what

it fails to do. It can never assure us that those traces of

intelligence to which it invites our study, proceeded from a

constructive mind detached from the universe; or that, if they did,

another mind did not fashion that mind, and so on _ad infinitum_. And

thus the perplexing puzzle of the origin of all things remains as

insoluble as before.

But farther, the validity of the teleological argument depends upon

the accuracy of our interpretation of those 'signs of intelligence' of

which it makes so much, and which it interprets analogically in the

light of human nature. But the 'interpreter' is ever 'one among a

thousand.' Who is to guarantee to us that we have not erred as to the

meaning of Nature's secret tracery? Who is to secure us against

inerrancy in this? Before we deduce so weighty a conclusion from data

so peculiar, we must obtain some assurance that no further insight

will disallow the interpretation we have given. But is not this

presumptuous in those who are acquainted in a very partial manner with

the significance of a few of nature's laws? Who will presume to say

that he has penetrated to the meaning of any one of these laws? And,

if he has not done so, can he validly single out a few resemblances he

has detected, and explain the nature of the infinite, by a sample of

the finite? Nature is so inscrutable that, even when a law is

discerned, the scientific explorer will not venture to say that he has

read its character, so as to be sure that the law reflects the

ultimate meaning of the several phenomena it explains. Nay, is he not

convinced that other and deeper meanings must lie within them? A law

of nature is but the generalized expression of the extent to which our

human insight has as yet extended into the secret laboratory of her

powers. But as that insight deepens, our explanations change. We say

the lower law is resolved back into a higher one, the more detailed

into the more comprehensive. But if our scientific conceptions

themselves are thus constantly changing, progressing, enlarging, how

can we venture to erect our natural theology on the surface

interpretation of the fleeting phenomena of the universe? 'Lo, these

are a part of His ways, but how little a portion is known of Him!'

And this conclusion we advance against those who as dogmatically deny

that there can be _any_ resemblance between the forces of nature as a

revelation of the Infinite, and the volitional energy of man. Both

assumptions are equally arbitrary and illegitimate. We shall shortly

endeavour to show on what grounds (remote from teleology) we are

warranted in believing that a resemblance does exist.

But, to return, if the inference from design is valid at all, it must

be valid everywhere--all the phenomena of the world must yield it

equally. No part of the universe is better made than any other part.

Every phenomenon is adjusted to every other phenomenon nearly or

remotely as means to ends. Therefore, if the few phenomena which our

teleologists single out from the many are a valid index to the

character of the source whence they have proceeded, everything that

exists must find its counterpart in the divine nature. If we are at

liberty to infer an Archetype above from the traces of mind beneath,

must not the phenomena of moral evil, malevolence, and sin be on the

same principle carried upwards by analogy?--a procedure which would

destroy the notion of Deity which the teleologists advocate. If we are

at liberty to conclude that a few phenomena which seem to us designed,

proceed from and find their counterpart in God, reason must be shown

why we should select a few and pass over other phenomena of the

universe. In other words, if the constructor of the universe designed

one result from the agency which he has established, must he not have

designed all the results that actually emerge; and if the character of

the architect be legitimately deduced from one or a few designs, must

we not take all the phenomena which exist _to help out our idea of his

character_? Look, then, at these phenomena as a whole. Consider the

elaborate contrivances for inflicting pain, and the apparatus so

exquisitely adjusted to produce a wholesale carnage of the animal

tribes. They have existed from the very dawn of geologic time. The

whole world teems with the proofs of such intended carnage. Every

organism has parasites which prey upon it; and not only do the

superior tribes feed upon the inferior (the less yielding to the

greater), but the inferior prey at the very same time no less

remorselessly upon the superior. If, therefore, the inference of

benevolence be valid, the inference of malevolence is at least equally

valid: and as equal and opposite, the one notion destroys the other.

But lastly, while we are philosophically impelled to consider all

events as designed, if we interpret one as such, nay, to believe that

the exact relation of every atom to every other atom in the universe

has been adjusted in 'a pre-established harmony,' the moment we do

thus universalize design, that moment the notion escapes us, is

emptied of all philosophical meaning or theological relevancy. Let it

be granted that phenomenon A is related to phenomenon B, as means to

an end. Carry out the principle (as philosophy and science alike

compel us to do), and consider A as related by remoter adaptation to

all the other phenomena of the universe; in short, regard every atom

as interrelated to every other atom, every change as co-related to

every other change; then the notion of design breaks down, from the

very width of the area it covers. We can understand a finite

mechanician planning that a finite phenomenon shall be related to

another finite phenomenon so as to produce a desired result; but if

the mechanician himself be a designed phenomenon, and all that he

works upon be equally so, every single atom and every individual

change being subtilly interlaced and all reciprocally dependent, then

the very notion of design vanishes. Seemingly valid on the limited

area of finite observation and of human agency, it disappears when the

whole universe is seen to be one vast network of interconnected law

and order.

Combining this objection with what may seem to be its opposite, but is

really a supplement to it, we may again say, that we, who are a part

of the universal order, cannot pronounce a verdict as to the intended

design of the parts, till able to see the whole. If elevated to a

station whence we could look down on the entire mechanism, if

_outside_ of the universe (a sheer impossibility to the creature), we

might see the exact bearing of part to part, and of link with link, so

as to pronounce with confidence as to the intention of the contriver.

If, like the wisdom of which Solomon writes, any creature had been

with the Almighty 'in the beginning of His way, before His works of

old, set up from everlasting, or even the earth was;' had a creature

been with Him 'when as yet He had not made the world, when He prepared

the heavens, and gave His decree' to the inanimate and animated worlds

as they severally arose, he might be able to understand the meaning of

their creation. And yet the moment this knowledge was gained, the

value of the perception would disappear; because 'being as God,' he

should no longer require the circuitous report or inference.

Thus the teleological argument must be pronounced fallacious. It is

illusive as well as incomplete: and were we to admit its relevancy, it

would afford no basis for worship, or the recognition of the object it

infers. The conception of deity as a workman, laying stress upon the

notion of cleverness in contrivance, and subordinating moral character

to skill, would never lead to reverence, or the adoration of the

architect.

It must be conceded, however, that there is a subsidiary value in this

as in all the other arguments, even while their failure is most

conspicuous. They prove (as Kant has shown) that if they cannot lead

us to the reality we are in search of, the phenomena of nature cannot

_discredit_ its existence. They do not turn the argument the other

way, or weight the scales on the opposite side. They are merely

negative, and indeed clear the ground for other and more valid modes

of proof.

