III. History of Systematic Theology…

III. History of Systematic Theology

1. In the Eastern Church, Systematic Theology may be said to have had its beginning and end in John of Damascus (700-760).

Ignatius († 115—Ad Trall., c. 9) gives us “the first distinct statement of the faith drawn up in a series of propositions. This systematizing formed the basis of all later efforts” (Prof. A. H. Newman). Origen of Alexandria (186-254) wrote his Περὶ Ἀρχῶν; Athanasius of Alexandria (300-373) his Treatises on the Trinity and the Deity of Christ; and Gregory of Nyssa in Cappadocia (332-398) his Λόγος κατηχητικὸς ὁ μέγας. Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 323, regards the “De Principiis” of Origen as the “first complete system of dogma,” and speaks of Origen as “the disciple of Clement of Alexandria, the first great teacher of philosophical Christianity.” But while the Fathers just mentioned seem to have conceived the plan of expounding the doctrines in order and of showing their relation to one another, it was John of Damascus (700-760) who first actually carried out such a plan. His Ἔκδοσις ἀκριβὴς τῆς ὀρθοδόξου Πίστεως, or Summary of the Orthodox Faith, may be considered the earliest work of Systematic Theology. Neander calls it “the most important doctrinal text-book of the Greek Church.” John, like the Greek Church in general, was speculative, theological, semi-pelagian, sacramentarian. The Apostles’ Creed, so called, is, in its present form, not earlier than the fifth century; see Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, 1:19. Mr. Gladstone suggested that the Apostles’ Creed was a development of the baptismal formula. McGiffert, Apostles’ Creed, assigns to the meagre original form a date of the third quarter of the second century, and regards the Roman origin of the symbol as proved. It was framed as a baptismal formula, but specifically in opposition to the teachings of Marcion, which were at that time causing much trouble at Rome. Harnack however dates the original Apostles’ Creed at 150, and Zahn places it at 120. See also J. C. Long, in Bap. Quar. Rev., Jan. 1892: 89-101.

2. In the Western Church, we may (with Hagenbach) distinguish three periods:

(a) The period of Scholasticism,—introduced by Peter Lombard (1100-1160), and reaching its culmination in Thomas Aquinas (1221-1274) and Duns Scotus (1265-1308).

Though Systematic Theology had its beginning in the Eastern Church, its development has been confined almost wholly to the Western. Augustine (353-430) wrote his “Encheiridion ad Laurentium” and his “De Civitate Dei,” and John Scotus Erigena († 850), Roscelin (1092-1122), and Abelard (1079-1142), in their attempts at the rational explanation of the Christian doctrine foreshadowed the works of the great scholastic teachers. Anselm of Canterbury (1034-1109), with his “Proslogion de Dei Existentia” and his “Cur Deus Homo,” has sometimes, but wrongly, been called the founder of Scholasticism. Allen, in his Continuity of Christian Thought, represents the transcendence of God as the controlling principle of the Augustinian and of the Western theology. The Eastern Church, he maintains, had founded its theology on God’s immanence. Paine, in his Evolution of Trinitarianism, shows that this is erroneous. Augustine was a theistic monist. He declares that “Dei voluntas rerum natura est,” and regards God’s upholding as a continuous creation. Western theology recognized the immanence of God as well as his transcendence.

Peter Lombard, however, (1100-1160), the “magister sententiarum,” was the first great systematizer of the Western Church, and his “Libri Sententiarum Quatuor” was the theological text-book of the Middle Ages. Teachers lectured on the “Sentences” (Sententia = sentence, Satz, locus, point, article of faith), as they did on the books of Aristotle, who furnished to Scholasticism its impulse and guide. Every doctrine was treated in the order of Aristotle’s four causes: the material, the formal, the efficient, the final. (“Cause” here = requisite: (1) matter of which a thing consists, e. g., bricks and mortar; (2) form it assumes, e. g., plan or design; (3) producing agent, e. g., builder; (4) end for which made, e. g., house.) The organization of physical as well as of theological science was due to Aristotle. Dante called him “the master of those who know.” James Ten Broeke, Bap. Quar. Rev., Jan. 1892:1-26—“The Revival of Learning showed the world that the real Aristotle was much broader than the Scholastic Aristotle—information very unwelcome to the Roman Church.” For the influence of Scholasticism, compare the literary methods of Augustine and of Calvin,—the former giving us his materials in disorder, like soldiers bivouacked for the night; the latter arranging them like those same soldiers drawn up in battle array; see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 4, and Christ in Creation, 188, 189.

Candlish, art.: Dogmatic, in Encycl. Brit., 7:340—“By and by a mighty intellectual force took hold of the whole collected dogmatic material, and reared out of it the great scholastic systems, which have been compared to the grand Gothic cathedrals that were the work of the same ages.” Thomas Aquinas (1221-1274), the Dominican, “doctor angelicus,” Augustinian and Realist,—and Duns Scotus (1265-1308), the Franciscan, “doctor subtilis,”—wrought out the scholastic theology more fully, and left behind them, in their Summæ, gigantic monuments of intellectual industry and acumen. Scholasticism aimed at the proof and systematizing of the doctrines of the Church by means of Aristotle’s philosophy. It became at last an illimitable morass of useless subtilities and abstractions, and it finally ended in the nominalistic scepticism of William of Occam (1270-1347). See Townsend, The Great Schoolmen of the Middle Ages.

(b) The period of Symbolism,—represented by the Lutheran theology of Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560), and the Reformed theology of John Calvin (1509-1564); the former connecting itself with the Analytic theology of Calixtus (1585-1656), and the latter with the Federal theology of Cocceius (1603-1669).

The Lutheran Theology.—Preachers precede theologians, and Luther (1485-1546) was preacher rather than theologian. But Melanchthon (1497-1560), “the preceptor of Germany,” as he was called, embodied the theology of the Lutheran church in his “Loci Communes” = points of doctrine common to believers (first edition Augustinian, afterwards substantially Arminian; grew out of lectures on the Epistle to the Romans). He was followed by Chemnitz (1522-1586), “clear and accurate,” the most learned of the disciples of Melanchthon. Leonhard Hutter (1563-1616), called “Lutherus redivivus,” and John Gerhard (1582-1637) followed Luther rather than Melanchthon. “Fifty years after the death of Melanchthon, Leonhard Hutter, his successor in the chair of theology at Wittenberg, on an occasion when the authority of Melanchthon was appealed to, tore down from the wall the portrait of the great Reformer, and trampled it under foot in the presence of the assemblage” (E. D. Morris, paper at the 60th Anniversary of Lane Seminary). George Calixtus (1586-1656) followed Melanchthon rather than Luther. He taught a theology which recognized the good element in both the Reformed and the Romanist doctrine and which was called “Syncretism.” He separated Ethics from Systematic Theology, and applied the analytical method of investigation to the latter, beginning with the end, or final cause, of all things, viz.: blessedness. He was followed in his analytic method by Dannhauer (1603-1666), who treated theology allegorically, Calovius (1612-1686), “the most uncompromising defender of Lutheran orthodoxy and the most drastic polemicist against Calixtus,” Quenstedt (1617-1688), whom Hovey calls “learned, comprehensive and logical,” and Hollaz († 1730). The Lutheran theology aimed to purify the existing church, maintaining that what is not against the gospel is for it. It emphasized the material principle of the Reformation, justification by faith; but it retained many Romanist customs not expressly forbidden in Scripture. Kaftan, Am. Jour. Theol., 1900:716—“Because the mediæval school-philosophy mainly held sway, the Protestant theology representing the new faith was meanwhile necessarily accommodated to forms of knowledge thereby conditioned, that is, to forms essentially Catholic.”

The Reformed Theology.—The word “Reformed” is here used in its technical sense, as designating that phase of the new theology which originated in Switzerland. Zwingle, the Swiss reformer (1484-1531), differing from Luther as to the Lord’s Supper and as to Scripture, was more than Luther entitled to the name of systematic theologian. Certain writings of his may be considered the beginning of Reformed theology. But it was left to John Calvin (1509-1564), after the death of Zwingle, to arrange the principles of that theology in systematic form. Calvin dug channels for Zwingle’s flood to flow in, as Melanchthon did for Luther’s. His Institutes (“Institutio Religionis Christianæ”), is one of the great works in theology (superior as a systematic work to Melanchthon’s “Loci”). Calvin was followed by Peter Martyr (1500-1562), Chamier (1565-1621), and Theodore Beza (1519-1605). Beza carried Calvin’s doctrine of predestination to an extreme supralapsarianism, which is hyper-Calvinistic rather than Calvinistic. Cocceius (1603-1669), and after him Witsius (1626-1708), made theology centre about the idea of the covenants, and founded the Federal theology. Leydecker (1642-1721) treated theology in the order of the persons of the Trinity. Amyraldus (1596-1664) and Placeus of Saumur (1596-1632) modified the Calvinistic doctrine, the latter by his theory of mediate imputation, and the former by advocating the hypothetic universalism of divine grace. Turretin (1671-1737), a clear and strong theologian whose work is still a text-book at Princeton, and Pictet (1655-1725), both of them Federalists, showed the influence of the Cartesian philosophy. The Reformed theology aimed to build a new church, affirming that what is not derived from the Bible is against it. It emphasized the formal principle of the Reformation, the sole authority of Scripture.

In general, while the line between Catholic and Protestant in Europe runs from west to east, the line between Lutheran and Reformed runs from south to north, the Reformed theology flowing with the current of the Rhine northward from Switzerland to Holland and to England, in which latter country the Thirty-nine Articles represent the Reformed faith, while the Prayer-book of the English Church is substantially Arminian; see Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theologie, Einleit., 9. On the difference between Lutheran and Reformed doctrine, see Schaff, Germany, its Universities, Theology and Religion, 167-177. On the Reformed Churches of Europe and America, see H. B. Smith, Faith and Philosophy, 87-124.

(c) The period of Criticism and Speculation,—in its three divisions: the Rationalistic, represented by Semler (1725-1791); the Transitional, by Schleiermacher (1768-1834); the Evangelical, by Nitzsch, Müller, Tholuck and Dorner.

First Division. Rationalistic theologies: Though the Reformation had freed theology in great part from the bonds of scholasticism, other philosophies after a time took its place. The Leibnitz- (1646-1754) Wolffian (1679-1754) exaggeration of the powers of natural religion prepared the way for rationalistic systems of theology. Buddeus (1667-1729) combated the new principles, but Semler’s (1725-1791) theology was built upon them, and represented the Scriptures as having a merely local and temporary character. Michaelis (1716-1784) and Doederlein (1714-1789) followed Semler, and the tendency toward rationalism was greatly assisted by the critical philosophy of Kant (1724-1804), to whom “revelation was problematical, and positive religion merely the medium through which the practical truths of reason are communicated” (Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:397). Ammon (1766-1850) and Wegscheider (1771-1848) were representatives of this philosophy. Daub, Marheinecke and Strauss (1808-1874) were the Hegelian dogmatists. The system of Strauss resembled “Christian theology as a cemetery resembles a town.” Storr (1746-1805), Reinhard (1753-1812), and Knapp (1753-1825), in the main evangelical, endeavored to reconcile revelation with reason, but were more or less influenced by this rationalizing spirit. Bretschneider (1776-1828) and De Wette (1780-1849) may be said to have held middle ground.

Second Division. Transition to a more Scriptural theology. Herder (1744-1803) and Jacobi (1743-1819), by their more spiritual philosophy, prepared the way for Schleiermacher’s (1768-1834) grounding of doctrine in the facts of Christian experience. The writings of Schleiermacher constituted an epoch, and had great influence in delivering Germany from the rationalistic toils into which it had fallen. We may now speak of a

Third Division—and in this division we may put the names of Neander and Tholuck, Twesten and Nitzsch, Müller and Luthardt, Dorner and Philippi, Ebrard and Thomasius, Lange and Kahnis, all of them exponents of a far more pure and evangelical theology than was common in Germany a century ago. Two new forms of rationalism, however, have appeared in Germany, the one based upon the philosophy of Hegel, and numbering among its adherents Strauss and Baur, Biedermann, Lipsius and Pfleiderer; the other based upon the philosophy of Kant, and advocated by Ritschl and his followers, Harnack, Hermann and Kaftan; the former emphasizing the ideal Christ, the latter emphasizing the historical Christ; but neither of the two fully recognizing the living Christ present in every believer (see Johnson’s Cyclopædia, art.: Theology, by A. H. Strong).

3. Among theologians of views diverse from the prevailing Protestant faith, may be mentioned:

(a) Bellarmine (1542-1621), the Roman Catholic.

Besides Bellarmine, “the best controversial writer of his age” (Bayle), the Roman Catholic Church numbers among its noted modern theologians:—Petavius (1583-1652), whose dogmatic theology Gibbon calls “a work of incredible labor and compass”; Melchior Canus (1523-1560), an opponent of the Jesuits and their scholastic method; Bossuet (1627-1704), who idealized Catholicism in his Exposition of Doctrine, and attacked Protestantism in his History of Variations of Protestant Churches; Jansen (1585-1638), who attempted, in opposition to the Jesuits, to reproduce the theology of Augustine, and who had in this the powerful assistance of Pascal (1623-1662). Jansenism, so far as the doctrines of grace are concerned, but not as respects the sacraments, is virtual Protestantism within the Roman Catholic Church. Moehler’s Symbolism, Perrone’s “Prelectiones Theologicæ,” and Hurter’s “Compendium Theologiæ Dogmaticæ” are the latest and most approved expositions of Roman Catholic doctrine.

(b) Arminius (1560-1609), the opponent of predestination.

Among the followers of Arminius (1560-1609) must be reckoned Episcopius (1583-1643), who carried Arminianism to almost Pelagian extremes; Hugo Grotius (1553-1645), the jurist and statesman, author of the governmental theory of the atonement; and Limborch (1633-1712), the most thorough expositor of the Arminian doctrine.

(c) Laelius Socinus (1525-1562), and Faustus Socinus (1539-1604), the leaders of the modern Unitarian movement.

The works of Laelius Socinus (1525-1562) and his nephew, Faustus Socinus (1539-1604) constituted the beginnings of modern Unitarianism. Laelius Socinus was the preacher and reformer, as Faustus Socinus was the theologian; or, as Baumgarten Crusius expresses it: “the former was the spiritual founder of Socinianism, and the latter the founder of the sect.” Their writings are collected in the Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum. The Racovian Catechism, taking its name from the Polish town Racow, contains the most succinct exposition of their views. In 1660, the Unitarian church of the Socini in Poland was destroyed by persecution, but its Hungarian offshoot has still more than a hundred congregations.

4. British Theology, represented by:

(a) The Baptists, John Bunyan (1628-1688), John Gill (1697-1771), and Andrew Fuller (1754-1815).

Some of the best British theology is Baptist. Among John Bunyan’s works we may mention his “Gospel Truths Opened,” though his “Pilgrim’s Progress” and “Holy War” are theological treatises in allegorical form. Macaulay calls Milton and Bunyan the two great creative minds of England during the latter part of the 17th century. John Gill’s “Body of Practical Divinity” shows much ability, although the Rabbinical learning of the author occasionally displays itself in a curious exegesis, as when on the word “Abba” he remarks: “You see that this word which means ’Father’ reads the same whether we read forward or backward; which suggests that God is the same whichever way we look at him.” Andrew Fuller’s “Letters on Systematic Divinity” is a brief compend of theology. His treatises upon special doctrines are marked by sound judgment and clear insight. They were the most influential factor in rescuing the evangelical churches of England from antinomianism. They justify the epithets which Robert Hall, one of the greatest of Baptist preachers, gives him: “sagacious,” “luminous,” “powerful.”

(b) The Puritans, John Owen (1616-1683), Richard Baxter (1615-1691), John Howe (1630-1705), and Thomas Ridgeley (1666-1734).

Owen was the most rigid, as Baxter was the most liberal, of the Puritans. The Encyclopædia Britannica remarks: “As a theological thinker and writer, John Owen holds his own distinctly defined place among those titanic intellects with which the age abounded. Surpassed by Baxter in point and pathos, by Howe in imagination and the higher philosophy, he is unrivaled in his power of unfolding the rich meanings of Scripture. In his writings he was preëminently the great theologian.” Baxter wrote a “Methodus Theologiæ,” and a “Catholic Theology”; John Howe is chiefly known by his “Living Temple”; Thomas Ridgeley by his “Body of Divinity.” Charles H. Spurgeon never ceased to urge his students to become familiar with the Puritan Adams, Ambrose, Bowden, Manton and Sibbes.

(c) The Scotch Presbyterians, Thomas Boston (1676-1732), John Dick (1764-1833), and Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847).

Of the Scotch Presbyterians, Boston is the most voluminous, Dick the most calm and fair, Chalmers the most fervid and popular.

(d) The Methodists, John Wesley (1703-1791), and Richard Watson (1781-1833).

Of the Methodists, John Wesley’s doctrine is presented in “Christian Theology,” collected from his writings by the Rev. Thornley Smith. The great Methodist text-book, however, is the “Institutes” of Watson, who systematized and expounded the Wesleyan theology. Pope, a recent English theologian, follows Watson’s modified and improved Arminianism, while Whedon and Raymond, recent American writers, hold rather to a radical and extreme Arminianism.

(e) The Quakers, George Fox (1624-1691), and Robert Barclay (1648-1690).

As Jesus, the preacher and reformer, preceded Paul the theologian; as Luther preceded Melanchthon; as Zwingle preceded Calvin; as Laelius Socinus preceded Faustus Socinus; as Wesley preceded Watson; so Fox preceded Barclay. Barclay wrote an “Apology for the true Christian Divinity,” which Dr. E. G. Robinson described as “not a formal treatise of Systematic Theology, but the ablest exposition of the views of the Quakers.” George Fox was the reformer, William Penn the social founder, Robert Barclay the theologian, of Quakerism.

(f) The English Churchmen, Richard Hooker (1553-1600), Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715), and John Pearson (1613-1686).

The English church has produced no great systematic theologian (see reasons assigned in Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theologie, 470). The “judicious” Hooker is still its greatest theological writer, although his work is only on “Ecclesiastical Polity.” Bishop Burnet is the author of the “Exposition of the XXXIX Articles,” and Bishop Pearson of the “Exposition of the Creed.” Both these are common English text-books. A recent “Compendium of Dogmatic Theology,” by Litton, shows a tendency to return from the usual Arminianism of the Anglican church to the old Augustinianism; so also Bishop Moule’s “Outlines of Christian Doctrine,” and Mason’s “Faith of the Gospel.”

5. American theology, running in two lines:

(a) The Reformed system of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), modified successively by Joseph Bellamy (1719-1790), Samuel Hopkins (1721-1803), Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), Nathanael Emmons (1745-1840), Leonard Woods (1774-1854), Charles G. Finney (1792-1875), Nathaniel W. Taylor (1786-1858), and Horace Bushnell (1802-1876). Calvinism, as thus modified, is often called the New England, or New School, theology.

Jonathan Edwards, one of the greatest of metaphysicians and theologians, was an idealist who held that God is the only real cause, either in the realm of matter or in the realm of mind. He regarded the chief good as happiness—a form of sensibility. Virtue was voluntary choice of this good. Hence union with Adam in acts and exercises was sufficient. Thus God’s will made identity of being with Adam. This led to the exercise-system of Hopkins and Emmons, on the one hand, and to Bellamy’s and Dwight’s denial of any imputation of Adam’s sin or of inborn depravity, on the other—in which last denial agree many other New England theologians who reject the exercise-scheme, as for example, Strong, Tyler, Smalley, Burton, Woods, and Park. Dr. N. W. Taylor added a more distinctly Arminian element, the power of contrary choice—and with this tenet of the New Haven theology, Charles G. Finney, of Oberlin, substantially agreed. Horace Bushnell held to a practically Sabellian view of the Trinity, and to a moral-influence theory of the atonement. Thus from certain principles admitted by Edwards, who held in the main to an Old School theology, the New School theology has been gradually developed.

Robert Hall called Edwards “the greatest of the sons of men.” Dr. Chalmers regarded him as the “greatest of theologians.” Dr. Fairbairn says: “He is not only the greatest of all the thinkers that America has produced, but also the highest speculative genius of the eighteenth century. In a far higher degree than Spinoza, he was a ’God-intoxicated man.’” His fundamental notion that there is no causality except the divine was made the basis of a theory of necessity which played into the hands of the deists whom he opposed and was alien not only to Christianity but even to theism. Edwards could not have gotten his idealism from Berkeley; it may have been suggested to him by the writings of Locke or Newton, Cudworth or Descartes, John Norris or Arthur Collier. See Prof. H. N. Gardiner, in Philos. Rev., Nov. 1900:573-596; Prof. E. C. Smyth, in Am. Jour. Theol., Oct. 1897:956; Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 16, 308-310, and in Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1891:767; Sanborn, in Jour. Spec. Philos., Oct. 1883:401-420; G. P. Fisher, Edwards on the Trinity, 18, 19.

(b) The older Calvinism, represented by Charles Hodge the father (1797-1878) and A. A. Hodge the son (1823-1886), together with Henry B. Smith (1815-1877), Robert J. Breckinridge (1800-1871), Samuel J. Baird, and William G. T. Shedd (1820-1894). All these, although with minor differences, hold to views of human depravity and divine grace more nearly conformed to the doctrine of Augustine and Calvin, and are for this reason distinguished from the New England theologians and their followers by the popular title of Old School.

Old School theology, in its view of predestination, exalts God; New School theology, by emphasizing the freedom of the will, exalts man. It is yet more important to notice that Old School theology has for its characteristic tenet the guilt of inborn depravity. But among those who hold this view, some are federalists and creationists, and justify God’s condemnation of all men upon the ground that Adam represented his posterity. Such are the Princeton theologians generally, including Charles Hodge, A. A. Hodge, and the brothers Alexander. Among those who hold to the Old School doctrine of the guilt of inborn depravity, however, there are others who are traducians, and who explain the imputation of Adam’s sin to his posterity upon the ground of the natural union between him and them. Baird’s “Elohim Revealed” and Shedd’s essay on “Original Sin” (Sin a Nature and that Nature Guilt) represent this realistic conception of the relation of the race to its first father. R. J. Breckinridge, R. L. Dabney, and J. H. Thornwell assert the fact of inherent corruption and guilt, but refuse to assign any rationale for it, though they tend to realism. H. B. Smith holds guardedly to the theory of mediate imputation.

On the history of Systematic Theology in general, see Hagenbach, History of Doctrine (from which many of the facts above given are taken), and Shedd, History of Doctrine; also, Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:44-100; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 1:15-128; Hase, Hutterus Redivivus, 24-52. Gretillat, Théologie Systématique, 3:24-120, has given an excellent history of theology, brought down to the present time. On the history of New England theology, see Fisher, Discussions and Essays, 285-354.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

IV. Order of Treatment in Systematic Theology

1. Various methods of arranging the topics of a theological system.

(a) The Analytical method of Calixtus begins with the assumed end of all things, blessedness, and thence passes to the means by which it is secured. (b) The Trinitarian method of Leydecker and Martensen regards Christian doctrine as a manifestation successively of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. (c) The Federal method of Cocceius, Witsius, and Boston treats theology under the two covenants. (d) The Anthropological method of Chalmers and Rothe; the former beginning with the Disease of Man and passing to the Remedy; the latter dividing his Dogmatik into the Consciousness of Sin and the Consciousness of Redemption. (e) The Christological method of Hase, Thomasius and Andrew Fuller treats of God, man, and sin, as presuppositions of the person and work of Christ. Mention may also be made of (f) The Historical method, followed by Ursinus, and adopted in Jonathan Edwards’s History of Redemption; and (g) The Allegorical method of Dannhauer, in which man is described as a wanderer, life as a road, the Holy Spirit as a light, the church as a candlestick, God as the end, and heaven as the home; so Bunyan’s Holy War, and Howe’s Living Temple.

See Calixtus, Epitome Theologiæ; Leydecker, De Œconomia trium Personarum in Negotio Salutis humanæ; Martensen (1808-1884), Christian Dogmatics; Cocceius, Summa Theologiæ, and Summa Doctrinæ de Fœdere et Testamento Dei, in Works, vol. vi; Witsius, The Economy of the Covenants; Boston, A Complete Body of Divinity (in Works, vol. 1 and 2), Questions in Divinity (vol. 6), Human Nature in its Fourfold State (vol. 8); Chalmers, Institutes of Theology; Rothe (1799-1867), Dogmatik, and Theologische Ethik; Hase (1800-1890), Evangelische Dogmatik; Thomasius (1802-1875), Christi Person und Werk; Fuller, Gospel Worthy of all Acceptation (in Works, 2:328-416), and Letters on Systematic Divinity (1:684-711); Ursinus (1534-1583), Loci Theologici (in Works, 1:426-909); Dannhauer (1603-1666) Hodosophia Christiana, seu Theologia Positiva in Methodum redacta. Jonathan Edwards’s so-called History of Redemption was in reality a system of theology in historical form. It “was to begin and end with eternity, all great events and epochs in time being viewed ‘sub specie eternitatis.’ The three worlds—heaven, earth and hell—were to be the scenes of this grand drama. It was to include the topics of theology as living factors, each in its own place,” and all forming a complete and harmonious whole; see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 379, 380.

2. The Synthetic Method, which we adopt in this compendium, is both the most common and the most logical method of arranging the topics of theology. This method proceeds from causes to effects, or, in the language of Hagenbach (Hist. Doctrine, 2:152), “starts from the highest principle, God, and proceeds to man, Christ, redemption, and finally to the end of all things.” In such a treatment of theology we may best arrange our topics in the following order:

1st. The existence of God. 2d. The Scriptures a revelation from God. 3d. The nature, decrees and works of God. 4th. Man, in his original likeness to God and subsequent apostasy. 5th. Redemption, through the work of Christ and of the Holy Spirit. 6th. The nature and laws of the Christian church. 7th. The end of the present system of things.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

V. Text-Books in Theology

1. Confessions: Schaff, Creeds of Christendom.

2. Compendiums: H. B. Smith, System of Christian Theology; A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology; E. H. Johnson, Outline of Systematic Theology; Hovey, Manual of Theology and Ethics; W. N. Clarke, Outline of Christian Theology; Hase, Hutterus Redivivus; Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik; Kurtz, Religionslehre.

3. Extended Treatises: Dorner, System of Christian Doctrine; Shedd, Dogmatic Theology; Calvin, Institutes; Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology; Van Oosterzee, Christian Dogmatics; Baird, Elohim Revealed; Luthardt, Fundamental, Saving, and Moral Truths; Phillippi, Glaubenslehre; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk.

4. Collected Works: Jonathan Edwards; Andrew Fuller.

5. Histories of Doctrine: Harnack; Hagenbach; Shedd; Fisher; Sheldon; Orr, Progress of Dogma.

6. Monographs: Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin; Shedd, Discourses and Essays; Liddon, Our Lord’s Divinity; Dorner, History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ; Dale, Atonement; Strong, Christ in Creation; Upton, Hibbert Lectures.

7. Theism: Martineau, Study of Religion; Harris, Philosophical Basis of Theism; Strong, Philosophy and Religion; Bruce, Apologetics; Drummond, Ascent of Man; Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ.

8. Christian Evidences: Butler, Analogy of Natural and Revealed Religion; Fisher, Grounds of Theistic and Christian Belief; Row, Bampton Lectures for 1877; Peabody, Evidences of Christianity; Mair, Christian Evidences; Fairbairn, Philosophy of the Christian Religion; Matheson, Spiritual Development of St. Paul.

9. Intellectual Philosophy: Stout, Handbook of Psychology; Bowne, Metaphysics; Porter, Human Intellect; Hill, Elements of Psychology; Dewey, Psychology.

10. Moral Philosophy: Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality; Smyth, Christian Ethics; Porter, Elements of Moral Science; Calderwood, Moral Philosophy; Alexander, Moral Science; Robins, Ethics of the Christian Life.

11. General Science: Todd, Astronomy; Wentworth and Hill, Physics; Remsen, Chemistry; Brigham, Geology; Parker, Biology; Martin, Physiology; Ward, Fairbanks, or West, Sociology; Walker, Political Economy.

12. Theological Encyclopædias: Schaff-Herzog (English); McClintock and Strong; Herzog (Second German Edition).

13. Bible Dictionaries: Hastings; Davis; Cheyne; Smith (edited by Hackett).

14. Commentaries: Meyer, on the New Testament; Philippi, Lange, Shedd, Sanday, on the Epistle to the Romans; Godet, on John’s Gospel; Lightfoot, on Philippians and Colossians; Expositor’s Bible, on the Old Testament books.

15. Bibles: American Revision (standard edition); Revised Greek-English New Testament (published by Harper & Brothers); Annotated Paragraph Bible (published by the London Religious Tract Society) Stier and Theile, Polyglotten-Bibel.

An attempt has been made, in the list of text-books given above, to put first in each class the book best worth purchasing by the average theological student, and to arrange the books that follow this first one in the order of their value. German books, however, when they are not yet accessible in an English translation, are put last, simply because they are less likely to be used as books of reference by the average student.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

I. Origin Of Our Idea Of God’s Existence

God is the infinite and perfect Spirit in whom all things have their source, support, and end.

On the definition of the term God, see Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:366. Other definitions are those of Calovius: “Essentia spiritualis infinite”; Ebrard: “The eternal source of all that is temporal”; Kahnis: “The infinite Spirit”; John Howe: “An eternal, uncaused, independent, necessary Being, that hath active power, life, wisdom, goodness, and whatsoever other supposable excellency, in the highest perfection, in and of itself”; Westminster Catechism: “A Spirit infinite, eternal and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth”; Andrew Fuller: “The first cause and last end of all things.”

The existence of God is a first truth; in other words, the knowledge of God’s existence is a rational intuition. Logically, it precedes and conditions all observation and reasoning. Chronologically, only reflection upon the phenomena of nature and of mind occasions its rise in consciousness.

The term intuition means simply direct knowledge. Lowndes (Philos. of Primary Beliefs, 78) and Mansel (Metaphysics, 52) would use the term only of our direct knowledge of substances, as self and body; Porter applies it by preference to our cognition of first truths, such as have been already mentioned. Harris (Philos. Basis of Theism, 44-151, but esp. 45, 46) makes it include both. He divides intuitions into two classes: 1. Presentative intuitions, as self-consciousness (in virtue of which I perceive the existence of spirit and already come in contact with the supernatural), and sense-perception (in virtue of which I perceive the existence of matter, at least in my own organism, and come in contact with nature); 2. Rational intuitions, as space, time, substance, cause, final cause, right, absolute being. We may accept this nomenclature, using the terms “first truths” and “rational intuitions” as equivalent to each other, and classifying rational intuitions under the heads of (1) intuitions of relations, as space and time; (2) intuitions of principles, as substance, cause, final cause, right; and (3) intuition of absolute Being, Power, Reason, Perfection, Personality, as God. We hold that, as upon occasion of the senses cognizing (a) extended matter, (b) succession, (c) qualities, (d) change, (e) order, (f) action, respectively, the mind cognizes (a) space, (b) time, (c) substance, (d) cause, (e) design, (f) obligation, so upon occasion of our cognizing our finiteness, dependence and responsibility, the mind directly cognizes the existence of an Infinite and Absolute Authority, Perfection, Personality, upon whom we are dependent and to whom we are responsible.

Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 60—“As we walk in entire ignorance of our muscles, so we often think in entire ignorance of the principles which underlie and determine thinking. But as anatomy reveals that the apparently simple act of walking involves a highly complex muscular activity, so analysis reveals that the apparently simple act of thinking involves a system of mental principles.” Dewey, Psychology, 238, 244—“Perception, memory, imagination, conception—each of these is an act of intuition.... Every concrete act of knowledge involves an intuition of God.” Martineau, Types, 1:459—The attempt to divest experience of either percepts or intuitions is “like the attempt to peel a bubble in search for its colors and contents: in tenuem ex oculis evanuit auram”; Study, 1:199—“Try with all your might to do something difficult, e. g., to shut a door against a furious wind, and you recognize Self and Nature—causal will, over against external causality”; 201—“Hence our fellow-feeling with Nature”; 65—“As Perception gives us Will in the shape of Causality over against us in the non-ego, so Conscience gives us Will in the shape of Authority over against us in the non-ego”; Types, 2:5—“In perception it is self and nature, in morals it is self and God, that stand face to face in the subjective and objective antithesis”; Study, 2:2, 3—“In volitional experience we meet with objective causality; in moral experience we meet with objective authority,—both being objects of immediate knowledge, on the same footing of certainty with the apprehension of the external material world. I know of no logical advantage which the belief in finite objects around us can boast over the belief in the infinite and righteous Cause of all”; 51—“In recognition of God as Cause, we raise the University; in recognition of God as Authority, we raise the Church.”