They are of farther use (as Kant has also shown) in correcting our

conceptions of the Divine Being, when from other sources we have

learned his existence, in defining and enlarging our notions of his

attributes. They discourage and disallow some unworthy conceptions,

and enlarge the scope of others. But to leave those celebrated lines

of argument which have gathered around them so much of the

intellectual strife of rival philosophies, it is needful now to tread

warily when we are forced to come to so decided a conclusion against

them.

We do not deny that the idea of God exists in the human mind as one of

its ultimate and ineradicable notions: we only dispute the inference

which ontology has deduced from its existence there. We do not deny

that by regressive ascent from finite sequences we are at length

constrained to rest in some causal fountain-head; we only dispute the

validity of the process by which that fountain-head is identified with

the absolute source of existence, and that source of existence with a

personal God. We do not deny the presence of design in nature when by

that term is meant the signs or indices of mind in the relation of

phenomena to phenomena as means to ends; we only assert that these

designs have no theistic value, and are only intelligible after we

have discovered the existence of a supreme mind within the universe,

from another and independent source. Till then the book of nature

presents us only with blank, unilluminated pages. Thereafter it is

radiant with the light of design, full of that mystic tracery which

proclaims the presence of a living will behind it. To a mind that has

attained to the knowledge or belief in God, it becomes the 'garment it

thereafter sees Him by,' as one might see a pattern issuing from a

loom while the weaver was concealed, and infer some of the designs of

the workman from the characteristics of his work.

The remaining lines of proof, followed, though not worked out in the

past, are the _intuitional_ and the _moral_. And it is by a

combination of the data from which they spring and a readjustment of

their respective parts and harmonies, that the foundations of theism

can alone be securely laid. As the evidence of intuition is of

greatest value, and is also most generally disesteemed, we shall take

its testimony first, and examine the moral evidence of conscience

afterwards.

The modern spirit is suspicious of the evidence of intuition. It is

loudly proclaimed on all sides by the teachers of positive science

that instinct is a dubious guide, liable to the accidents of chance

interpretation, variously understood by various minds; that in

following it we may be pursuing an _ignis fatuus_; that it is at best

only valid for the individual who may happen to feel its force; that

it is not a universal endowment (as it should be if trustworthy), but

often altogether wanting; and that it can never yield us _certainty_,

because its root is a subjective feeling or conviction, which cannot

be verified by external test. These charges cannot be ignored, or

lightly passed over. And for the theist merely to proclaim, as an

ultimate fact, that the human soul has an intuition of God, that we

are endowed with a faculty of apprehension of which the correlative

object is divine, will carry no conviction to the atheist. Suppose

that he replies, 'This intuition may be valid evidence for you, but I

have no such irrepressible instinct; I see no evidence in favour of

innate ideas in the soul, or of a substance underneath the phenomena

of nature of which we can have any adequate knowledge;' we may close

the argument by simple re-assertion, and vindicate our procedure on

the ground that in the region of first principles there can be no

farther proof. We may also affirm that the instinct being a sacred

endowment, and delicate in proportion to the stupendous nature of the

object it attests, it may, like every other function of the human

spirit, collapse from mere disuse. But if we are to succeed in even

suggesting a doubt in the mind of our opponent as to the accuracy of

his analysis, we must verify our primary belief, and exhibit its

credentials so far as that is possible. We must show why we cannot

trace its genealogy farther back, or resolve it into simpler elements,

and we must not keep its nature shrouded in darkness, but disclose it

so far as may be. This, then, is our task.

The instinct to which we make our ultimate appeal is in its first rise

in the soul, crude, dim, and inarticulate. Gradually it shapes itself

into greater clearness, aided, in the case of most men, by the myriad

influences of religious thought and of historical tradition,--heightening

and refining it when educed, but not creating it; separating the real

gold from any spurious alloy it may have contracted. Like all our

innate instincts this one is at first infantile, and, when it begins

to assert itself, it prattles rather than speaks coherently. We do not

here raise the general question of the existence of _à priori_

principles. We assume that the mind is not originally an _abrasa

tabula_, but the endowments with which it starts are all gifts in

embryo. They are not full-formed powers, so much as the capacities and

potentialities of mental life. Their growth to maturity is most

gradual, and the difference between their adult and their rudimentary

phases is as wide as is the interval between a mature organization and

the egg from which it springs. It is therefore no evidence against the

reality or the trustworthiness of the intuition to which we appeal,

that its manifestations are not uniform, or that it sometimes seems

absent in the abnormal states of consciousness, or among the ruder

civilizations of the world. We admit that it is difficult for the

uninitiated to trace any affinity between its normal and its abnormal

manifestations, when it is modified by circumstances to any extent. We

farther admit that while never entirely absent, it may sometimes seem

to slumber not only in stray individuals, but in a race or an era, and

be transmitted from generation to generation in a latent state. It may

hybernate, and then awake as from the sleep of years, arising against

the will of its possessor and refusing to be silenced. Almost any

phenomenon may call it forth, and no single phenomenon can quench it.

It is the spontaneous utterance of the soul in presence of the object

whose existence it attests, and as such it is necessarily prior to any

act of reflection upon its character, validity, or significance.

Reflex thought, which is the product of experience, cannot in any case

originate an intuition, or account for those phenomena which we may

call by that name, supposing them to be delusive. Nothing in us, from

the simplest instinct to the loftiest intuition, could in any sense

create the object it attests, or after which it seeks and feels. And

all our ultimate principles, irreducible by analysis, simply attest

and assert.

The very existence of the intuition of which we now speak is itself a

revelation, because pointing to a Revealer within or behind itself.

And however crude in its elementary forms, it manifests itself in its

highest and purest state at once as an act of intelligence and of

faith. It may be most fitly described as a direct gaze by the inner

eye of the spirit, into a region over which mists usually brood. The

great and transcendant Reality it apprehends lies evermore behind the

veil of phenomena. It does not see far into that reality, yet it

grasps it, and recognises in it 'the open secret' of the universe.

This, then, is the main characteristic of the theistic intuition. It

proclaims a supreme Existence without and beyond the mind, which it

apprehends _in the act of revealing itself_. It perceives through the

vistas of phenomenal sequence, as through breaks in the cloud, the

glimpses of a _Presence_ which it can know only in part, but which it

does not follow in the dark, or merely infer from its obscure and

vanishing footprints. Unlike the 'necessary notion' of the Cartesian

school, unlike the space and time which are but subjective forms of

thought, unlike the 'regressive inference' from the phenomena of the

world, the conclusion it reaches is not the creation of its own

subjectivity. The God of the logical understanding, whose existence is

supposed to be attested by the necessary laws of the mind, is the mere

projected shadow of self. It has no more than an ideal significance.