Kant declares that the idea of freedom is the source of our idea of personality,—personality consists in the freedom of the whole soul from the mechanism of nature. Lotze, Metaphysics, § 244—“So far as, and so long as, the soul knows itself as the identical subject of inward experience, it is, and is named simply for that reason, substance.” Illingworth, Personality, Human and Divine, 32—“Our conception of substance is derived, not from the physical, but from the mental world. Substance is first of all that which underlies our mental affections and manifestations.” James, Will to Believe, 80—“Substance, as Kant says, means ‘das Beharrliche,’ the abiding, that which will be as it has been, because its being is essential and eternal.” In this sense we have an intuitive belief in an abiding substance which underlies our own thoughts and volitions, and this we call the soul. But we also have an intuitive belief in an abiding substance which underlies all natural phenomena and all the events of history, and this we call God. Among those who hold to this general view of an intuitive knowledge of God may be mentioned the following:—Calvin, Institutes, book I, chap. 3; Nitzsch, System of Christian Doctrine, 15-26, 133-140; Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:78-84; Ulrici, Leib und Seele, 688-725; Porter, Human Intellect, 497; Hickok, Rational Cosmology, 58-89; Farrar, Science in Theology, 27-29; Bib. Sac., July, 1872:533, and January, 1873:204; Miller, Fetich in Theology, 110-122; Fisher, Essays, 565-572; Tulloch, Theism, 314-336; Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:191-203; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christian Belief, 75, 76; Raymond, Syst. Theology, 1:247-262; Bascom, Science of Mind, 246, 247; Knight, Studies in Philos. and Lit., 155-224; A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 76-89.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

I. First Truths in General

1. Their nature.

A. Negatively.—A first truth is not (a) Truth written prior to consciousness upon the substance of the soul—for such passive knowledge implies a materialistic view of the soul; (b) Actual knowledge of which the soul finds itself in possession at birth—for it cannot be proved that the soul has such knowledge; (c) An idea, undeveloped at birth, but which has the power of self-development apart from observation and experience—for this is contrary to all we know of the laws of mental growth.

Cicero, De Natura Deorum, 1:17—“Intelligi necesse est esse deos, quoniam insitas eorum vel potius innatas cogitationes habemus.” Origen, Adv. Celsum, 1:4—“Men would not be guilty, if they did not carry in their minds common notions of morality, innate and written in divine letters.” Calvin, Institutes, 1:3:3—“Those who rightly judge will always agree that there is an indelible sense of divinity engraven upon men’s minds.” Fleming, Vocab. of Philosophy, art.: “Innate Ideas”—“Descartes is supposed to have taught (and Locke devoted the first book of his Essays to refuting the doctrine) that these ideas are innate or connate with the soul; i. e., the intellect finds itself at birth, or as soon as it wakes to conscious activity, to be possessed of ideas to which it has only to attach the appropriate names, or of judgments which it only needs to express in fit propositions—i. e., prior to any experience of individual objects.”

Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 77—“In certain families, Descartes teaches, good breeding and the gout are innate. Yet, of course, the children of such families have to be instructed in deportment, and the infants just learning to walk seem happily quite free from gout. Even so geometry is innate in us, but it does not come to our consciousness without much trouble”; 79—Locke found no innate ideas. He maintained, in reply, that “infants, with their rattles, showed no sign of being aware that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.” Schopenhauer said that “Jacobi had the trifling weakness of taking all he had learned and approved before his fifteenth year for inborn ideas of the human mind.” Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 5—“That the rational ideas are conditioned by the sense experience and are sequent to it, is unquestioned by any one; and that experience shows a successive order of manifestation is equally undoubted. But the sensationalist has always shown a curious blindness to the ambiguity of such a fact. He will have it that what comes after must be a modification of what went before; whereas it might be that, and it might be a new, though conditioned, manifestation of an immanent nature or law. Chemical affinity is not gravity, although affinity cannot manifest itself until gravity has brought the elements into certain relations.”

Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:103—“This principle was not from the beginning in the consciousness of men; for, in order to think ideas, reason must be clearly developed, which in the first of mankind it could just as little be as in children. This however does not exclude the fact that there was from the beginning the unconscious rational impulse which lay at the basis of the formation of the belief in God, however manifold may have been the direct motives which co-operated with it.” Self is implied in the simplest act of knowledge. Sensation gives us two things, e. g., black and white; but I cannot compare them without asserting difference for me. Different sensations make no knowledge, without a self to bring them together. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, lecture 2—“You could as easily prove the existence of an external world to a man who had no senses to perceive it, as you could prove the existence of God to one who had no consciousness of God.”

B. Positively.—A first truth is a knowledge which, though developed upon occasion of observation and reflection, is not derived from observation and reflection,—a knowledge on the contrary which has such logical priority that it must be assumed or supposed, in order to make any observation or reflection possible. Such truths are not, therefore, recognized first in order of time; some of them are assented to somewhat late in the mind’s growth; by the great majority of men they are never consciously formulated at all. Yet they constitute the necessary assumptions upon which all other knowledge rests, and the mind has not only the inborn capacity to evolve them so soon as the proper occasions are presented, but the recognition of them is inevitable so soon as the mind begins to give account to itself of its own knowledge.

Mansel, Metaphysics, 52, 279—“To describe experience as the cause of the idea of space would be as inaccurate as to speak of the soil in which it was planted as the cause of the oak—though the planting in the soil is the condition which brings into manifestation the latent power of the acorn.” Coleridge: “We see before we know that we have eyes; but when once this is known, we perceive that eyes must have preëxisted in order to enable us to see.” Coleridge speaks of first truths as “those necessities of mind or forms of thinking, which, though revealed to us by experience, must yet have preëxisted in order to make experience possible.” McCosh, Intuitions, 48, 49—Intuitions are “like flower and fruit, which are in the plant from its embryo, but may not be actually formed till there have been a stalk and branches and leaves.” Porter, Human Intellect, 501, 519—“Such truths cannot be acquired or assented to first of all.” Some are reached last of all. The moral intuition is often developed late, and sometimes, even then, only upon occasion of corporal punishment. “Every man is as lazy as circumstances will admit.” Our physical laziness is occasional; our mental laziness frequent; our moral laziness incessant. We are too lazy to think, and especially to think of religion. On account of this depravity of human nature we should expect the intuition of God to be developed last of all. Men shrink from contact with God and from the thought of God. In fact, their dislike for the intuition of God leads them not seldom to deny all their other intuitions, even those of freedom and of right. Hence the modern “psychology without a soul.”

Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion, 105-115—“The idea of God ... is latest to develop into clear consciousness ... and must be latest, for it is the unity of the difference of the self and the not-self, which are therefore presupposed.” But “it has not less validity in itself, it gives no less trustworthy assurance of actuality, than the consciousness of the self, or the consciousness of the not-self.... The consciousness of God is the logical prius of the consciousness of self and of the world. But not, as already observed, the chronological; for, according to the profound observation of Aristotle, what in the nature of things is first, is in the order of development last. Just because God is the first principle of being and knowing, he is the last to be manifested and known.... The finite and the infinite are both known together, and it is as impossible to know one without the other as it is to apprehend an angle without the sides which contain it.” For account of the relation of the intuitions to experience, see especially Cousin, True, Beautiful and Good, 39-64, and History of Philosophy, 2:199-245. Compare Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Introd., 1. See also Bascom, in Bib. Sac., 23:1-47; 27:68-90.

2. Their criteria. The criteria by which first truths are to be tested are three:

A. Their universality. By this we mean, not that all men assent to them or understand them when propounded in scientific form, but that all men manifest a practical belief in them by their language, actions, and expectations.

B. Their necessity. By this we mean, not that it is impossible to deny these truths, but that the mind is compelled by its very constitution to recognize them upon the occurrence of the proper conditions, and to employ them in its arguments to prove their non-existence.

C. Their logical independence and priority. By this we mean that these truths can be resolved into no others, and proved by no others; that they are presupposed in the acquisition of all other knowledge, and can therefore be derived from no other source than an original cognitive power of the mind.

Instances of the professed and formal denial of first truths:—the positivist denies causality; the idealist denies substance; the pantheist denies personality; the necessitarian denies freedom; the nihilist denies his own existence. A man may in like manner argue that there is no necessity for an atmosphere; but even while he argues, he breathes it. Instance the knock-down argument to demonstrate the freedom of the will. I grant my own existence in the very doubting of it; for “cogito, ergo sum,” as Descartes himself insisted, really means “cogito, scilicet sum”; H. B. Smith: “The statement is analysis, not proof.” Ladd, Philosophy of Knowledge, 59—“The cogito, in barbarous Latin = cogitans sum: thinking is self-conscious being.” Bentham: “The word ought is an authoritative imposture, and ought to be banished from the realm of morals.” Spinoza and Hegel really deny self-consciousness when they make man a phenomenon of the infinite. Royce likens the denier of personality to the man who goes outside of his own house and declares that no one lives there because, when he looks in at the window, he sees no one inside.

Professor James, in his Psychology, assumes the reality of a brain, but refuses to assume the reality of a soul. This is essentially the position of materialism. But this assumption of a brain is metaphysics, although the author claims to be writing a psychology without metaphysics. Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 3—“The materialist believes in causation proper so long as he is explaining the origin of mind from matter, but when he is asked to see in mind the cause of physical change he at once becomes a mere phenomenalist.” Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 400—“I know that all beings, if only they can count, must find that three and two make five. Perhaps the angels cannot count; but, if they can, this axiom is true for them. If I met an angel who declared that his experience had occasionally shown him a three and two that did not make five, I should know at once what sort of an angel he was.” On the criteria of first truths, see Porter, Human Intellect, 510, 511. On denial of them, see Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 1:213.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

II. The Existence of God a first truth

1. Its universality.

That the knowledge of God’s existence answers the first criterion of universality, is evident from the following considerations:

A. It is an acknowledged fact that the vast majority of men have actually recognized the existence of a spiritual being or beings, upon whom they conceived themselves to be dependent.

The Vedas declare: “There is but one Being—no second.” Max Müller, Origin and Growth of Religion, 34—“Not the visible sun, moon and stars are invoked, but something else that cannot be seen.” The lowest tribes have conscience, fear death, believe in witches, propitiate or frighten away evil fates. Even the fetich-worshiper, who calls the stone or the tree a god, shows that he has already the idea of a God. We must not measure the ideas of the heathen by their capacity for expression, any more than we should judge the child’s belief in the existence of his father by his success in drawing the father’s picture. On heathenism, its origin and nature, see Tholuck, in Bib. Repos., 1832:86; Scholz, Götzendienst und Zauberwesen.

B. Those races and nations which have at first seemed destitute of such knowledge have uniformly, upon further investigation, been found to possess it, so that no tribe of men with which we have thorough acquaintance can be said to be without an object of worship. We may presume that further knowledge will show this to be true of all.

Moffat, who reported that certain African tribes were destitute of religion, was corrected by the testimony of his son-in-law, Livingstone: “The existence of God and of a future life is everywhere recognized in Africa.” Where men are most nearly destitute of any formulated knowledge of God, the conditions for the awakening of the idea are most nearly absent. An apple-tree may be so conditioned that it never bears apples. “We do not judge of the oak by the stunted, flowerless specimens on the edge of the Arctic Circle.” The presence of an occasional blind, deaf or dumb man does not disprove the definition that man is a seeing, hearing and speaking creature. Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 154—“We need not tremble for mathematics, even if some tribes should be found without the multiplication-table.... Sub-moral and sub-rational existence is always with us in the case of young children; and, if we should find it elsewhere, it would have no greater significance.”

Victor Hugo: “Some men deny the Infinite; some, too, deny the sun; they are the blind.” Gladden, What is Left? 148—“A man may escape from his shadow by going into the dark; if he comes under the light of the sun, the shadow is there. A man may be so mentally undisciplined that he does not recognize these ideas; but let him learn the use of his reason, let him reflect on his own mental processes, and he will know that they are necessary ideas.” On an original monotheism, see Diestel, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1860, and vol. 5:669; Max Müller, Chips, 1:337; Rawlinson, in Present Day Tracts, No. 11; Legge, Religions of China, 8-11; Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 1:201-208. Per contra, see Asmus, Indogerm. Relig., 2:1-8; and synopsis in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1877:167-172.

C. This conclusion is corroborated by the fact that those individuals, in heathen or in Christian lands, who profess themselves to be without any knowledge of a spiritual power or powers above them, do yet indirectly manifest the existence of such an idea in their minds and its positive influence over them.

Comte said that science would conduct God to the frontier and then bow him out, with thanks for his provisional services. But Herbert Spencer affirms the existence of a “Power to which no limit in time or space is conceivable, of which all phenomena as presented in consciousness are manifestations.” The intuition of God, though formally excluded, is implicitly contained in Spencer’s system, in the shape of the “irresistible belief” in Absolute Being, which distinguishes his position from that of Comte; see H. Spencer, who says: “One truth must ever grow clearer—the truth that there is an inscrutable existence everywhere manifested, to which we can neither find nor conceive beginning or end—the one absolute certainty that we are ever in the presence of an infinite and eternal energy from which all things proceed.” Mr. Spencer assumes unity in the underlying Reality. Frederick Harrison sneeringly asks him: “Why not say ‘forces,’ instead of ‘force’?” While Harrison gives us a supreme moral ideal without a metaphysical ground, Spencer gives us an ultimate metaphysical principle without a final moral purpose. The idea of God is the synthesis of the two,—“They are but broken lights of Thee, And thou, O Lord, art more than they” (Tennyson, In Memoriam).

Solon spoke of ὁ θεός and of τὸ θεῖον, and Sophocles of ὁ μέγας θεός. The term for “God” is identical in all the Indo-European languages, and therefore belonged to the time before those languages separated; see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:201-208. In Virgil’s Æneid, Mezentius is an atheist, a despiser of the gods, trusting only in his spear and in his right arm; but, when the corpse of his son is brought to him, his first act is to raise his hands to heaven. Hume was a sceptic, but he said to Ferguson, as they walked on a starry night: “Adam, there is a God!” Voltaire prayed in an Alpine thunderstorm. Shelley wrote his name in the visitors’ book of the inn at Montanvert, and added: “Democrat, philanthropist, atheist”; yet he loved to think of a “fine intellectual spirit pervading the universe”; and he also wrote: “The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly.” Strauss worships the Cosmos, because “order and law, reason and goodness” are the soul of it. Renan trusts in goodness, design, ends. Charles Darwin, Life, 1:274—“In my most extreme fluctuations, I have never been an atheist, in the sense of denying the existence of a God.”

D. This agreement among individuals and nations so widely separated in time and place can be most satisfactorily explained by supposing that it has its ground, not in accidental circumstances, but in the nature of man as man. The diverse and imperfectly developed ideas of the supreme Being which prevail among men are best accounted for as misinterpretations and perversions of an intuitive conviction common to all.

Huxley, Lay Sermons, 163—“There are savages without God, in any proper sense of the word; but there are none without ghosts.” Martineau, Study, 2:353, well replies: “Instead of turning other people into ghosts, and then appropriating one to ourselves [and attributing another to God, we may add] by way of imitation, we start from the sense of personal continuity, and then predicate the same of others, under the figures which keep most clear of the physical and perishable.” Grant Allen describes the higher religions as “a grotesque fungoid growth,” that has gathered about a primitive thread of ancestor-worship. But this is to derive the greater from the less. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, 358—“I can find no trace of ancestor-worship in the earliest literature of Babylonia which has survived to us”—this seems fatal to Huxley’s and Allen’s view that the idea of God is derived from man’s prior belief in spirits of the dead. C. M. Tyler, in Am. Jour. Theo., Jan. 1899:144—“It seems impossible to deify a dead man, unless there is embryonic in primitive consciousness a prior concept of Deity.”

Renouf, Religion of Ancient Egypt, 93—“The whole mythology of Egypt ... turns on the histories of Ra and Osiris.... Texts are discovered which identify Osiris and Ra.... Other texts are known wherein Ra, Osiris, Amon, and all other gods disappear, except as simple names, and the unity of God is asserted in the noblest language of monotheistic religion.” These facts are earlier than any known ancestor-worship. “They point to an original idea of divinity above humanity” (see Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 317). We must add the idea of the superhuman, before we can turn any animism or ancestor-worship into a religion. This superhuman element was suggested to early man by all he saw of nature about him, especially by the sight of the heavens above, and by what he knew of causality within. For the evidence of a universal recognition of a superior power, see Flint, Anti-theistic Theories, 250-289, 522-533; Renouf, Hibbert Lectures for 1879:100; Bib. Sac., Jan. 1884:132-157; Peschel, Races of Men, 261; Ulrici, Leib und Seele, 688, and Gott und die Natur, 658-670, 758; Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:377, 381, 418; Alexander, Evidences of Christianity, 22; Calderwood, Philosophy of the Infinite, 512; Liddon, Elements of Religion, 50; Methodist Quar. Rev., Jan. 1875:1; J. F. Clark, Ten Great Religions, 2:17-21.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

2. Its necessity

That the knowledge of God’s existence answers the second criterion of necessity, will be seen by considering:

A. That men, under circumstances fitted to call forth this knowledge, cannot avoid recognizing the existence of God. In contemplating finite existence, there is inevitably suggested the idea of an infinite Being as its correlative. Upon occasion of the mind’s perceiving its own finiteness, dependence, responsibility, it immediately and necessarily perceives the existence of an infinite and unconditioned Being upon whom it is dependent and to whom it is responsible.

We could not recognize the finite as finite, except by comparing it with an already existing standard—the Infinite. Mansel, Limits of Religious Thought, lect. 3—“We are compelled by the constitution of our minds to believe in the existence of an Absolute and Infinite Being—a belief which appears forced upon us as the complement of our consciousness of the relative and finite.” Fisher, Journ. Chr. Philos., Jan. 1883:113—“Ego and non-ego, each being conditioned by the other, presuppose unconditioned being on which both are dependent. Unconditioned being is the silent presupposition of all our knowing.” Perceived dependent being implies an independent; independent being is perfectly self-determining; self-determination is personality; perfect self-determination is infinite Personality. John Watson, in Philos. Rev., Sept. 1893:526—“There is no consciousness of self apart from the consciousness of other selves and things; and no consciousness of the world apart from the consciousness of the single Reality presupposed in both.” E. Caird, Evolution of Religion, 64-68—In every act of consciousness the primary elements are implied: “the idea of the object, or not-self; the idea of the subject, or self; and the idea of the unity which is presupposed in the difference of the self and not-self, and within which they act and react on each other.” See Calderwood, Philos. of Infinite, 46, and Moral Philos., 77; Hopkins, Outline Study of Man, 283-285; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:211.

B. That men, in virtue of their humanity, have a capacity for religion. This recognized capacity for religion is proof that the idea of God is a necessary one. If the mind upon proper occasion did not evolve this idea, there would be nothing in man to which religion could appeal.

“It is the suggestion of the Infinite that makes the line of the far horizon, seen over land or sea, so much more impressive than the beauties of any limited landscape.” In times of sudden shock and danger, this rational intuition becomes a presentative intuition,—men become more conscious of God’s existence than of the existence of their fellow-men and they instinctively cry to God for help. In the commands and reproaches of the moral nature the soul recognizes a Lawgiver and Judge whose voice conscience merely echoes. Aristotle called man “a political animal”; it is still more true, as Sabatier declares, that “man is incurably religious.” St. Bernard: “Noverim me, noverim te.” O. P. Gifford: “As milk, from which under proper conditions cream does not rise, is not milk, so the man, who upon proper occasion shows no knowledge of God, is not man, but brute.” We must not however expect cream from frozen milk. Proper environment and conditions are needed.

It is the recognition of a divine Personality in nature which constitutes the greatest merit and charm of Wordsworth’s poetry. In his Tintern Abbey, he speaks of “A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.” Robert Browning sees God in humanity, as Wordsworth sees God in nature. In his Hohenstiel-Schwangau he writes: “This is the glory, that in all conceived Or felt or known, I recognize a Mind—Not mine, but like mine—for the double joy Making all things for me, and me for Him.” John Ruskin held that the foundation of beauty in the world is the presence of God in it. In his youth he tells us that he had “a continual perception of sanctity in the whole of nature, from the slightest thing to the vastest—an instinctive awe mixed with delight, an indefinable thrill such as we sometimes imagine to indicate the presence of a disembodied spirit.” But it was not a disembodied, but an embodied, Spirit that he saw. Nitzsch, Christian Doctrine, § 7—“Unless education and culture were preceded by an innate consciousness of God as an operative predisposition, there would be nothing for education and culture to work upon.” On Wordsworth’s recognition of a divine personality in nature, see Knight, Studies, 282-317, 405-426; Hutton, Essays, 2:113.

C. That he who denies God’s existence must tacitly assume that existence in his very argument, by employing logical processes whose validity rests upon the fact of God’s existence. The full proof of this belongs under the next head.

“I am an atheist, God knows”—was the absurd beginning of an argument to disprove the divine existence. Cutler, Beginnings of Ethics, 22—“Even the Nihilists, whose first principle is that God and duty are great bugbears to be abolished, assume that God and duty exist, and they are impelled by a sense of duty to abolish them.” Mrs. Browning, The Cry of the Human: “ ‘There is no God,’ the foolish saith; But none, ‘There is no sorrow’; And nature oft the cry of faith In bitter need will borrow: Eyes which the preacher could not school By wayside graves are raised; And lips say, ‘God be pitiful,’ Who ne’er said, ‘God be praised.’ ” Dr. W. W. Keen, when called to treat an Irishman’s aphasia, said: “Well, Dennis, how are you?” “Oh, doctor, I cannot spake!” “But, Dennis, you are speaking.” “Oh, doctor, it’s many a word I cannot spake!” “Well, Dennis, now I will try you. See if you cannot say, ‘Horse.’ ” “Oh, doctor dear, ‘horse’ is the very word I cannot spake!” On this whole section, see A. M. Fairbairn, Origin and Development of the Idea of God, in Studies in Philos. of Relig. and History; Martineau, Religion and Materialism, 45; Bishop Temple, Bampton Lectures, 1884:37-65.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

3. Its logical independence and priority

That the knowledge of God’s existence answers the third criterion of logical independence and priority, may be shown as follows:

A. It is presupposed in all other knowledge as its logical condition and foundation. The validity of the simplest mental acts, such as sense-perception, self-consciousness, and memory, depends upon the assumption that a God exists who has so constituted our minds that they give us knowledge of things as they are.

Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:88—“The ground of science and of cognition generally is to be found neither in the subject nor in the object per se, but only in the divine thinking that combines the two, which, as the common ground of the forms of thinking in all finite minds, and of the forms of being in all things, makes possible the correspondence or agreement between the former and the latter, or in a word makes knowledge of truth possible.” 91—“Religious belief is presupposed in all scientific knowledge as the basis of its possibility.” This is the thought of Psalm 36:10—“In thy light shall we see light.” A. J. Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 303—“The uniformity of nature cannot be proved from experience, for it is what makes proof from experience possible.... Assume it, and we shall find that facts conform to it.... 309—The uniformity of nature can be established only by the aid of that principle itself, and is necessarily involved in all attempts to prove it.... There must be a God, to justify our confidence in innate ideas.”

Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 276—“Reflection shows that the community of individual intelligences is possible only through an all-embracing Intelligence, the source and creator of finite minds.” Science rests upon the postulate of a world-order. Huxley: “The object of science is the discovery of the rational order which pervades the universe.” This rational order presupposes a rational Author. Dubois, in New Englander, Nov. 1890:468—“We assume uniformity and continuity, or we can have no science. An intelligent Creative Will is a genuine scientific hypothesis [postulate?], suggested by analogy and confirmed by experience, not contradicting the fundamental law of uniformity but accounting for it.” Ritchie, Darwin and Hegel, 18—“That nature is a system, is the assumption underlying the earliest mythologies: to fill up this conception is the aim of the latest science.” Royce, Relig. Aspect of Philosophy, 435—“There is such a thing as error; but error is inconceivable unless there be such a thing as truth; and truth is inconceivable unless there be a seat of truth, an infinite all-including Thought or Mind; therefore such a Mind exists.”

B. The more complex processes of the mind, such as induction and deduction, can be relied on only by presupposing a thinking Deity who has made the various parts of the universe and the various aspects of truth to correspond to each other and to the investigating faculties of man.

We argue from one apple to the others on the tree. Newton argued from the fall of an apple to gravitation in the moon and throughout the solar system. Rowland argued from the chemistry of our world to that of Sirius. In all such argument there is assumed a unifying thought and a thinking Deity. This is Tyndall’s “scientific use of the imagination.” “Nourished,” he says, “by knowledge partially won, and bounded by coöperant reason, imagination is the mightiest instrument of the physical discoverer.” What Tyndall calls “imagination”, is really insight into the thoughts of God, the great Thinker. It prepares the way for logical reasoning,—it is not the product of mere reasoning. For this reason Goethe called imagination “die Vorschule des Denkens,” or “thought’s preparatory school.”

Peabody, Christianity the Religion of Nature, 23—“Induction is syllogism, with the immutable attributes of God for a constant term.” Porter, Hum. Intellect, 492—“Induction rests upon the assumption, as it demands for its ground, that a personal or thinking Deity exists”; 658—“It has no meaning or validity unless we assume that the universe is constituted in such a way as to presuppose an absolute and unconditioned originator of its forces and laws”; 662—“We analyze the several processes of knowledge into their underlying assumptions, and we find that the assumption which underlies them all is that of a self-existent Intelligence who not only can be known by man, but must be known by man in order that man may know anything besides”; see also pages 486, 508, 509, 518, 519, 585, 616. Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 81—“The processes of reflective thought imply that the universe is grounded in, and is the manifestation of, reason”; 560—“The existence of a personal God is a necessary datum of scientific knowledge.” So also, Fisher, Essays on Supernat. Origin of Christianity, 564, and in Journ. Christ. Philos., Jan. 1883:129, 130.

C. Our primitive belief in final cause, or, in other words, our conviction that all things have their ends, that design pervades the universe, involves a belief in God’s existence. In assuming that there is a universe, that the universe is a rational whole, a system of thought-relations, we assume the existence of an absolute Thinker, of whose thought the universe is an expression.

Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:81—“The real can only be thinkable if it is realized thought, a thought previously thought, which our thinking has only to think again. Therefore the real, in order to be thinkable for us, must be the realized thought of the creative thinking of an eternal divine Reason which is presented to our cognitive thinking.” Royce, World and Individual, 2:41—“Universal teleology constitutes the essence of all facts.” A. H. Bradford, The Age of Faith, 142—“Suffering and sorrow are universal. Either God could prevent them and would not, and therefore he is neither beneficent nor loving; or else he cannot prevent them and therefore something is greater than God, and therefore there is no God? But here is the use of reason in the individual reasoning. Reasoning in the individual necessitates the absolute or universal reason. If there is the absolute reason, then the universe and history are ordered and administered in harmony with reason; then suffering and sorrow can be neither meaningless nor final, since that would be the contradiction of reason. That cannot be possible in the universal and absolute which contradicts reason in man.”

D. Our primitive belief in moral obligation, or, in other words, our conviction that right has universal authority, involves the belief in God’s existence. In assuming that the universe is a moral whole, we assume the existence of an absolute Will, of whose righteousness the universe is an expression.

Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:88—“The ground of moral obligation is found neither in the subject nor in society, but only in the universal or divine Will that combines both.... 103—The idea of God is the unity of the true and the good, or of the two highest ideas which our reason thinks as theoretical reason, but demands as practical reason.... In the idea of God we find the only synthesis of the world that is—the world of science, and of the world that ought to be—the world of religion.” Seth, Ethical Principles, 425—“This is not a mathematical demonstration. Philosophy never is an exact science. Rather is it offered as the only sufficient foundation of the moral life.... The life of goodness ... is a life based on the conviction that its source and its issues are in the Eternal and the Infinite.” As finite truth and goodness are comprehensible only in the light of some absolute principle which furnishes for them an ideal standard, so finite beauty is inexplicable except as there exists a perfect standard with which it may be compared. The beautiful is more than the agreeable or the useful. Proportion, order, harmony, unity in diversity—all these are characteristics of beauty. But they all imply an intellectual and spiritual Being, from whom they proceed and by whom they can be measured. Both physical and moral beauty, in finite things and beings, are symbols and manifestations of Him who is the author and lover of beauty, and who is himself the infinite and absolute Beauty. The beautiful in nature and in art shows that the idea of God’s existence is logically independent and prior. See Cousin, The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, 140-153; Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics, who holds that belief in God is the necessary presupposition of the belief in duty.

To repeat these four points in another form—the intuition of an Absolute Reason is (a) the necessary presupposition of all other knowledge, so that we cannot know anything else to exist except by assuming first of all that God exists; (b) the necessary basis of all logical thought, so that we cannot put confidence in any one of our reasoning processes except by taking for granted that a thinking Deity has constructed our minds with reference to the universe and to truth; (c) the necessary implication of our primitive belief in design, so that we can assume all things to exist for a purpose, only by making the prior assumption that a purposing God exists—can regard the universe as a thought, only by postulating the existence of an absolute Thinker; and (d) the necessary foundation of our conviction of moral obligation, so that we can believe in the universal authority of right, only by assuming that there exists a God of righteousness who reveals his will both in the individual conscience and in the moral universe at large. We cannot prove that God is; but we can show that, in order to show the existence of any knowledge, thought, reason, conscience, in man, man must assume that God is.

As Jacobi said of the beautiful: “Es kann gewiesen aber nicht bewiesen werden”—it can be shown, but not proved. Bowne, Metaphysics, 472—“Our objective knowledge of the finite must rest upon ethical trust in the infinite”; 480—“Theism is the absolute postulate of all knowledge, science and philosophy”; “God is the most certain fact of objective knowledge.” Ladd, Bib. Sac., Oct. 1877:611-616—“Cogito, ergo Deus est. We are obliged to postulate a not-ourselves which makes for rationality, as well as for righteousness.” W. T. Harris: “Even natural science is impossible, where philosophy has not yet taught that reason made the world, and that nature is a revelation of the rational.” Whately, Logic, 270; New Englander, Oct. 1871, art. on Grounds of Confidence in Inductive Reasoning; Bib. Sac., 7:415-425; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:197; Trendelenburg, Logische Untersuchungen, ch. “Zweck”; Ulrici, Gott und die Natur, 540-626; Lachelier, Du Fondement de l’Induction, 78. Per contra, see Janet, Final Causes, 174, note, and 457-464, who holds final cause to be, not an intuition, but the result of applying the principle of causality to cases which mechanical laws alone will not explain.

Pascal: “Nature confounds the Pyrrhonist, and Reason confounds the Dogmatist. We have an incapacity of demonstration, which the former cannot overcome; we have a conception of truth which the latter cannot disturb.” “There is no Unbelief! Whoever says. ‘To-morrow,’ ‘The Unknown,’ ‘The Future,’ trusts that Power alone. Nor dares disown.” Jones, Robert Browning, 314—“We cannot indeed prove God as the conclusion of a syllogism, for he is the primary hypothesis of all proof.” Robert Browning, Hohenstiel-Schwangau: “I know that he is there, as I am here, By the same proof, which seems no proof at all, It so exceeds familiar forms of proof”; Paracelsus, 27—“To know Rather consists in opening out a way Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape Than in effecting entrance for a light Supposed to be without.” Tennyson, Holy Grail: “Let visions of the night or day Come as they will, and many a time they come.... In moments when he feels he cannot die, And knows himself no vision to himself, Nor the high God a vision, nor that One Who rose again”; The Ancient Sage, 548—“Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son! Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in. Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone, Nor canst Thou prove that thou art spirit alone, Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one. Thou canst not prove that thou art immortal, no, Nor yet that thou art mortal. Nay, my son, thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee, Am not thyself in converse with thyself. For nothing worthy proving can be proven, Nor yet disproven: Wherefore be thou wise, Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt, And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith.”