The same may be said, with some abatements, of the being whose

existence is inferred from the phenomena of design. The ontologist and

the teleologist unconsciously draw their own portrait, and by an

effort of thought project it outwards on the canvass of infinity. The

intuitionalist, on the other hand, perceives that a revelation has

been made to him, descending as through an opened cloud, which closes

again. It is 'a moment seen, then gone;' for while we are always

conscious of our contact with the natural, we are less frequently

aware of the presence of the supernatural.

The difference between the evidence of intuition and the supposed

warrant of the other proofs we have reviewed is apparent. It is one

thing to create or evolve (even unconsciously) a mental image of

ourselves which we vainly attempt to magnify to infinity, and

thereafter worship the image that our minds have framed; it is another

to discern for a moment an august Presence, _other than the human_,

through a break in the clouds which usually veil Him from our eyes.

And it is to the inward recognition of this self-revealing object that

the theist makes appeal. What he discerns is at least not a 'form of

his mind's own throwing;' while his knowledge is due not to the

penetration of his own finite spirit, but to the condescension of the

infinite.

But we admit that this intuition is _not naturally luminous_. It is

the presence of the transcendant Object which makes it luminous.[14]

Its light is therefore fitful. It is itself rather an eye than a

light; (a passive organ, rather than an active power); and when not

lit up by light strictly supra-natural,--because emanating from the

object it discerns,--it is dull and lustreless. The varying

intelligence it reports of that object, corresponds to the changing

perceptions of the human eye in a day of alternate gloom and sunlight.

It is itself a human trust which ripens gradually into a matured

belief, rather than a clear perception, self-luminous from the first.

It may be needful, however, as the evidence of our intuitions is so

generally suspected, to examine a little more fully into the

credentials of this one, in common with all its allies.

Our knowledge of the object which intuition discloses is at first, in

all cases, necessarily unreflective. In the presence of that object,

the mind does not double back upon itself, to scrutinise the origin

and test the accuracy of the report that has reached it. And thus the

truth which it apprehends is at first only presumptive. It remains to

be afterwards tested by reflection, that no illusion be mistaken for

reality. What, then, are the tests of our intuitions?[15]

The following seem sufficient criteria of their validity and

truthworthiness. 1. The persistence with which they appear and

reappear after experimental reflection upon them, the obstinacy with

which they reassert themselves when silenced, the tenacity with which

they cling to us. 2. Their historical permanence; the confirmation of

ages and of generations. The hold they have upon the general mind of

the race is the sign of some 'root of endurance' planted firmly in the

soil of human nature. If 'deep in the general heart of men, their

power survives,' we may accept them as true, or interpret them as a

phase of some deeper yet kindred truth, of which they are the popular

distortion. 3. The interior harmony which they exhibit with each

other, and with the rest of our psychological nature; each of the

intuitions being in harmony with the entire circle, and with the

whole realm of knowledge. If any alleged intuition should come into

collision with any other and disturb it, there would be good reason

for suspecting its genuineness; and in that case the lower and less

authenticated must always yield to the higher and better attested. But

if the critical intellect carrying our intuition (if we may so speak

in a figure) round the circle of our nature, and in turn placing it in

juxtaposition with the rest, finds that no collision ensues, we may

safely conclude that the witness of that intuition is true. 4. If the

results of its action and influence are such as to elevate and

etherealize our nature, its validity may be assumed. This is no test

by itself, for an erroneous belief might for a time even elevate the

mind that held it; as the intellectual life evoked by many of the

erroneous theories and exploded hypotheses of the past has been great.

But no error could do so permanently. No illusion could survive as an

educative and elevating power over humanity; and no alleged instinct

could sustain its claim, and vindicate its presumptive title, if it

could not stand the test we mention. A theoretic error is seen to be

such when we attempt to reduce it to practice; as a hidden crack or

fissure in a metal becomes visible when a strain is applied, or the

folly of an ideal Utopia is seen in the actual life of a mixed

commonwealth. Many of those scientific guesses which have served as

good provisional hypotheses, have been abandoned in the actual working

of them out, and so the flaw that lurks within an alleged intuition,

(if there be a flaw) will become apparent when we try to apply it in

actual life, and take it as a regulative principle in action. Thus,

take the belief in the Divine existence, attested, as we affirm, by

intuition, and apply it in the act of worship or adoration. Does that

belief (which fulfils the conditions of our previous tests,--for it

appears everywhere and clings tenaciously to man, and comes into

collision with no other normal tendency of our nature, or defrauds any

instinct of its due) does it elevate the nature of him who holds it?

The reply of history is conclusive, and its attestation is abundantly

clear. The power of the theistic faith over the rest of human nature

is such that it has quickened the other faculties into a more vigorous

life. Its moral leverage has been vast, while it has sharpened the

æsthetic sense to some of its most delicate perceptions, and in some

instances brought a new accession of intellectual power. The intuition

which men trust in the dark, gradually leads the whole nature towards

the light. Its dimness and its dumbness are exchanged for clearness

and an intelligible voice; and while it thus grows luminous, it gains

new power, and our confidence in its verdict strengthens.

We have now stated what seems to us the general nature of the theistic

intuition, and added one or two criteria by which all intuitions must

be tested. It remains that we indicate more precisely the phases which

it assumes; and the channels in which it works. Though ultimate and

insusceptible of analysis, it has a triple character. It manifests

itself in the consciousness which the human mind has of the Infinite

(an intellectual phase); in its perception of the world-soul, which is

Nature's 'open secret' revealed to the poet (an æsthetic phase); and

in the act of worship, in which an object correlative to the

worshipper is revealed in his very sense of dependence (a moral and

religious phase).