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

III. Other Supposed Sources of our Idea of God’s Existence

Our proof that the idea of God’s existence is a rational intuition will not be complete, until we show that attempts to account in other ways for the origin of the idea are insufficient, and require as their presupposition the very intuition which they would supplant or reduce to a secondary place. We claim that it cannot be derived from any other source than an original cognitive power of the mind.

1. Not from external revelation,—whether communicated (a) through the Scriptures, or (b)through tradition; for, unless man had from another source a previous knowledge of the existence of a God from whom such a revelation might come, the revelation itself could have no authority for him.

(a) See Gillespie, Necessary Existence of God, 10; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:117; H. B. Smith, Faith and Philosophy, 18—“A revelation takes for granted that he to whom it is made has some knowledge of God, though it may enlarge and purify that knowledge.” We cannot prove God from the authority of the Scriptures, and then also prove the Scriptures from the authority of God. The very idea of Scripture as a revelation presupposes belief in a God who can make it. Newman Smyth, in New Englander, 1878:355—We cannot derive from a sun-dial our knowledge of the existence of a sun. The sun-dial presupposes the sun, and cannot be understood without previous knowledge of the sun. Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 2:103—“The voice of the divine ego does not first come to the consciousness of the individual ego from without; rather does every external revelation presuppose already this inner one; there must echo out from within man something kindred to the outer revelation, in order to its being recognized and accepted as divine.”

Fairbairn, Studies in Philos. of Relig. and Hist., 21, 22—“If man is dependent on an outer revelation for his idea of God, then he must have what Schelling happily termed ‘an original atheism of consciousness.’ Religion cannot, in that case, be rooted in the nature of man,—it must be implanted from without.” Schurman, Belief in God, 78—“A primitive revelation of God could only mean that God had endowed man with the capacity of apprehending his divine original. This capacity, like every other, is innate, and like every other, it realizes itself only in the presence of appropriate conditions.” Clarke, Christian Theology, 112—“Revelation cannot demonstrate God’s existence, for it must assume it; but it will manifest his existence and character to men, and will serve them as the chief source of certainty concerning him, for it will teach them what they could not know by other means.”

(b) Nor does our idea of God come primarily from tradition, for “tradition can perpetuate only what has already been originated” (Patton). If the knowledge thus handed down is the knowledge of a primitive revelation, then the argument just stated applies—that very revelation presupposed in those who first received it, and presupposes in those to whom it is handed down, some knowledge of a Being from whom such a revelation might come. If the knowledge thus handed down is simply knowledge of the results of the reasonings of the race, then the knowledge of God comes originally from reasoning—an explanation which we consider further on. On the traditive theory of religion, see Flint, Theism, 23, 338; Cocker, Christianity and Greek Philosophy, 86-96; Fairbairn, Studies in Philos. of Relig. and Hist., 14, 15; Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 453, and in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1876; Pfleiderer, Religionsphilos., 312-322.

Similar answers must be returned to many common explanations of man’s belief in God: “Primus in orbe deos fecit timor”; Imagination made religion; Priests invented religion; Religion is a matter of imitation and fashion. But we ask again: What caused the fear? Who made the imagination? What made priests possible? What made imitation and fashion natural? To say that man worships, merely because he sees other men worshiping, is as absurd as to say that a horse eats hay because he sees other horses eating it. There must be a hunger in the soul to be satisfied, or external things would never attract man to worship. Priests could never impose upon men so continuously, unless there was in human nature a universal belief in a God who might commission priests as his representatives. Imagination itself requires some basis of reality, and a larger basis as civilization advances. The fact that belief in God’s existence gets a wider hold upon the race with each added century, shows that, instead of fear having caused belief in God, the truth is that belief in God has caused fear; indeed, “the fear of Jehovah is the beginning of wisdom” (Ps. 111:10).

2. Not from experience,—whether this mean (a) the sense-perception and reflection of the individual (Locke), (b) the accumulated results of the sensations and associations of past generations of the race (Herbert Spencer), or (c) the actual contact of our sensitive nature with God, the supersensible reality, through the religious feeling (Newman Smyth).

The first form of this theory is inconsistent with the fact that the idea of God is not the idea of a sensible or material object, nor a combination of such ideas. Since the spiritual and infinite are direct opposites of the material and finite, no experience of the latter can account for our idea of the former.

With Locke (Essay on Hum. Understanding, 2:1:4), experience is the passive reception of ideas by sensation or by reflection. Locke’s “tabula rasa” theory mistakes the occasion of our primitive ideas for their cause. To his statement: “Nihil est in intellectu nisi quod ante fuerit in sensu,” Leibnitz replied: “Nisi intellectus ipse.” Consciousness is sometimes called the source of our knowledge of God. But consciousness, as simply an accompanying knowledge of ourselves and our states, is not properly the source of any other knowledge. The German Gottesbewusstsein = not “consciousness of God,” but “knowledge of God”; Bewusstsein here = not a “conknowing,” but a “beknowing”; see Porter, Human Intellect, 86; Cousin, True, Beautiful and Good, 48, 49.

Fraser, Locke, 143-147—Sensations are the bricks, and association the mortar, of the mental house. Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 47—“Develope language by allowing sounds to associate and evolve meaning for themselves? Yet this is the exact parallel of the philosophy which aims to build intelligence out of sensation....52—One who does not know how to read would look in vain for meaning in a printed page, and in vain would he seek to help his failure by using strong spectacles.” Yet even if the idea of God were a product of experience, we should not be warranted in rejecting it as irrational. See Brooks, Foundations of Zoölogy, 132—“There is no antagonism between those who attribute knowledge to experience and those who attribute it to our innate reason; between those who attribute the development of the germ to mechanical conditions and those who attribute it to the inherent potency of the germ itself; between those who hold that all nature was latent in the cosmic vapor and those who believe that everything in nature is immediately intended rather than predetermined.” All these may be methods of the immanent God.

The second form of the theory is open to the objection that the very first experience of the first man, equally with man’s latest experience, presupposes this intuition, as well as the other intuitions, and therefore cannot be the cause of it. Moreover, even though this theory of its origin were correct, it would still be impossible to think of the object of the intuition as not existing, and the intuition would still represent to us the highest measure of certitude at present attainable by man. If the evolution of ideas is toward truth instead of falsehood, it is the part of wisdom to act upon the hypothesis that our primitive belief is veracious.

Martineau, Study, 2:26—“Nature is as worthy of trust in her processes, as in her gifts.” Bowne, Examination of Spencer, 163, 164—“Are we to seek truth in the minds of pre-human apes, or in the blind stirrings of some primitive pulp? In that case we can indeed put away all our science, but we must put away the great doctrine of evolution along with it. The experience-philosophy cannot escape this alternative: either the positive deliverances of our mature consciousness must be accepted as they stand, or all truth must be declared impossible.” See also Harris, Philos. Basis Theism, 137-142.

Charles Darwin, in a letter written a year before his death, referring to his doubts as to the existence of God, asks: “Can we trust to the convictions of a monkey’s mind?” We may reply: “Can we trust the conclusions of one who was once a baby?” Bowne, Ethics, 3—“The genesis and emergence of an idea are one thing; its validity is quite another. The logical value of chemistry cannot be decided by reciting its beginnings in alchemy; and the logical value of astronomy is independent of the fact that it began in astrology.... 11—Even if man came from the ape, we need not tremble for the validity of the multiplication-table or of the Golden Rule. If we have moral insight, it is no matter how we got it; and if we have no such insight, there is no help in any psychological theory.... 159—We must not appeal to savages and babies to find what is natural to the human mind.... In the case of anything that is under the law of development we can find its true nature, not by going back to its crude beginnings, but by studying the finished outcome.” Dawson, Mod. Ideas of Evolution, 13—“If the idea of God be the phantom of an apelike brain, can we trust to reason or conscience in any other matter? May not science and philosophy themselves be similar phantasies, evolved by mere chance and unreason?” Even though man came from the ape, there is no explaining his ideas by the ideas of the ape: “A man ’s a man for a’ that.”

We must judge beginnings by endings, not endings by beginnings. It matters not how the development of the eye took place nor how imperfect was the first sense of sight, if the eye now gives us correct information of external objects. So it matters not how the intuitions of right and of God originated, if they now give us knowledge of objective truth. We must take for granted that evolution of ideas is not from sense to nonsense. G. H. Lewes, Study of Psychology, 122—“We can understand the amœba and the polyp only by a light reflected from the study of man.” Seth, Ethical Principles, 429—“The oak explains the acorn even more truly than the acorn explains the oak.” Sidgwick: “No one appeals from the artist’s sense of beauty to the child’s. Higher mathematics are no less true, because they can be apprehended only by trained intellect. No strange importance attaches to what was first felt or thought.” Robert Browning, Paracelsus: “Man, once descried, imprints forever His presence on all lifeless things.... A supplementary reflux of light Illustrates all the inferior grades, explains Each back step in the circle.” Man, with his higher ideas, shows the meaning and content of all that led up to him. He is the last round of the ascending ladder, and from this highest product and from his ideas we may infer what his Maker is.

Bixby, Crisis in Morals, 162, 245—“Evolution simply gave man such height that he could at last discern the stars of moral truth which had previously been below the horizon. This is very different from saying that moral truths are merely transmitted products of the experiences of utility.... The germ of the idea of God, as of the idea of right, must have been in man just so soon as he became man,—the brute’s gaining it turned him into man. Reason is not simply a register of physical phenomena and of experiences of pleasure and pain: it is creative also. It discerns the oneness of things and the supremacy of God.” Sir Charles Lyell: “The presumption is enormous that all our faculties, though liable to err, are true in the main and point to real objects. The religious faculty in man is one of the strongest of all. It existed in the earliest ages, and instead of wearing out before advancing civilization, it grows stronger and stronger, and is to-day more developed among the highest races than it ever was before. I think we may safely trust that it points to a great truth.” Fisher, Nat. and Meth. of Rev., 137, quotes Augustine: “Securus judicat orbis terrarum,” and tells us that the intellect is assumed to be an organ of knowledge, however the intellect may have been evolved. But if the intellect is worthy of trust, so is the moral nature. George A. Gordon, The Christ of To-day, 103—“To Herbert Spencer, human history is but an incident of natural history, and force is supreme. To Christianity nature is only the beginning, and man the consummation. Which gives the higher revelation of the life of the tree—the seed, or the fruit?”

The third form of the theory seems to make God a sensuous object, to reverse the proper order of knowing and feeling, to ignore the fact that in all feeling there is at least some knowledge of an object, and to forget that the validity of this very feeling can be maintained only by previously assuming the existence of a rational Deity.

Newman Smyth tells us that feeling comes first; the idea is secondary. Intuitive ideas are not denied, but they are declared to be direct reflections, in thought, of the feelings. They are the mind’s immediate perception of what it feels to exist. Direct knowledge of God by intuition is considered to be idealistic, reaching God by inference is regarded as rationalistic, in its tendency. See Smyth, The Religious Feeling; reviewed by Harris, in New Englander, Jan., 1878: reply by Smyth, in New Englander, May, 1878.

We grant that, even in the case of unregenerate men, great peril, great joy, great sin often turn the rational intuition of God into a presentative intuition. The presentative intuition, however, cannot be affirmed to be common to all men. It does not furnish the foundation or explanation of a universal capacity for religion. Without the rational intuition, the presentative would not be possible, since it is only the rational that enables man to receive and to interpret the presentative. The very trust that we put in feeling presupposes an intuitive belief in a true and good God. Tennyson said in 1869: “Yes, it is true that there are moments when the flesh is nothing to me; when I know and feel the flesh to be the vision; God and the spiritual is the real; it belongs to me more than the hand and the foot. You may tell me that my hand and my foot are only imaginary symbols of my existence,—I could believe you; but you never, never can convince me that the I is not an eternal Reality, and that the spiritual is not the real and true part of me.”

3. Not from reasoning,—because

(a) The actual rise of this knowledge in the great majority of minds is not the result of any conscious process of reasoning. On the other hand, upon occurrence of the proper conditions, it flashes upon the soul with the quickness and force of an immediate revelation.

(b) The strength of men’s faith in God’s existence is not proportioned to the strength of the reasoning faculty. On the other hand, men of greatest logical power are often inveterate sceptics, while men of unwavering faith are found among those who cannot even understand the arguments for God’s existence.

(c) There is more in this knowledge than reasoning could ever have furnished. Men do not limit their belief in God to the just conclusions of argument. The arguments for the divine existence, valuable as they are for purposes to be shown hereafter, are not sufficient by themselves to warrant our conviction that there exists an infinite and absolute Being. It will appear upon examination that the a priori argument is capable of proving only an abstract and ideal proposition, but can never conduct us to the existence of a real Being. It will appear that the a posteriori arguments, from merely finite existence, can never demonstrate the existence of the infinite. In the words of Sir Wm. Hamilton (Discussions, 23)—“A demonstration of the absolute from the relative is logically absurd, as in such a syllogism we must collect in the conclusion what is not distributed in the premises”—in short, from finite premises we cannot draw an infinite conclusion.

Whately, Logic, 290-292; Jevons, Lessons in Logic, 81; Thompson, Outline Laws of Thought, sections 82-92; Calderwood, Philos. of Infinite, 60-69, and Moral Philosophy, 238; Turnbull, in Bap. Quarterly, July, 1872:271; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 239; Dove, Logic of Christian Faith, 21. Sir Wm. Hamilton: “Departing from the particular, we admit that we cannot, in our highest generalizations, rise above the finite.” Dr. E. G. Robinson: “The human mind turns out larger grists than are ever put in at the hopper.” There is more in the idea of God than could have come out so small a knot-hole as human reasoning. A single word, a chance remark, or an attitude of prayer, suggests the idea to a child. Helen Keller told Phillips Brooks that she had always known that there was a God, but that she had not known his name. Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 119—“It is a foolish assumption that nothing can be certainly known unless it be reached as the result of a conscious syllogistic process, or that the more complicated and subtle this process is, the more sure is the conclusion. Inferential knowledge is always dependent upon the superior certainty of immediate knowledge.” George M. Duncan, in Memorial of Noah Porter, 246—“All deduction rests either on the previous process of induction, or on the intuitions of time and space which involve the Infinite and Absolute.”

(d) Neither do men arrive at the knowledge of God’s existence by inference; for inference is condensed syllogism, and, as a form of reasoning, is equally open to the objection just mentioned. We have seen, moreover, that all logical processes are based upon the assumption of God’s existence. Evidently that which is presupposed in all reasoning cannot itself be proved by reasoning.

By inference, we of course mean mediate inference, for in immediate inference (e. g., “All good rulers are just; therefore no unjust rulers are good”) there is no reasoning, and no progress in thought. Mediate inference is reasoning—is condensed syllogism; and what is so condensed may be expanded into regular logical form. Deductive inference: “A negro is a fellow-creature; therefore he who strikes a negro strikes a fellow-creature.” Inductive inference: “The first finger is before the second; therefore it is before the third.” On inference, see Martineau, Essays, 1:105-108; Porter, Human Intellect, 444-448; Jevons, Principles of Science, 1:14, 136-139, 168, 262.

Flint, in his Theism, 77, and Herbert, in his Mod. Realism Examined, would reach the knowledge of God’s existence by inference. The latter says God is not demonstrable, but his existence is inferred, like the existence of our fellow men. But we reply that in this last case we infer only the finite from the finite, while the difficulty in the case of God is in inferring the infinite from the finite. This very process of reasoning, moreover, presupposes the existence of God as the absolute Reason, in the way already indicated.

Substantially the same error is committed by H. B. Smith, Introd. to Chr. Theol., 84-133, and by Diman, Theistic Argument, 316, 364, both of whom grant an intuitive element, but use it only to eke out the insufficiency of reasoning. They consider that the intuition gives us only an abstract idea, which contains in itself no voucher for the existence of an actual being corresponding to the idea, and that we reach real being only by inference from the facts of our own spiritual natures and of the outward world. But we reply, in the words of McCosh, that “the intuitions are primarily directed to individual objects.” We know, not the infinite in the abstract, but infinite space and time, and the infinite God. See McCosh, Intuitions, 26, 199, who, however, holds the view here combated.

Schurman, Belief in God, 43—“I am unable to assign to our belief in God a higher certainty than that possessed by the working hypotheses of science.... 57—The nearest approach made by science to our hypothesis of the existence of God lies in the assertion of the universality of law ... based on the conviction of the unity and systematic connection of all reality.... 64—This unity can be found only in self-conscious spirit.” The fault of this reasoning is that it gives us nothing necessary or absolute. Instances of working hypotheses are the nebular hypothesis in astronomy, the law of gravitation, the atomic theory in chemistry, the principle of evolution. No one of these is logically independent or prior. Each of them is provisional, and each may be superseded by new discovery. Not so with the idea of God. This idea is presupposed by all the others, as the condition of every mental process and the guarantee of its validity.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

IV. Contents of this Intuition

1. In this fundamental knowledge that God is, it is necessarily implied that to some extent men know intuitively what God is, namely, (a) a Reason in which their mental processes are grounded; (b) a Power above them upon which they are dependent; (c) a Perfection which imposes law upon their moral natures; (d) a Personality which they may recognize in prayer and worship.

In maintaining that we have a rational intuition of God, we by no means imply that a presentative intuition of God is impossible. Such a presentative intuition was perhaps characteristic of unfallen man; it does belong at times to the Christian; it will be the blessing of heaven (Mat. 5:8—“the pure in heart ... shall see God”; Rev. 22:4—“they shall see his face”). Men’s experiences of face-to-face apprehension of God, in danger and guilt, give some reason to believe that a presentative knowledge of God is the normal condition of humanity. But, as this presentative intuition of God is not in our present state universal, we here claim only that all men have a rational intuition of God.

It is to be remembered, however, that the loss of love to God has greatly obscured even this rational intuition, so that the revelation of nature and the Scriptures is needed to awaken, confirm and enlarge it, and the special work of the Spirit of Christ to make it the knowledge of friendship and communion. Thus from knowing about God, we come to know God (John 17:3—“This is life eternal, that they should know thee”; 2 Tim. 1:12—“I know him whom I have believed”).

Plato said, for substance, that there can be no ὅτι οἶδεν without something of the ἁ οἶδεν. Harris, Philosophical Basis of Theism, 208—“By rational intuition man knows that absolute Being exists; his knowledge of what it is, is progressive with his progressive knowledge of man and of nature.” Hutton, Essays: “A haunting presence besets man behind and before. He cannot evade it. It gives new meanings to his thoughts, new terror to his sins. It becomes intolerable. He is moved to set up some idol, carved out of his own nature, that will take its place—a non-moral God who will not disturb his dream of rest. It is a righteous Life and Will, and not the mere idea of righteousness that stirs men so.” Porter, Hum. Int., 661—“The Absolute is a thinking Agent.” The intuition does not grow in certainty; what grows is the mind’s quickness in applying it and power of expressing it. The intuition is not complex; what is complex is the Being intuitively cognized. See Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 232; Lowndes, Philos. of Primary Beliefs, 108-112; Luthardt, Fund. Truths, 157—Latent faculty of speech is called forth by speech of others; the choked-up well flows again when debris is cleared away. Bowen, in Bib. Sac., 33:740-754; Bowne, Theism, 79.

Knowledge of a person is turned into personal knowledge by actual communication or revelation. First, comes the intuitive knowledge of God possessed by all men—the assumption that there exists a Reason, Power, Perfection, Personality, that makes correct thinking and acting possible. Secondly, comes the knowledge of God’s being and attributes which nature and Scripture furnish. Thirdly, comes the personal and presentative knowledge derived from actual reconciliation and intercourse with God, through Christ and the Holy Spirit. Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 208—“Christian experience verifies the claims of doctrine by experiment,—so transforming probable knowledge into real knowledge.” Biedermann, quoted by Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 18—“God reveals himself to the human spirit, 1. as its infinite Ground, in the reason; 2. as its infinite Norm, in the conscience; 3. as its infinite Strength, in elevation to religious truth, blessedness, and freedom.”

Shall I object to this Christian experience, because only comparatively few have it, and I am not among the number? Because I have not seen the moons of Jupiter, shall I doubt the testimony of the astronomer to their existence? Christian experience, like the sight of the moons of Jupiter, is attainable by all. Clarke, Christian Theology, 113—“One who will have full proof of the good God’s reality must put it to the experimental test. He must take the good God for real, and receive the confirmation that will follow. When faith reaches out after God, it finds him.... They who have found him will be the sanest and truest of their kind, and their convictions will be among the safest convictions of man.... Those who live in fellowship with the good God will grow in goodness, and will give practical evidence of his existence aside from their oral testimony.”

2. The Scriptures, therefore, do not attempt to prove the existence of God, but, on the other hand, both assume and declare that the knowledge that God is, is universal (Rom. 1:19-21, 28, 32; 2:15). God has inlaid the evidence of this fundamental truth in the very nature of man, so that nowhere is he without a witness. The preacher may confidently follow the example of Scripture by assuming it. But he must also explicitly declare it, as the Scripture does. “For the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen” (καθορᾶται—spiritually viewed); the organ given for this purpose is the νοῦς (νοούμενα); but then—and this forms the transition to our next division of the subject—they are “perceived through the things that are made” (τοῖς ποιήμασιν, Rom. 1:20).

On Rom. 1:19-21, see Weiss, Bib. Theol. des N. T., 251, note; also commentaries of Meyer, Alford, Tholuck, and Wordsworth; τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ θεοῦ = not “that which may be known” (Rev. Vers.) but “that which is known” of God; νοούμενα καθορᾶται = are clearly seen in that they are perceived by the reason—νοούμενα expresses the manner of the καθορᾶται (Meyer); compare John 1:9; Acts 17:27; Rom. 1:28; 2:15. On 1 Cor. 15:34, see Calderwood, Philos. of Inf., 466—ἀγνωσίαν Θεοῦ τινὲς ἔχουσι = do not possess the specially exalted knowledge of God which belongs to believers in Christ (cf. 1 Jo. 4:7—“every one that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth God”). On Eph. 2:12, see Pope, Theology, 1:240—ἄθεοι ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ is opposed to being in Christ, and signifies rather forsaken of God, than denying him or entirely ignorant of him. On Scripture passages, see Schmid, Bib. Theol. des N. T., 486; Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:62.

E. G. Robinson: “The first statement of the Bible is, not that there is a God, but that ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’ (Gen. 1:1). The belief in God never was and never can be the result of logical argument, else the Bible would give us proofs.” Many texts relied upon as proofs of God’s existence are simply explications of the idea of God, as for example: Ps. 94:9, 10—“He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? He that formed the eye, shall he not see? He that chastiseth the nations, shall not he correct, even he that teacheth man knowledge?” Plato says that God holds the soul by its roots,—he therefore does not need to demonstrate to the soul the fact of his existence. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 308, says well that Scripture and preaching only interpret what is already in the heart which it addresses: “Flinging a warm breath on the inward oracles hid in invisible ink, it renders them articulate and dazzling as the handwriting on the wall. The divine Seer does not convey to you his revelation, but qualifies you to receive your own. This mutual relation is possible only through the common presence of God in the conscience of mankind.” Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 1:195-220—“The earth and sky make the same sensible impressions on the organs of a brute that they do upon those of a man; but the brute never discerns the ‘invisible things’ of God, his ‘eternal power and godhood’ (Rom. 1:20).”

Our subconscious activity, so far as it is normal, is under the guidance of the immanent Reason. Sensation, before it results in thought, has in it logical elements which are furnished by mind—not ours, but that of the Infinite One. Christ, the Revealer of God, reveals God in every man’s mental life, and the Holy Spirit may be the principle of self-consciousness in man as in God. Harris, God the Creator, tells us that “man finds the Reason that is eternal and universal revealing itself in the exercise of his own reason.” Savage, Life after Death, 268—“How do you know that your subliminal consciousness does not tap Omniscience, and get at the facts of the universe?” Savage negatives this suggestion, however, and wrongly favors the spirit-theory. For his own experience, see pages 295-329 of his book.

C. M. Barrows, in Proceedings of Soc. for Psychical Research, vol. 12, part 30, pages 34-36—“There is a subliminal agent. What if this is simply one intelligent Actor, filling the universe with his presence, as the ether fills space; the common Inspirer of all mankind, a skilled Musician, presiding over many pipes and keys, and playing through each what music he will? The subliminal self is a universal fountain of energy, and each man is an outlet of the stream. Each man’s personal self is contained in it, and thus each man is made one with every other man. In that deep Force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all psychical and bodily effects find their common origin.” This statement needs to be qualified by the assertion of man’s ethical nature and distinct personality; see section of this work on Ethical Monism, in chapter III. But there is truth here like that which Coleridge sought to express in his Æolian Harp: “And what if all of animated Nature Be but organic harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps, Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the soul of each, and God of all?” See F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality.

Dorner, System of Theology, 1:75—“The consciousness of God is the true fastness of our self-consciousness.... Since it is only in the God-conscious man that the innermost personality comes to light, in like manner, by means of the interweaving of that consciousness of God and of the world, the world is viewed in God (‘sub specie eternitatis’), and the certainty of the world first obtains its absolute security for the spirit.” Royce, Spirit of Mod. Philosophy, synopsis in N. Y. Nation: “The one indubitable fact is the existence of an infinite self, a Logos or World-mind (345). That it exists is clear, I. Because idealism shows that real things are nothing more nor less than ideas, or ‘possibilities of experience’; but a mere ‘possibility’, as such, is nothing, and a world of ‘possible’ experiences, in so far as it is real, must be a world of actual experience to some self (367). If then there be a real world, it has all the while existed as ideal and mental, even before it became known to the particular mind with which we conceive it as coming into connection (368). II. But there is such a real world; for, when I think of an object, when I mean it, I do not merely have in mind an idea resembling it, for I aim at the object, I pick it out, I already in some measure possess it. The object is then already present in essence to my hidden self (370). As truth consists in knowledge of the conformity of a cognition to its object, that alone can know a truth which includes within itself both idea and object. This inclusive Knower is the Infinite Self (374). With this I am in essence identical (371); it is my larger self (372); and this larger self alone is (379). It includes all reality, and we know other finite minds, because we are one with them in its unity” (409).

The experience of George John Romanes is instructive. For years he could recognize no personal Intelligence controlling the universe. He made four mistakes: 1. He forgot that only love can see, that God is not disclosed to the mere intellect, but only to the whole man, to the integral mind, to what the Scripture calls “the eyes of your heart” (Eph. 1:18). Experience of life taught him at last the weakness of mere reasoning, and led him to depend more upon the affections and intuitions. Then, as one might say, he gave the X-rays of Christianity a chance to photograph God upon his soul. 2. He began at the wrong end, with matter rather than with mind, with cause and effect rather than with right and wrong, and so got involved in the mechanical order and tried to interpret the moral realm by it. The result was that instead of recognizing freedom, responsibility, sin, guilt, he threw them out as pretenders. But study of conscience and will set him right. He learned to take what be found instead of trying to turn it into something else, and so came to interpret nature by spirit, instead of interpreting spirit by nature. 3. He took the Cosmos by bits, instead of regarding it as a whole. His early thinking insisted on finding design in each particular part, or nowhere. But his more mature thought recognized wisdom and reason in the ordered whole. As he realized that this is a universe, he could not get rid of the idea of an organizing Mind. He came to see that the Universe, as a thought, implies a Thinker. 4. He fancied that nature excludes God, instead of being only the method of God’s working. When he learned how a thing was done, he at first concluded that God had not done it. His later thought recognized that God and nature are not mutually exclusive. So he came to find no difficulty even in miracles and inspiration; for the God who is in man and of whose mind and will nature is only the expression, can reveal himself, if need be, in special ways. So George John Romanes came back to prayer, to Christ, to the church.

On the general subject of intuition as connected with our idea of God, see Ladd, in Bib. Sac., 1877:1-36, 611-616; 1878:619; Fisher, on Final Cause and Intuition, in Journ. Christ. Philos., Jan. 1883:113-134; Patton, on Genesis of Idea of God, in Jour. Christ. Philos., Apl. 1883:283-307; McCosh, Christianity and Positivism, 124-140; Mansel, in Encyc. Brit., 8th ed., vol. 14:604 and 615; Robert Hall, sermon on Atheism; Hutton, on Atheism, in Essays, 1:3-37; Shairp, in Princeton Rev., March, 1881:264.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

II. Corroborative Evidences Of God’s Existence

Although the knowledge of God’s existence is intuitive, it may be explicated and confirmed by arguments drawn from the actual universe and from the abstract ideas of the human mind.

Remark 1. These arguments are probable, not demonstrative. For this reason they supplement each other, and constitute a series of evidences which is cumulative in its nature. Though, taken singly, none of them can be considered absolutely decisive, they together furnish a corroboration of our primitive conviction of God’s existence, which is of great practical value, and is in itself sufficient to bind the moral action of men.

Butler, Analogy, Introd., Bohn’s ed., 72—Probable evidence admits of degrees, from the highest moral certainty to the lowest presumption. Yet probability is the guide of life. In matters of morals and religion, we are not to expect mathematical or demonstrative, but only probable, evidence, and the slightest preponderance of such evidence may be sufficient to bind our moral action. The truth of our religion, like the truth of common matters, is to be judged by the whole evidence taken together; for probable proofs, by being added, not only increase the evidence, but multiply it. Dove, Logic of Christ. Faith, 24—Value of the arguments taken together is much greater than that of any single one. Illustrated from water, air and food, together but not separately, supporting life; value of £1000 note, not in paper, stamp, writing, signature, taken separately. A whole bundle of rods cannot be broken, though each rod in the bundle may be broken separately. The strength of the bundle is the strength of the whole. Lord Bacon, Essay on Atheism: “A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion. For while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them and go no further, but, when it beholdeth the chain of them confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity.” Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 221-223—“The proof of a God and of a spiritual world which is to satisfy us must consist in a number of different but converging lines of proof.”

In a case where only circumstantial evidence is attainable, many lines of proof sometimes converge, and though no one of the lines reaches the mark, the conclusion to which they all point becomes the only rational one. To doubt that there is a London, or that there was a Napoleon, would indicate insanity; yet London and Napoleon are proved by only probable evidence. There is no constraining efficacy in the arguments for God’s existence; but the same can be said of all reasoning that is not demonstrative. Another interpretation of the facts is possible, but no other conclusion is so satisfactory, as that God is; see Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 129. Prof. Rogers: “If in practical affairs we were to hesitate to act until we had absolute and demonstrative certainty, we should never begin to move at all.” For this reason an old Indian official advised a young Indian judge “always to give his verdict, but always to avoid giving the grounds of it.”

Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 11-14—“Instead of doubting everything that can be doubted, let us rather doubt nothing until we are compelled to doubt.... In society we get on better by assuming that men are truthful, and by doubting only for special reasons, than we should if we assumed that all men are liars, and believed them only when compelled. So in all our investigations we make more progress if we assume the truthfulness of the universe and of our own nature than we should if we doubted both.... The first method seems the more rigorous, but it can be applied only to mathematics, which is a purely subjective science. When we come to deal with reality, the method brings thought to a standstill.... The law the logician lays down is this: Nothing may be believed which is not proved. The law the mind actually follows is this: Whatever the mind demands for the satisfaction of its subjective interests and tendencies may be assumed as real, in default of positive disproof.”

Remark 2. A consideration of these arguments may also serve to explicate the contents of an intuition which has remained obscure and only half conscious for lack of reflection. The arguments, indeed, are the efforts of the mind that already has a conviction of God’s existence to give to itself a formal account of its belief. An exact estimate of their logical value and of their relation to the intuition which they seek to express in syllogistic form, is essential to any proper refutation of the prevalent atheistic and pantheistic reasoning.