It is not only essential to the validity of the theistic intuition

that the human mind has a positive though imperfect knowledge of the

infinite, but the assertion of this is involved in the very intuition

itself. If we had no positive knowledge of the source it seeks to

reach, the instinct, benumbed as by an intellectual frost, and unable

to rise, would be fatally paralysed; or if it could move along its

finite area, it would wander helplessly, feeling after its object, 'if

haply it might find it.' And it will be found that all who deny the

validity of our intuition, either limit us to the knowledge of

phenomena, or while admitting that we have a certain knowledge of

finite substance adopt the cold theory of nescience. From the earliest

Greek schools, or from the earlier speculation of the Chinese mind, a

powerful band of thinkers have denied to man the knowledge of aught

beyond phenomena, and from Confucius to Comte the list is an ample

one. In our own day this school includes some of the clearest and

subtilest minds devoted to philosophy. Comte, Lewes, Mill, Mr. Bain,

Herbert Spencer, and the majority of our best scientific guides

(however they differ in detail) agree in the common postulate that all

that man can know, and intelligibly reason about, are phenomena, and

the laws of these phenomena, 'that which doth appear.' There is,

however, a positivist 'religion,' which consists now in the worship of

phenomena, and again in homage paid to mystery, to the unknown and the

unknowable which lies beyond the known. Comte deified man and nature,

in their phenomenal aspects, without becoming pantheist; and the

instinct of worship though outlawed from his philosophy (which denies

the existence of its object), asserted itself within his nature--at

least in the second period of his intellectual career--and led him

not only to deify humanity, but to prescribe a minute and cumbrous

ritual, as puerile as it is inconsistent. It is true that worship is

philosophically an excrescence on his system. The advanced secularist

who disowns it is logically more consistent with the first principle

of positivism. To adore the _grande être_ as personified in woman is

as great a mimicry of worship as to offer homage to the law of

gravitation. Comte, says his acutest critic, 'forgot that the wine of

the real Presence was poured out, and adored the empty cup.' But we

may note in this latter graft upon his earlier system a testimony to

the operation of that very intuition which positivism disowns; its

uncouth form, when distorted by an alien philosophy, being a more

expressive witness to its irrepressible character.

Mr. Spencer, on the other hand, with some of our scientific teachers,

bids us bow down before the unknown and unknowable power which

subsists in the universe. The highest triumph of the human spirit,

according to him, is to ascertain the laws of phenomena, and then to

worship the dark abyss of the inscrutable beyond them. But there is

surely neither humility nor sanity in worshipping darkness, any more

than there would be in erecting an altar to chaos: and the advice

seems strange coming from those who claim to be the special teachers

of clear knowledge and comprehensible law. If we must at length erect

an altar at all, we must have some knowledge of the existence to whom

it is erected, and have some better reason for doing so than the blank

and bland confession that we have not the smallest idea of its nature!

Mr. Spencer undertakes to 'reconcile' the claims of science and

religion; and he finds the rallying-point to be the recognition of

mystery, into which all knowledge recedes. But if religion has any

function, and a reconciliation between her and science be possible,

the harmony cannot be effected by first denying the postulate from

which religion starts, and quietly sweeping her into the background of

the inconceivable, consigning her to the realm of the unknowable, and

then proclaiming that the conciliation is complete. This is to silence

or annihilate one of the two powers which the philosopher undertook to

reconcile. It is annexation accomplished by conquest, the cessation of

strife, effected by the destruction of one opposing force, not by an

armistice, or the ratification of articles of peace. Mr. Spencer does

not come between two combatants who are wounding each other

needlessly, and bid each put his sword into its sheath, for they are

brethren; but he turns round and (to his own satisfaction) slays one

of them, and then informs the other that the reconciliation is

effected.

We must therefore ask the positivist for his warrant, on the one hand,

in denying the existence of a world of substance, underneath the

fleeting phenomena of being, _out of which a revelation may emerge_,

apprehensible by man; and on the other, in denying to man positive

knowledge of the infinite as a substance. We must remind him that

infinite and finite, absolute and relative, substance and phenomena,

are terms of a relation: while we ask him for his warrant in

differentiating these terms, and proclaiming that the one set are

knowable and known, the others unknown and unknowable. He arbitrarily

singles out one of the two factors which together constitute a

relation, and are only known as complementary terms, and he bestows

upon it a spurious honour, by proclaiming that it alone is

intelligible, while he relegates the other term to the region of

darkness. We ask him on what ground he does so? and whether the law of

contrast does not render phenomena as unintelligible, without

substance, as substance without phenomena? Can we pronounce the one to

be known and the other unknown, merely because the former reaches us

through the five gateways of sense, and the latter through the avenue

of intuition? Now, no wise theist ever asserted that God was

phenomenally known. God is no phenomenon, but the noumenal essence

underlying all phenomena. We have admitted and contended that no study

of the laws of the universe can give us direct information as to the

first cause; for a first cause could never be revealed to the senses,

nor be an inference deduced from the data which sense supplies. The

assertion therefore, that nature (of which the physical sciences are

the interpretation) does not reveal God by its phenomena, is as

strongly asserted by the theist as by the positivist. It may reveal

his footprints, but we only know whose foot has left its mark on

nature when we have learned _from another source_ that He _is_. As

little, however, can the laws of nature discredit faith in a first

cause, which springs from a region at once beneath, above, and beyond

phenomena. And our theistic faith is not an _inference_; it is a

_postulate_: an axiomatic truth, affirmed on the report of that

intuition, of which the root is planted so firmly in the soil of

consciousness, that no form of the positivist philosophy can tear it

thence. Let science, therefore, march as it will, and where it will,

being hemmed in by the very laws of the universe which give rise to

it, and of which it is the exposition, it cannot interfere with or

encroach upon the theistic intuition. If there be a region behind

phenomena and their laws, accessible to knowledge or to philosophic

faith, no conclusion gathered from the scientific survey can touch it,

whether to discredit or attest.

The fundamental doctrine of both the schools of nescience is the

relativity of human knowledge, and that doctrine as taught by the

Scottish psychologists (and notably by Scotland's greatest

metaphysician since Hume, Sir William Hamilton) has been wrested out

of their hands, and turned against the theism they also advocate. Mr.

Spencer would exhibit them all as 'hoist with their own petard.' It is

necessary, therefore, to enquire whether this doctrine of relativity

favours a theory of nescience, or warrants a counter-doctrine of the

knowledge of the infinite, or is indifferent to both.

With us the relativity of knowledge is a first principle in

philosophy. But to affirm it, is merely to assert that all that is

known occupies a fixed relation to the knower. It is to affirm nothing

as to the character or contents of his knowledge. As regards the

objects known we further maintain that they are apprehended only in

their differences and contrasts. We know self only in its contrast

with what is not self, a particular portion of matter only in its

relation to other portions which surround and transcend it. So also

and for the same reason, with the finite and the infinite. The one is

not a positive notion, and the other negative; the one clear, and the

other obscure. Both are equally clear, both sharply defined, so far as

they are given us in relation. If the one notion suffers, the other

suffers with it. In short, if we discharge any notion from all

relation with its opposite or contrary, it ceases to be a notion at

all. The finite, if we take it alone, is as inconceivable as the

infinite, if we take it alone; phenomena by themselves are as

incogitable as substance by itself: and the relative as a notion cut

off from the absolute which antithetically bounds it, is not more

intelligible than the absolute as an essence absolved from all

relations. And thus the entire fabric of our knowledge being founded

on contrasts, and arising out of differences, involving in its every

datum another element hidden in the background, may be said to be a

vast double chain of relatives mutually complementary. It looks ever

in two directions, without and within, above and beneath, before and

after.