Diman, Theistic Argument, 363—“Nor have I claimed that the existence, even, of this Being can be demonstrated as we demonstrate the abstract truths of science. I have only claimed that the universe, as a great fact, demands a rational explanation, and that the most rational explanation that can possibly be given is that furnished in the conception of such a Being. In this conclusion reason rests, and refuses to rest in any other.” Rückert: “Wer Gott nicht fühlt in sich und allen Lebenskreisen, Dem werdet ihr nicht ihn beweisen mit Beweisen.” Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 307—“Theology depends on noetic and empirical science to give the occasion on which the idea of the Absolute Being arises, and to give content to the idea.” Andrew Fuller, Part of Syst. of Divin., 4:283, questions “whether argumentation in favor of the existence of God has not made more sceptics than believers.” So far as this is true, it is due to an overstatement of the arguments and an exaggerated notion of what is to be expected from them. See Nitzsch, Christian Doctrine, translation, 140; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:119, 120; Fisher, Essays on Supernatural Origin of Christianity, 572, 573; Van Oosterzee, 238, 241.

“Evidences of Christianity?” said Coleridge, “I am weary of the word.” The more Christianity was proved, the less it was believed. The revival of religion under Whitefield and Wesley did what all the apologists of the eighteenth century could not do,—it quickened men’s intuitions into life, and made them practically recognize God. Martineau, Types, 2:231—Men can “bow the knee to the passing Zeitgeist, while turning the back to the consensus of all the ages”; Seat of Authority, 312—“Our reasonings lead to explicit Theism because they start from implicit Theism.” Illingworth, Div. and Hum. Personality, 81—“The proofs are ... attempts to account for and explain and justify something that already exists; to decompose a highly complex though immediate judgment into its constituent elements, none of which when isolated can have the completeness or the cogency of the original conviction taken as a whole.”

Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 31, 32—“Demonstration is only a makeshift for helping ignorance to insight.... When we come to an argument in which the whole nature is addressed, the argument must seem weak or strong, according as the nature is feebly, or fully, developed. The moral argument for theism cannot seem strong to one without a conscience. The argument from cognitive interests will be empty when there is no cognitive interest. Little souls find very little that calls for explanation or that excites surprise, and they are satisfied with a correspondingly small view of life and existence. In such a case we cannot hope for universal agreement. We can only proclaim the faith that is in us, in hope that this proclamation may not be without some response in other minds and hearts.... We have only probable evidence for the uniformity of nature or for the affection of friends. We cannot logically prove either. The deepest convictions are not the certainties of logic, but the certainties of life.”

Remark 3. The arguments for the divine existence may be reduced to four, namely: I. The Cosmological; II. The Teleological; III. The Anthropological; and IV. The Ontological. We shall examine these in order, seeking first to determine the precise conclusions to which they respectively lead, and then to ascertain in what manner the four may be combined.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

I. The Cosmological Argument, or Argument from Change in Nature

This is not properly an argument from effect to cause; for the proposition that every effect must have a cause is simply identical, and means only that every caused event must have a cause. It is rather an argument from begun existence to a sufficient cause of that beginning, and may be accurately stated as follows:

Everything begun, whether substance or phenomenon, owes its existence to some producing cause. The universe, at least so far as its present form is concerned, is a thing begun, and owes its existence to a cause which is equal to its production. This cause must be indefinitely great.

It is to be noticed that this argument moves wholly in the realm of nature. The argument from man’s constitution and beginning upon the planet is treated under another head (see Anthropological Argument). That the present form of the universe is not eternal in the past, but has begun to be, not only personal observation but the testimony of geology assures us. For statements of the argument, see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Bohn’s transl.), 370; Gillespie, Necessary Existence of God, 8:34-44; Bib. Sac., 1849:613; 1850:613; Porter, Hum. Intellect, 570; Herbert Spencer, First Principles, 93. It has often been claimed, as by Locke, Clarke, and Robert Hall, that this argument is sufficient to conduct the mind to an Eternal and Infinite First Cause. We proceed therefore to mention

1. The defects of the Cosmological Argument.

A. It is impossible to show that the universe, so far as its substance is concerned, has had a beginning. The law of causality declares, not that everything has a cause—for then God himself must have a cause—but rather that everything begun has a cause, or in other words, that every event or change has a cause.

Hume, Philos. Works, 2:411 sq., urges with reason that we never saw a world made. Many philosophers in Christian lands, as Martineau, Essays, 1:206, and the prevailing opinions of ante-Christian times, have held matter to be eternal. Bowne, Metaphysics, 107—“For being itself, the reflective reason never asks a cause, unless the being show signs of dependence. It is change that first gives rise to the demand for cause.” Martineau, Types, 1:291—“It is not existence, as such, that demands a cause, but the coming into existence of what did not exist before. The intellectual law of causality is a law for phenomena, and not for entity.” See also McCosh, Intuitions, 225-241; Calderwood, Philos. of Infinite, 61. Per contra, see Murphy, Scient. Bases of Faith, 49, 195, and Habit and Intelligence, 1:55-67; Knight, Lect. on Metaphysics, lect. ii, p. 19.

B. Granting that the universe, so far as its phenomena are concerned, has had a cause, it is impossible to show that any other cause is required than a cause within itself, such as the pantheist supposes.

Flint, Theism, 65—“The cosmological argument alone proves only force, and no mere force is God. Intelligence must go with power to make a Being that can be called God.” Diman, Theistic Argument: “The cosmological argument alone cannot decide whether the force that causes change is permanent self-existent mind, or permanent self-existent matter.” Only intelligence gives the basis for an answer. Only mind in the universe enables us to infer mind in the maker. But the argument from intelligence is not the Cosmological, but the Teleological, and to this last belong all proofs of Deity from order and combination in nature.

Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 201-296—Science has to do with those changes which one portion of the visible universe causes in another portion. Philosophy and theology deal with the Infinite Cause which brings into existence and sustains the entire series of finite causes. Do we ask the cause of the stars? Science says: Fire-mist, or an infinite regress of causes. Theology says: Granted; but this infinite regress demands for its explanation the belief in God. We must believe both in God, and in an endless series of finite causes. God is the cause of all causes, the soul of all souls: “Centre and soul of every sphere, Yet to each loving heart how near!” We do not need, as mere matter of science, to think of any beginning.

C. Granting that the universe most have had a cause outside of itself, it is impossible to show that this cause has not itself been caused, i. e., consists of an infinite series of dependent causes. The principle of causality does not require that everything begun should be traced back to an uncaused cause; it demands that we should assign a cause, but not that we should assign a first cause.

So with the whole series of causes. The materialist is bound to find a cause for this series, only when the series is shown to have had a beginning. But the very hypothesis of an infinite series of causes excludes the idea of such a beginning. An infinite chain has no topmost link (versus Robert Hall); an uncaused and eternal succession does not need a cause (versus Clarke and Locke). See Whately, Logic, 270; New Englander, Jan. 1874:75; Alexander, Moral Science, 221; Pfleiderer, Die Religion, 1:160-164; Calderwood, Moral Philos., 225; Herbert Spencer, First Principles, 37—criticized by Bowne, Review of H. Spencer, 36. Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:128, says that the causal principle is not satisfied till by regress we come to a cause which is not itself an effect—to one who is causa sui; Aids to Study of German Theology, 15-17—Even if the universe be eternal, its contingent and relative nature requires us to postulate an eternal Creator; Diman, Theistic Argument, 86—“While the law of causation does not lead logically up to the conclusion of a first cause, it compels us to affirm it.” We reply that it is not the law of causation which compels us to affirm it, for this certainly “does not lead logically up to the conclusion.” If we infer an uncaused cause, we do it, not by logical process, but by virtue of the intuitive belief within us. So substantially Secretan, and Whewell, in Indications of a Creator, and in Hist. of Scientific Ideas, 2:321, 322—“The mind takes refuge, in the assumption of a First Cause, from an employment inconsistent with its own nature”; “we necessarily infer a First Cause, although the palætiological sciences only point toward it, but do not lead us to it.”

D. Granting that the cause of the universe has not itself been caused, it is impossible to show that this cause is not finite, like the universe itself. The causal principle requires a cause no greater than just sufficient to account for the effect.

We cannot therefore infer an infinite cause, unless the universe is infinite—which cannot be proved, but can only be assumed—and this is assuming an infinite in order to prove an infinite. All we know of the universe is finite. An infinite universe implies infinite number. But no number can be infinite, for to any number, however great, a unit can be added, which shows that it was not infinite before. Here again we see that the most approved forms of the Cosmological Argument are obliged to avail themselves of the intuition of the infinite, to supplement the logical process. Versus Martineau, Study, 1:416—“Though we cannot directly infer the infinitude of God from a limited creation, indirectly we may exclude every other position by resort to its unlimited scene of existence (space).” But this would equally warrant our belief in the infinitude of our fellow men. Or, it is the argument of Clarke and Gillespie (see Ontological Argument below). Schiller, Die Grösse der Welt, seems to hold to a boundless universe. He represents a tired spirit as seeking the last limit of creation. A second pilgrim meets him from the spaces beyond with the words: “Steh! du segelst umsonst,—vor dir Unendlichkeit”—“Hold! thou journeyest in vain,—before thee is only Infinity.” On the law of parsimony, see Sir Wm. Hamilton, Discussions, 628.

2. The value of the Cosmological Argument, then, is simply this,—it proves the existence of some cause of the universe indefinitely great. When we go beyond this and ask whether this cause is a cause of being, or merely a cause of change, to the universe; whether it is a cause apart from the universe, or one with it; whether it is an eternal cause, or a cause dependent upon some other cause; whether it is intelligent or unintelligent, infinite or finite, one or many,—this argument cannot assure us.

On the whole argument, see Flint, Theism, 93-130; Mozley, Essays, Hist. and Theol., 2:414-444; Hedge, Ways of the Spirit, 148-154; Studien und Kritiken, 1876:9-31.

II. The Teleological Argument, or Argument from Order and Useful Collocation in Nature.

This is not properly an argument from design to a designer; for that design implies a designer is simply an identical proposition. It may be more correctly stated as follows: Order and useful collocation pervading a system respectively imply intelligence and purpose as the cause of that order and collocation. Since order and useful collocation pervade the universe, there must exist an intelligence adequate to the production of this order, and a will adequate to direct this collocation to useful ends.

Etymologically, “teleological argument” = argument to ends or final causes, that is, “causes which, beginning as a thought, work themselves out into a fact as an end or result” (Porter, Hum. Intellect, 592-618);—health, for example, is the final cause of exercise, while exercise is the efficient cause of health. This definition of the argument would be broad enough to cover the proof of a designing intelligence drawn from the constitution of man. This last, however, is treated as a part of the Anthropological Argument, which follows this, and the Teleological Argument covers only the proof of a designing intelligence drawn from nature. Hence Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Bohn’s trans.), 381, calls it the physico-theological argument. On methods of stating the argument, see Bib. Sac., Oct. 1867:625. See also Hedge, Ways of the Spirit, 155-185; Mozley, Essays Hist. and Theol., 2:365-413.

Hicks, in his Critique of Design-Arguments, 347-389, makes two arguments instead of one: (1) the argument from order to intelligence, to which he gives the name Eutaxiological; (2) the argument from adaptation to purpose, to which he would restrict the name Teleological. He holds that teleology proper cannot prove intelligence, because in speaking of “ends” at all, it must assume the very intelligence which it seeks to prove; that it actually does prove simply the intentional exercise of an intelligence whose existence has been previously established. “Circumstances, forces or agencies converging to a definite rational result imply volition—imply that this result is intended—is an end. This is the major premise of this new teleology.” He objects to the term “final cause.” The end is not a cause at all—it is a motive. The characteristic element of cause is power to produce an effect. Ends have no such power. The will may choose them or set them aside. As already assuming intelligence, ends cannot prove intelligence.

With this in the main we agree, and count it a valuable help to the statement and understanding of the argument. In the very observation of order, however, as well as in arguing from it, we are obliged to assume the same all-arranging intelligence. We see no objection therefore to making Eutaxiology the first part of the Teleological Argument, as we do above. See review of Hicks, in Meth. Quar. Rev., July, 1883:569-576. We proceed however to certain

1. Further explanations.

A. The major premise expresses a primitive conviction. It is not invalidated by the objections: (a) that order and useful collocation may exist without being purposed—for we are compelled by our very mental constitution to deny this in all cases where the order and collocation pervade a system: (b) that order and useful collocation may result from the mere operation of physical forces and laws—for these very forces and laws imply, instead of excluding, an originating and superintending intelligence and will.

Janet, in his work on Final Causes, 8, denies that finality is a primitive conviction, like causality, and calls it the result of an induction. He therefore proceeds from (1) marks of order and useful collocation to (2) finality in nature, and then to (3) an intelligent cause of this finality or “pre-conformity to future event.” So Diman, Theistic Argument, 105, claims simply that, as change requires cause, so orderly change requires intelligent cause. We have shown, however, that induction and argument of every kind presupposes intuitive belief in final cause. Nature does not give us final cause; but no more does she give us efficient cause. Mind gives us both, and gives them as clearly upon one experience as after a thousand. Ladd: “Things have mind in them: else they could not be minded by us.” The Duke of Argyll told Darwin that it seemed to him wholly impossible to ascribe the adjustments of nature to any other agency than that of mind. “Well,” said Darwin, “that impression has often come upon me with overpowering force. But then, at other times, it all seems—;” and then he passed his hands over his eyes, as if to indicate the passing of a vision out of sight. Darwinism is not a refutation of ends in nature, but only of a particular theory with regard to the way in which ends are realized in the organic world. Darwin would begin with an infinitesimal germ, and make all the subsequent development unteleological; see Schurman, Belief in God, 193.

(a) Illustration of unpurposed order in the single throwing of “double sixes,”—constant throwing of double sixes indicates design. So arrangement of detritus at mouth of river, and warming pans sent to the West Indies,—useful but not purposed. Momerie, Christianity and Evolution, 72—“It is only within narrow limits that seemingly purposeful arrangements are produced by chance. And therefore, as the signs of purpose increase, the presumption in favor of their accidental origin diminishes.” Elder, Ideas from Nature, 81, 82—“The uniformity of a boy’s marbles shows them to be products of design. A single one might be accidental, but a dozen cannot be. So atomic uniformity indicates manufacture.” Illustrations of purposed order, in Beattie’s garden, Tillotson’s blind men, Kepler’s salad. Dr. Carpenter: “The atheist is like a man examining the machinery of a great mill, who, finding that the whole is moved by a shaft proceeding from a brick wall, infers that the shaft is a sufficient explanation of what he sees, and that there is no moving power behind it.” Lord Kelvin: “The atheistic idea is nonsensical.” J. G. Paton, Life, 2:191—The sinking of a well on the island of Aniwa convinces the cannibal chief Namakei that Jehovah God exists, the invisible One. See Chauncey Wright, in N. Y. Nation, Jan. 15, 1874; Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 208.

(b) Bowne, Review of Herbert Spencer, 231-247—“Law is method, not cause. A man cannot offer the very fact to be explained, as its sufficient explanation.” Martineau, Essays, 1:144—“Patterned damask, made not by the weaver, but by the loom?” Dr. Stevenson: “House requires no architect, because it is built by stone-masons and carpenters?” Joseph Cook: “Natural law without God behind it is no more than a glove without a hand in it, and all that is done by the gloved hand of God in nature is done by the hand and not by the glove. Evolution is a process, not a power; a method of operation, not an operator. A book is not written by the laws of spelling and grammar, but according to those laws. So the book of the universe is not written by the laws of heat, electricity, gravitation, evolution, but according to those laws.” G. F. Wright, Ant. and Orig. of Hum. Race, lecture IX—“It is impossible for evolution to furnish evidence which shall drive design out of nature. It can only drive it back to an earlier point of entrance, thereby increasing our admiration for the power of the Creator to accomplish ulterior designs by unlikely means.”