We maintain, therefore, that we have positive knowledge of the

infinite. Whosoever says that the infinite cannot be known contradicts

himself. For he must possess a notion of it before he can deny that he

has a positive knowledge of it, before he can predict aught regarding

it. And so he says he cannot know what he says, though in another

fashion, that he does know. It could never have come within the

horizon of hypothetical knowledge, never have become the subject of

discussion, unless positively (though inadequately) known; and thus

the infinite stands as the antithetic background of the finite. Sir

William Hamilton's and Dr. Mansel's doctrine of nescience, no less

than Mr. Spencer's, we regard as absolute intellectual suicide. It

implies that we have no knowledge of that which we are compelled to

conceive in order to know that it is unknowable. We could not compare

the two notions, if the one were unthinkable. For if all knowledge is

a relation, in each act of knowing I must know both the terms related.

The one term causes us no difficulty, being admitted on both sides.

But the other which so perplexes our teachers of nescience, is, it

must be owned, as to its contents a somewhat vague residuum. It is

without an outline. It is not given us with the luminous clearness

that its correlative is given. Nevertheless, it is a real term in a

real relation. The moment we proceed to analyse our consciousness of

the relative, we find it as the penumbra of the notion, its shadowy

complement. We may never obtain more than a vague, and what we might

call a moonlight view of it: nevertheless behold it we do; apprehend

it we must.

But it is objected that as human knowledge is always finite, we can

never have a positive apprehension of an infinite object; that as the

subject of knowledge is necessarily finite, its object must be the

same. Let us sift this objection.

I may know an object in itself as related to me the knower, or I may

know it in its relation to other objects also known by me the knower.

But in both and in all cases, knowledge is limited by the power of the

knower, therefore it is always finite knowledge. But it may be finite

knowledge of an infinite object, incomplete knowledge of a complete

object, partial knowledge of a transcendent object. The boundary or

fence may be within the faculty of the knower, while the object he

imperfectly grasps may not only be infinite, but be known to transcend

his faculties in the very act of conscious knowledge. For example, I

may know that a line is infinite while I have only a finite knowledge

of the points along which that line extends. And similarly my

knowledge of the Infinite Mind is partial and incomplete, but it is

clear and defined. It is definite knowledge of an indefinite object.

We may have a partial knowledge not only of a part, but of the whole.

Thus, I have a partial knowledge of a circle, because I know only a

few of its properties; but it is not to a part of the circle that my

partial knowledge extends, but to the whole which I know in part. In

like manner as the Infinite Object has no parts, it is not of a

portion of His being that we possess a partial knowledge, but of the

whole. We know Him as we know the circle, inadequately yet directly,

immediately, though in part. He is dark to us by excess of light.

Thus, although our knowledge of the infinite may be _vivified_, it is

not really _enlarged_ by goading our thought to wider and wider

imaginings, or spurring our faculties onwards over areas of space, or

intervals of time. That knowledge is directly revealed while we are

apprehending any finite object, as its correlative and complementary

antithesis.

Again it is said that to know the infinite is to know the sum of all

reality, and as that would include the universe and its source

together, it must necessarily include on the one hand the knower along

with his knowledge, and on the other all the possibilities of

existence. The possibility of our knowing the Infinite Being as

distinct from the universe is denied, since infinite existence is said

to be coextensive with the whole universe of things. But that the

source of the universe must necessarily exhaust existence and contain

within himself all actual being is a mere theoretic assumption. The

presence of the finite does not limit the infinite as if the area of

the latter were contracted by so much of the former as exists within

it. For the relation of the infinite being to the finite is not

similar to the relation between infinite space and a segment of it. It

is true that so much of finite space is so much cut out of the whole

area of infinite space--though, if the remainder is infinite, the

portion removed will not really limit it. But as our intuition of the

infinite has no resemblance to our knowledge of space, we believe that

the relations which their respective objects sustain have no affinity

with each other. The intuition of God is a purely spiritual

revelation, informing us not of the quantity but of the quality of the

supreme being in the universe. And to affirm that the finite spirit of

man standing in a fixed relation to the infinite spirit of God limits

it, by virtue of that relation, is covertly to introduce a spatial

concept into a region to which it is utterly foreign, and which it has

no right to enter.[16]

We therefore maintain, in opposition to the teachers of nescience,

that a positive knowledge of the Infinite is competent to man, because

involved in his very consciousness of the finite. And when

psychologically analysed, this intuition explains and vindicates

itself.

But there is another aspect, no less important, in which it may be

regarded. To say that the infinite is wholly inscrutable by man, is to

limit not man's faculty only, but the possibilities of the divine

nature itself. If God cannot unveil himself to man through the

openings of those clouds which ordinarily conceal His presence, can

His resources be illimitable, can He be the infinitely perfect? It is

said, on the one hand, that the unknown Force reveals itself in the

laws of nature, but cannot disclose its essence; and, on the other,

that the infinite being reveals His handiwork, from which He permits

us to infer His existence, but cannot reveal Himself. Such assertions

are either subtle instances of verbal jugglery or manifest

contradictions in terms. All revelation of whatever kind, presupposes

some knowledge of the revealer. That knowledge may be imparted the

moment the revelation is made, or prior to it, and from an independent

source; but no revelation could be made, were the being to whom it was

addressed ignorant of the source whence it came. Is there really any

special difficulty in supposing that the infinite intelligence can

directly disclose His nature to a creature fashioned in His image, the

disclosure quickening the latent power of intuition, which, thus

touched from above, springs forth to meet its source and object?

The question between the theist and the positivist is brought to its

real issue when the latter is forced to recognise that the God of

theism is no inference from phenomena, but if we may so speak, a

_postulate of intuition_. And hence it is so necessary to concede

frankly the failure of the teleological argument from final causes, as

well as the ontological argument from the necessary notions of the

intellect. We not only admit, we are forward to proclaim that by

inductive science we can never rise higher than phenomena; and hence

at the end of our researches we should be no nearer God than at the

outset. But though we cannot reach Him by induction, we may do so

before we begin our induction, by simply giving the intuition of the

soul free scope to rise towards its source. And to dislodge the theist

from his position, his opponent must succeed in proving that this

intuition, whose root springs from a region beneath phenomena, and

which in its flight outsoars phenomena, is as baseless and

unauthenticated as a dream.

There are two principles, one of them metaphysical, and the other

scientific, which are helpful at this point in our inquiry. These are

the principle of causality, and the doctrine of the correlation of

forces, or the conservation of energy. We cannot discuss them at any

length, but we shall briefly state their nature, and their relation to

the theistic intuition.

The phenomena of nature (using that term in its widest sense) are not

only a series of sequences, they are also the revelation of a

mysterious Power or living Force. All that we perceive by the senses,

and, inductively register in nature, is a series of phenomena, of

which the laws of nature are the generalized expression and

interpretation. But every change is a revelation not only of

succession, but of causal power. No matter where we take our stand

along the line of sequence, mental or material, always and at every

point this conviction is flashed in upon the mind, 'there is a hidden

Power behind.' But we instinctively ask, 'what is this power or force

determining the changes of the universe?' Is it material or spiritual?

Can the force which moves the particles of matter be material? We do

not perceive it by the senses, which take note only of the modified

phenomena of matter. It is neither visible, nor audible, nor tangible.

It is invisible; must we not therefore believe it to be incorporeal?

We cannot reach it by analysis. We conclude that it is not physical

but hyper-physical, not natural but supranatural. We have an

intellectual intuition of it. It announces its presence in every

change that occurs, but it nowhere shows its face as a material

entity. It is a mystic agency endlessly revealing its existence,

everywhere concealing its source. We watch its evolutions, but it

escapes our scrutiny; we try to detain it, and we find that it is

gone; yet it reappears in the next thing we examine, and in the very

phenomena of our search for it; the agency is manifest, but it is the

Agent we wish to discover. Must it be, like the sangreal of mediæval

legend, sought for in many lands, but nowhere found by any wanderer in

quest of it?

Before attempting an answer, we shall state the scientific principle

referred to, which is entitled to rank as one of the greatest of

modern discoveries. All the forms of force are convertible amongst

themselves. They are all ultimately identical, and are endlessly

passing and repassing into each other: the mechanical, the chemical,

the vital, are all one. 'The many' _are_ 'the one,' its varying

phrases, its protean raiment. In short, there is but a single supreme

force, ubiquitous and plastic, the fountain of all change. It now

evolves itself in heat, now masks itself in light, reveals itself in

electricity, or sleeps in the law of gravitation: one solitary pulse

within Nature's vast machine, and behind the barrier of her laws. This

force, thus endlessly changing, is neither diminished nor replenished;

it is not added to, nor subtracted from; it is perennial, and is its

own conservator. It is not synthesis, but analysis that has resolved

it into unity. But can synthesis combine its manifold phases under one

regulative notion? In realizing its general character we cannot

discharge from our minds in turn all the known features of particular

forces, so as to leave a vague resultant common to all, yet especially

identified with none. The diverse types must have an _archetype_. What

is that archetype?

It seems to us self-evident that we must seek for it, not in nature,

but in man; not in the lower plane of the cosmical forces, but in the

human _will_, the root of our personality. Comte begins with the

lowermost grade of force (to wit, the mechanical), and ascends with

it, bringing all the finer and more subtle forms under its sway, and

interpreting the higher by the lower. We, on the contrary, begin with

the highest known type, that which lies nearest ourselves, with which

we are earliest acquainted, and whence we derive our notion of force

beyond ourselves; and we descend with it as a light to guide our

footsteps amongst the lower. This we hold to be the correct, to be

indeed the only admissible philosophical procedure. If it is only

through the consciousness of force within ourselves that we have any

intelligible notion of it in nature (and are thus first initiated into

the idea), we must come back to the will for an explanation of what

the one force external to us is. Our own personality supplies us with

the archetype of which we are in search. We thus throw the plank

across the chasm between man and nature; we interpret the latter by

the former (not the reverse); and the discovery of the correlation of

forces, and the conservation of energy, becomes the scientific

equivalent of the doctrine of philosophical theology, that one supreme

Will pervades the universe, that in nature lives and moves and has

its being.

If we can vindicate this procedure, and prove our right to interpret

the forces, if not the phenomena of nature, as the outcome of a living

will, the energy of a nature like our own, our goal is reached. But,

say the Comtists, that is a mere imagination of theology, the creation

of a superstitious mind, 'transcendant audacity,' 'a form of the

mind's own throwing,' just as much as the teleological explanation of

nature. It has been spoken of as presumptuous, as well as fanciful,

betokening a lack of humility and philosophic caution; it being sheer

egotism to interpret nature by what we are, and a return to the

Protagorean doctrine that 'man is the measure of all things.' In

reply, we give only hints and suggestions, for the region is high, and

the atmosphere rarefied.

In the first place, it is to be observed that we do not take one class

of phenomena to explain the inner nature of another class; the

phenomena of will to explain, say those of electricity, in outward

nature; for in that case we might as well, with just as much reason

and plausibility, with just as much authority, take the latter class

of phenomena to explain the former; and we should learn quite as much,

that is to say, we should learn nothing at all. But we take a certain

special _noumenal_ force, one that is transcendant but revealed in our

innermost life and consciousness, in the will's _autocracy_, and by

the help and suggestion of this known force we explain (not the

phenomena of Nature nor her laws), but the darker, the unknown

noumenal Force, the pulse of nature.

In the next place, it is also to be observed that as the human will,

while noumenally free, is phenomenally under law and governed most

rigidly by motives, so the force which we interpret as the expression

of personal will in nature, acts in perfect conformity to law. The

laws of nature are the expression of its bondage. The minor scattered

forces, which may be spoken of as the messengers and servitors of the

supreme will, are no more fitful but no less capricious than is the

human will, in which the causal nexus is not broken while it remains

free. The supernatural reveals itself in an orderly fashion through

the natural. Its will is expressed by law.

In the third place, so far as bridging the chasm between the two

orders of phenomena, it is not accomplished by the poetic intuition (to

which we shall immediately refer), but by the human intellect, it

seems legitimated by _analogy_. In our inductive interpretation of

nature we perceive resemblances, and infer a likeness. 'Analogy is the

soul of induction.' If, therefore, it be an illicit act of the reason

which ventures to trace a parallel between nature and man, and

interpret the former by the latter, how fares it with the foundations

of human knowledge, and with the pillars of science herself? Is not

all physical science the rational interpretation of nature? If we may

not read the meaning of the great central force in the light of that

force which we carry in the will, how can we warrantably interpret the

laws of nature, in the light of that which we carry in the intellect?

Are we not left in uncertainty as to the character of the entire

fabric of our knowledge? The oracle is altogether dumb. If the way

which seems to lead from the interior of the human will into the

temple of outward nature be really a _cul-de-sac_, what warrant have

we for opening a door on the other side, and walking down the avenues

of positive science, imagining that in these pathways we shall find

the only key to nature? To bring the analogy into effect, let us take

two instances: the force with which I discharge a projectile and the

force of gravitation. The former proceeds from the will, which is the

originating power, though mechanical and physiological causes

intervene. Since, therefore, similar effects have similar or

resembling causes, it is a strictly analogical inference that as the

effects correspond, the causes will resemble each other, and the

essential part of the correspondence will not consist in the apparatus

used (the phenomena), but in the will underlying, which is

noumenal.[17]

In the fourth place, as the force of the will is both higher and

better known than the mechanical, chemical, and vital forces of

nature, we are warranted in interpreting the lower by the higher, and

not in reducing the higher to the level of the lower. As we ascend in

nature from the lowest vital forms to the highest type of

organization, we find that the higher is not only an advance upon the

lower, but that it _includes_ it; and no naturalist would describe a

vertebrated animal by that which it held in common with the mollusca.

That in which it differs from the types beneath it is held to be its

distinctive and descriptive feature. When, therefore, we reach man at

the top of the scale, separated by a distinct endowment from the

classes beneath him, yet conserving all their main characteristics in

his nature, and describe him not by what he has in common with the

lower animals, but by that in which he differs from them, we act on

the principle of selecting the highest feature we can find, and taking

it as our guide. And similarly when we are in search of the Supreme

Principle of the universe, the _causa causarum_, we interpret it by

the highest features in human nature, because that nature is the

highest with which we are experimentally acquainted. And we may

validly throw the burden of proof upon the positivist, and ask why the

great cosmical force that rules in nature should be radically

different from the volitional force which is the root of our

personality? Reverting again to the force of gravitation, why should

it not be the outcome in nature of a Will vaster than man's,

resembling, yet transcending it? To what does that force amount? The

phenomenalist cannot arrest our inquiry by simply drawing the veil of

nescience over it. He cannot slip a lid over the end of our telescope

turned skyward by merely exclaiming 'mystery of mysteries, all is

mystery.' And it seems to us that we must either divest the word

gravitation of all intelligible meaning, or while perceiving the

unlikeness at a glance, we must 'invest it with a human or

_quasi-human_ vitality.'

_Quasi_, for again in the fifth place, this all-pervasive protean

force assumes many a phase which is exceedingly unlike the operations

of a personal power. In many of her moods, Nature has the countenance

of the sphinx. She is sublimely silent as to her inmost essence. Cold,

stern, inflexible, neutral, taciturn, apathetic--all these terms seem

applicable to her at times, as we gaze across the chasm between man

and the universe. But the regulative idea, which we find in the

analogy of the human will, is not to be regarded as exhaustive or

exclusive of other notions which may unite with it. The personal force

may at the same time be more than personal. Its highest quality

becomes to us what we have called its regulative idea; but it contains

elements within the infinite compass of its nature, different from

those features of which we find the mirror in ourselves.[18] It is

sufficient if we know that the _causa causarum_, the all-pervading

life of the universe, can in any sense be described as personal, that

we can speak of 'the soul of nature,' without being the dupes of a

fanciful analogy, dealing merely with figure and hyperbole. Be it

admitted by every theist that there are myriad facets which the subtle

life of nature may present to the beholder. We not only may, we must

think of it as

'He, they, one, all, within, without,

The power in darkness which we guess.'

It reveals itself to us now as personal, awakening and responding to

the instinct of worship, calling forth our wonder and reverence, with

the hunger and the thirst of the human spirit in rising to its source;

now it turns its cold, impassive, silent face towards us; and as we

feel its immeasurable transcendency we are warned against the error of

construing it into a mere exaggeration of ourselves. We thus learn on

the one hand, the indefinite unlikeness between man and the Supreme

Spirit of the universe, and on the other their positive likeness or

kindredness. We escape the prevailing error of mediævalism, and the

equally fatal error of the modern scientific spirit. The tendency of

the schoolmen was to interpret all the laws of nature in the light of

_à priori_ notions of the mind. They did not search laboriously for

her own meaning, and wait patiently for her revelations; but distorted

nature by _outré_ hypotheses fetched altogether from within. It is,

however, an equal if not a greater onesidedness to do exactly the

reverse; to interpret the human spirit in the light of external nature

and organic law. The apotheosis of man was at least no worse--(we

think it rather better)--than making a fetish of nature, and

explaining the sublime mysteries of the human will by the phenomena of

molecular action. We therefore maintain that amid the many possible

manifestations of the infinite Life, they may be reduced to two

primary forms, the one impersonal and the other personal. God is

infinitely unlike the creature. He is also the archetype of which we

are the type. And we have less need to be philosophically warned

against the possible caricature of the latter doctrine (of which the

teachers of nescience remind us), than to be cautioned against the

partial truth of the former, which, in isolation, may so easily drift

into exaggeration and a lie.

The intellectual intuition of the infinite, which we have endeavoured

to vindicate, so far attests this correspondence; but the inspired

utterance of the Poet in reference to the soul of nature, no less

bears it witness. The identity or affinity of the force within him and

the forces without, is felt by the poet when the speculative thinker

perceives it not. He cannot analyse into its constituent elements the

mystic meaning of the universe which is flashed into his soul in

moments of glowing inspiration, as the chemist analyses his earths in

a crucible. But he is the

'Mighty prophet, seer blest,

With whom these truths do rest,

Which we are toiling all our years to find

In darkness lost.'

And he may be able to help the merely scientific explorer out of that

abyss of mystery in which he is speculatively lost, and to save him

from erecting an altar to 'the unknown God.' While his soul, in 'a

wise passiveness,' lies open to the visitations of the supernatural,

he sees a vision, and he hears a voice, of which he can give no

scientific explanation, but which announces to him the 'open secret.'

Perhaps the finest description of the characteristics of the soul's

intuitions is that given by Lowell, 'the prevailing poet' of America.

He writes--

'As blind nestlings, unafraid,

Stretch up wide-mouthed to every shade,

By which their downy dream is stirred,

Taking it for the mother-bird;

So, when God's shadow, which is light,

My wakening instincts falls across,

Silent as sunbeams over moss,

_In my heart's-nest half-conscious things

Stir with a helpless sense of wings,

Lift themselves up_, and tremble long

With premonitions sweet of song.'

The poet may thus throw the plank for us where the psychologist or

metaphysician fails. He 'sees into the life of things.' His insight,

which comes and goes in flashes marvellous but fugitive, which dart

across the world and bring back this report of correspondence,

illumines every realm of nature. He tells us that it is 'haunted for

ever by the Eternal Mind.' He finds the whole temple of nature

exquisitely filled with symbols of his own deepest thought. She is a

storehouse of imagery expressing the subtlest gradations of his

feeling. Wherever he moves he finds that the forms and the forces

around him are an interpretation of what he _is_. They are the

symbolic language of his deepest thoughts and highest aspirations,

while his innermost life again interprets them. He explains the inner

world in terms of the outer, and the outward in terms of the inward.

In the grand vocation of the poet, we know of nothing grander than his

function to mediate between the baffled ontologist and the man of

science. He is a reconciler who presents a common truth which those

on either side may recognise, and the recognition of which may draw

them together.

This vast and varied region of our complex nature, the æsthetic or

poetic, thus comes to the aid of our theology. The great imaginative

poets, in their delineations of man and nature, do not idealise; they

_see_: or they see before they idealise. Who will affirm that

Wordsworth's 'inward eye'--by the use and cultivation of which he

became the greatest of all interpreters of the symbolism of nature--in

seeing visions, saw but the ghostly forms of his own imagination, and

was not in contact with _real existence_? Are his 'spiritual

presences' as unreal as the fawns and dryads of polytheistic legend?

And was not even the early personification of nature a cruder

testimony in the same direction,--the belief in these deities of the

wood and hill and stream being a dumb homage by the savage mind to a

divinity in nature kindred to man? Is the poet, then, _a seer_,[19] or

only the elaborator of fancies?--the mere creator of ideal shapes, or

the discerner of real existence? He tells us that nature is a luminous

veil, behind which visions are to be seen, and voices heard; that

sometimes, in a moment, he has come upon the footprints of the

supernatural; and that, in such moments, he is in contact with a

reality, which he calls 'the soul of the world.' Why should he call it

a _soul_, if he has no intuition of its analogy and correspondence

with his own nature? And what though he speaks continually in the

plural, and tells us of the myriad 'presences,' as the scientific

explorer speaks of manifold 'forces?' What though he lapses into a

semipolytheist interpretation of nature? It is but the sign of a

weight of inspiration too vast for one utterance. It indicates that

his feeling of the central life has broken up the diversity; that

nature's great soul--_the_ Presence--cannot reveal itself at once as

all-in-all and all inclusive; within the boundaries of the finite

mind. In its very wealth it reveals itself as manifold. But as the

poet and the philosopher may combine the manifold in the unity of

their own mind, why not also in the unity of the object revealing

itself to them?

It is to be observed, however, that the object which the poet's

insight attests and reveals, is not phenomenal, but substantial.

Hence no question arises as to its origin. It is only that which

enters on the theatre of phenomenal existence that demands a further

explanation. The entrance and the exit of phenomena are explained,

when we refer them to the substance out of which they have emerged,

and to which they return. But we do not ask for the origin of

substance, any more than for the origin of space, time, or number.

There is still another branch of the theistic evidence from intuition.

It is the instinct of worship. Our space admits of but a sentence

regarding it. It is seen in the mere uprise of the soul, spontaneously

doing homage to a higher than itself; in the sense of dependence, felt

by all men who 'know themselves;' in the need which the worshipper

feels of approaching One who is higher and holier than himself, and in

whom all perfection resides, who is recognisable by him, and is

interested in his state; in the workings of the filial instinct

seeking its source, and, as said St. Augustine, 'restless till it

rests in Thee;' in the suffrage of the heart rising amid the miseries

of its lot, and even against the surmises of the intellect, to the

'Rock that is higher than it;' in the soul's aspirations--its thirst

for the ideal, while it feels the necessity of an absolute centre or

ultimate standard of truth, beauty, and goodness; and even in the

passionate longings of the mystic to reach an utterly transcendent

good. All these things bear witness to an _instinct_, working often in

the dark, but always seeking its source. They are almost universal,

and they are certainly ineradicable. They show how deeply the roots of

the theistic faith are planted in the soil of the moral consciousness.

We cannot, however, pursue these several lines of proof in detail.

They form a fitting link of connection with the more strictly ethical

evidence, on which we must add a few paragraphs.

The Kantian argument is more intricate and much less satisfactory than

the common evidence from the phenomena of conscience itself. It is

founded on the moral law, with its 'categorical imperative,' asserting

that certain actions are right and others wrong, in a world in which

the right is often defrauded of its legitimate awards, and the wrong

is temporarily successful. This, however, says Kant, points to a

future; in which the irregularity will be redressed, and _therefore_

to a Supreme Moral Power, able to effect it. The argument is

altogether inferential. It is circuitous, its conclusion being in a

sense an appendix to the doctrine of immortality; and it has only a

secondary connection with the data of the moral law itself. But the

phenomena of conscience afford the data of theism directly. We do not

raise the question of the nature or the origin of the moral faculty.

We assume its existence, as an _à priori_ principle, carrying with it

not a contingent but an absolute and unconditional authority. But this

moral law within us is the index of another power, a higher

personality whence it emanates, and of whose character it is the

expression. The law carries in its very heart or centre the evidence

of a moral law-giver, his existence not being an inference _from_, but

a postulate _of_ this law. It is given with the direct and antithetic

clearness with which the infinite is given as the correlative of the

finite; and the ascent from the law to the supreme legislator is not

greater than is the ascent from space and time, revealed in limited

areas and intervals, to immensity and eternity. The two data are the

terms of relation. And thus we do not rise to the divine existence by

any 'regressive inference,' as the Kantian argument reaches it; we

find God _in_ conscience. Moral analysis reveals _Another_, within and

yet above our own personality: and if we _reject that implicate_ which

is folded within the very idea of conscience, it ceases to be

authoritative; and, divested of all ethical significance, it sinks to

the level of expediency.

Thus the moral part of our nature rests upon the background of another

and a divine personality. Let us analyse the notion of duty, the idea

of obligation contained in the word '_ought_.' If it resolves itself

into this, 'it is expedient to act in a certain manner, because, if we

do not, we injure the balance of our faculties, promote a schism

amongst the several powers, and put the machinery of human nature out

of working gear:' then it does not point to one behind it, any more

than the phenomenal sequences and designs in nature point in that

direction. But if we 'ought _simply because we ought_,' _i.e._,

because the law which we find within us, but did not produce, controls

us, haunts us, and claims supremacy over us, then we find in such a

fact the revelation of One from whom the law has emanated. As Fenelon

says in reference to the idea of the infinite, breathing the spirit of

St. Augustine--

'Where have I obtained this idea, which is so much above

me, which infinitely surpasses me, which astonishes me,

which makes me disappear in my own eyes, which renders the

infinite present to me. It is in me; it is more than

myself. It seems to me everything, and myself nothing. I

can neither efface, obscure, diminish, nor contradict it.

It is in me; I have not put it there, I have found it

there: and I have found it there only because it was

already there before I sought it. It remains there

invariable even if I do not think of it, when I think of

something else. I find it wherever I seek it, and it often

presents itself when I am not seeking it. It does not

depend upon me. I depend upon it.'[20]