Evolution is only the method of God. It has to do with the how, not with the why, of phenomena, and therefore is not inconsistent with design, but rather is a new and higher illustration of design. Henry Ward Beecher: “Design by wholesale is greater than design by retail.” Frances Power Cobbe: “It is a singular fact that, whenever we find out how a thing is done, our first conclusion seems to be that God did not do it.” Why should we say: “The more law, the less God?” The theist refers the phenomena to a cause that knows itself and what it is doing; the atheist refers them to a power which knows nothing of itself and what it is doing (Bowne). George John Romanes said that, if God be immanent, then all natural causation must appear to be mechanical, and it is no argument against the divine origin of a thing to prove it due to natural causation: “Causes in nature do not obviate the necessity of a cause in nature.” Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 47—Evolution shows that the direction of affairs is under control of something like our own intelligence: “Evolution spells Purpose.” Clarke, Christ. Theology, 105—“The modern doctrine of evolution has been awake to the existence of innumerable ends within the universe, but not to the one great end for the universe itself.” Huxley, Critiques and Addresses, 274, 275, 307—“The teleological and mechanical views of the universe are not mutually exclusive.” Sir William Hamilton, Metaphysics: “Intelligence stands first in the order of existence. Efficient causes are preceded by final causes.” See also Thornton, Old Fashioned Ethics, 199-265; Archbp. Temple, Bampton Lect., 1884:99-123; Owen, Anat. of Vertebrates, 3:796; Peirce, Ideality in the Physical Sciences, 1-35; Newman Smyth, Through Science to Faith, 96; Fisher, Nat. and Meth. of Rev., 135.

B. The minor premise expresses a working-principle of all science, namely, that all things have their uses, that order pervades the universe, and that the methods of nature are rational methods. Evidences of this appear in the correlation of the chemical elements to each other; in the fitness of the inanimate world to be the basis and support of life; in the typical forms and unity of plan apparent in the organic creation; in the existence and coöperation of natural laws; in cosmical order and compensations.

This minor premise is not invalidated by the objections: (a) That we frequently misunderstand the end actually subserved by natural events and objects; for the principle is, not that we necessarily know the actual end, but that we necessarily believe that there is some end, in every case of systematic order and collocation. (b) That the order of the universe is manifestly imperfect; for this, if granted, would argue, not absence of contrivance, but some special reason for imperfection, either in the limitations of the contriving intelligence itself, or in the nature of the end sought (as, for example, correspondence with the moral state and probation of sinners).

The evidences of order and useful collocation are found both in the indefinitely small and the indefinitely great. The molecules are manufactured articles; and the compensations of the solar system which provide that a secular flattening of the earth’s orbit shall be made up for by a secular rounding of that same orbit, alike show an intelligence far transcending our own; see Cooke, Religion and Chemistry, and Credentials of Science, 23—“Beauty is the harmony of relations which perfect fitness produces; law is the prevailing principle which underlies that harmony. Hence both beauty and law imply design. From energy, fitness, beauty, order, sacrifice, we argue might, skill, perfection, law, and love in a Supreme Intelligence. Christianity implies design, and is the completion of the design argument.” Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:168—“A good definition of beauty is immanent purposiveness, the teleological ideal background of reality, the shining of the Idea through phenomena.”

Bowne, Philos. Theism, 85—“Design is never causal. It is only ideal, and it demands an efficient cause for its realization. If ice is not to sink, and to freeze out life, there must be some molecular structure which shall make its bulk greater than that of an equal weight of water.” Jackson, Theodore Parker, 355—“Rudimentary organs are like the silent letters in many words,—both are witnesses to a past history; and there is intelligence in their preservation.” Diman, Theistic Argument: “Not only do we observe in the world the change which is the basis of the Cosmological Argument, but we perceive that this change proceeds according to a fixed and invariable rule. In inorganic nature, general order, or regularity; in organic nature, special order or adaptation.” Bowne, Review of H. Spencer, 113-115, 224-230: “Inductive science proceeds upon the postulate that the reasonable and the natural are one.” This furnished the guiding clue to Harvey and Cuvier; see Whewell, Hist. Induct. Sciences, 2:489-491. Kant: “The anatomist must assume that nothing in man is in vain.” Aristotle: “Nature makes nothing in vain.” On molecules as manufactured articles, see Maxfield, in Nature, Sept. 25, 1873. See also Tulloch, Theism, 116, 120; LeConte, Religion and Science, lect. 2 and 3; McCosh, Typical Forms, 81, 420; Agassiz, Essay on Classification, 9, 10; Bib. Sac., 1849:626 and 1850:613; Hopkins, in Princeton Review, 1882:181.

(a) Design, in fact that rivers always run by large towns? that springs are always found at gambling places? Plants made for man, and man for worms? Voltaire: “Noses are made for spectacles—let us wear them!” Pope: “While man exclaims ‘See all things for my use,’ ‘See man for mine,’ replies the pampered goose.” Cherries do not ripen in the cold of winter when they do not taste as well, and grapes do not ripen in the heat of summer when the new wine would turn to vinegar? Nature divides melons into sections for convenience in family eating? Cork-tree made for bottle-stoppers? The child who was asked the cause of salt in the ocean, attributed it to codfish, thus dimly confounding final cause with efficient cause. Teacher: “What are marsupials?” Pupil: “Animals that have pouches in their stomachs.” Teacher: “And what do they have pouches for?” Pupil: “To crawl into and conceal themselves in, when they are pursued.” Why are the days longer in summer than in winter? Because it is the property of all natural objects to elongate under the influence of heat. A Jena professor held that doctors do not exist because of disease, but that diseases exist precisely in order that there may be doctors. Kepler was an astronomical Don Quixote. He discussed the claims of eleven different damsels to become his second wife, and he likened the planets to huge animals rushing through the sky. Many of the objections to design arise from confounding a part of the creation with the whole, or a structure in the process of development with a structure completed. For illustrations of mistaken ends, see Janet, Final Causes.

(b) Alphonso of Castile took offense at the Ptolemaic System, and intimated that, if he had been consulted at the creation, he could have suggested valuable improvements. Lange, in his History of Materialism, illustrates some of the methods of nature by millions of gun barrels shot in all directions to kill a single hare; by ten thousand keys bought at haphazard to get into a shut room; by building a city in order to obtain a house. Is not the ice a little overdone about the poles? See John Stuart Mill’s indictment of nature, in his posthumous Essays on Religion, 29—“Nature impales men, breaks men as if on a wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them with the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve, such as the ingenious cruelty of a Nabis or a Domitian never surpassed.” So argue Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann.

The doctrine of evolution answers many of these objections, by showing that order and useful collocation in the system as a whole is necessarily and cheaply purchased by imperfection and suffering in the initial stages of development. The question is: Does the system as a whole imply design? My opinion is of no value as to the usefulness of an intricate machine the purpose of which I do not know. If I stand at the beginning of a road and do not know whither it leads, it is presumptuous in me to point out a more direct way to its destination. Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 20-22—“In order to counterbalance the impressions which apparent disorder and immorality in nature make upon us, we have to assume that the universe at its root is not only rational, but good. This is faith, but it is an act on which our whole moral life depends.” Metaphysics, 165—“The same argument which would deny mind in nature denies mind in man.” Fisher, Nat. and Meth. of Rev., 264—“Fifty years ago, when the crane stood on top of the tower of unfinished Cologne Cathedral, was there no evidence of design in the whole structure?” Yet we concede that, so long as we cannot with John Stuart Mill explain the imperfections of the universe by any limitations in the Intelligence which contrived it, we are shut up to regarding them as intended to correspond with the moral state and probation of sinners which God foresaw and provided for at the creation. Evil things in the universe are symbols of sin, and helps to its overthrow. See Bowne, Review of H. Spencer, 264, 265; McCosh, Christ. and Positivism, 82 sq.; Martineau, Essays, 1:50, and Study, 1:351-398; Porter, Hum. Intellect, 599; Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 366-371; Princeton Rev., 1878:272-303; Shaw, on Positivism.

2. Defects of the Teleological Argument. These attach not to the premises but to the conclusion sought to be drawn therefrom.

A. The argument cannot prove a personal God. The order and useful collocations of the universe may be only the changing phenomena of an impersonal intelligence and will, such as pantheism supposes. The finality may be only immanent finality.

There is such a thing as immanent and unconscious finality. National spirit, without set purpose, constructs language. The bee works unconsciously to ends. Strato of Lampsacus regarded the world as a vast animal. Aristotle, Phys., 2:8—“Plant the ship-builder’s skill within the timber itself, and you have the mode in which nature produces.” Here we see a dim anticipation of the modern doctrine of development from within instead of creation from without. Neander: “The divine work goes on from within outward.” John Fiske: “The argument from the watch has been superseded by the argument from the flower.” Iverach, Theism, 91—“The effect of evolution has been simply to transfer the cause from a mere external influence working from without to an immanent rational principle.” Martineau, Study, 1:349, 350—“Theism is in no way committed to the doctrine of a God external to the world ... nor does intelligence require, in order to gain an object, to give it externality.”

Newman Smyth, Place of Death, 62-80—“The universe exists in some all-pervasive Intelligence. Suppose we could see a small heap of brick, scraps of metal, and pieces of mortar, gradually shaping themselves into the walls and interior structure of a building, adding needed material as the work advanced, and at last presenting in its completion a factory furnished with varied and finely wrought machinery. Or, a locomotive carrying a process of self-repair to compensate for wear, growing and increasing in size, detaching from itself at intervals pieces of brass or iron endowed with the power of growing up step by step into other locomotives capable of running themselves and of reproducing new locomotives in their turn.” So nature in its separate parts may seem mechanical, but as a whole it is rational. Weismann does not “disown a directive power,”—only this power is “behind the mechanism as its final cause ... it must be teleological.”

Impressive as are these evidences of intelligence in the universe as a whole, and increased in number as they are by the new light of evolution, we must still hold that nature alone cannot prove that this intelligence is personal. Hopkins, Miscellanies, 18-36—“So long as there is such a thing as impersonal and adapting intelligence in the brute creation, we cannot necessarily infer from unchanging laws a free and personal God.” See Fisher, Supernat. Origin of Christianity, 576-578. Kant shows that the argument does not prove intelligence apart from the world (Critique, 370). We must bring mind to the world, if we would find mind in it. Leave out man, and nature cannot be properly interpreted: the intelligence and will in nature may still be unconscious. But, taking in man, we are bound to get our idea of the intelligence and will in nature from the highest type of intelligence and will we know, and that is man’s. “Nullus in microcosmo spiritus, nullus in macrocosmo Deus.” “We receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live.”

The Teleological Argument therefore needs to be supplemented by the Anthropological Argument, or the argument from the mental and moral constitution of man. By itself, it does not prove a Creator. See Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 26; Ritter, Hist. Anc. Philos., bk. 9, chap. 6; Foundations of our Faith, 38; Murphy, Scientific Bases, 215; Habit and Intelligence, 2:6, and chap. 27. On immanent finality, see Janet, Final Causes, 345-415; Diman, Theistic Argument, 201-203. Since righteousness belongs only to personality, this argument cannot prove righteousness in God. Flint, Theism, 66—“Power and Intelligence alone do not constitute God, though they be infinite. A being may have these, and, if lacking righteousness, may be a devil.” Here again we see the need of the Anthropological Argument to supplement this.

B. Even if this argument could prove personality in the intelligence and will that originated the order of the universe, it could not prove either the unity, the eternity, or the infinity of God; not the unity—for the useful collocations of the universe might be the result of oneness of counsel, instead of oneness of essence, in the contriving intelligence; not the eternity—for a created demiurge might conceivably have designed the universe; not the infinity—since all marks of order and collocation within our observation are simply finite.

Diman asserts (Theistic Argument, 114) that all the phenomena of the universe must be due to the same source—since all alike are subject to the same method of sequence, e. g., gravitation—and that the evidence points us irresistibly to some one explanatory cause. We can regard this assertion only as the utterance of a primitive belief in a first cause, not as the conclusion of logical demonstration, for we know only an infinitesimal part of the universe. From the point of view of the intuition of an Absolute Reason, however, we can cordially assent to the words of F. L. Patton: “When we consider Matthew Arnold’s ‘stream of tendency,’ Spencer’s ‘unknowable,’ Schopenhauer’s ‘world as will,’ and Hartmann’s elaborate defence of finality as the product of unconscious intelligence, we may well ask if the theists, with their belief in one personal God, are not in possession of the only hypothesis that can save the language of these writers from the charge of meaningless and idiotic raving” (Journ. Christ. Philos., April, 1883:283-307).

The ancient world, which had only the light of nature, believed in many gods. William James, Will to Believe, 44—“If there be a divine Spirit of the universe, nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its ultimate word to man. Either there is no spirit revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and (as all the higher religions have assumed) what we call visible nature, or this world, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen, or other world.” Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 234—“But is not intelligence itself the mystery of mysteries?... No doubt, intellect is a great mystery.... But there is a choice in mysteries. Some mysteries leave other things clear, and some leave things as dark and impenetrable as ever. The former is the case with the mystery of intelligence. It makes possible the comprehension of everything but itself.”

3. The value of the Teleological Argument is simply this,—it proves from certain useful collocations and instances of order which have clearly had a beginning, or in other words, from the present harmony of the universe, that there exists an intelligence and will adequate to its contrivance. But whether this intelligence and will is personal or impersonal, creator or only fashioner, one or many, finite or infinite, eternal or owing its being to another, necessary or free, this argument cannot assure us.

In it, however, we take a step forward. The causative power which we have proved by the Cosmological Argument has now become an intelligent and voluntary power.

John Stuart Mill, Three Essays on Theism, 168-170—“In the present state of our knowledge, the adaptations in nature afford a large balance of probability in favor of causation by intelligence.” Ladd holds that, whenever one being acts upon its like, each being undergoes changes of state that belong to its own nature under the circumstances. Action of one body on another never consists in transferring the state of one being to another. Therefore there is no more difficulty in beings that are unlike acting on one another than in beings that are like. We do not transfer ideas to other minds,—we only rouse them to develop their own ideas. So force also is positively not transferable. Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 49, begins with “the conception of things interacting according to law and forming an intelligible system. Such a system cannot be construed by thought without the assumption of a unitary being which is the fundamental reality of the system. 53—No passage of influences or forces will avail to bridge the gulf, so long as the things are regarded as independent. 56—The system itself cannot explain this interaction, for the system is only the members of it. There must be some being in them which is their reality, and of which they are in some sense phases or manifestations. In other words, there must be a basal monism.” All this is substantially the view of Lotze, of whose philosophy see criticism in Stählin’s Kant, Lotze, and Ritschl, 116-156, and especially 123. Falckenberg, Gesch. der neueren Philosophie, 454, shows as to Lotze’s view that his assumption of monistic unity and continuity does not explain how change of condition in one thing should, as equalization or compensation, follow change of condition in another thing. Lotze explains this actuality by the ethical conception of an all-embracing Person. On the whole argument, see Bib. Sac., 1849:634; Murphy, Sci. Bases, 216; Flint, Theism, 131-210; Pfleiderer, Die Religion, 1:164-174; W. R. Benedict, on Theism and Evolution, in Andover Rev., 1886:307-350, 607-622.

III. The Anthropological Argument, or Argument from Man’s Mental and Moral Nature.

This is an argument from the mental and moral condition of man to the existence of an Author, Lawgiver, and End. It is sometimes called the Moral Argument.

The common title “Moral Argument” is much too narrow, for it seems to take account only of conscience in man, whereas the argument which this title so imperfectly designates really proceeds from man’s intellectual and emotional, as well as from his moral, nature. In choosing the designation we have adopted, we desire, moreover, to rescue from the mere physicist the term “Anthropology”—a term to which he has attached altogether too limited a signification, and which, in his use of it, implies that man is a mere animal,—to him Anthropology is simply the study of la bête humaine. Anthropology means, not simply the science of man’s physical nature, origin, and relations, but also the science which treats of his higher spiritual being. Hence, in Theology, the term Anthropology designates that division of the subject which treats of man’s spiritual nature and endowments, his original state and his subsequent apostasy. As an argument, therefore, from man’s mental and moral nature, we can with perfect propriety call the present argument the Anthropological Argument.

The argument is a complex one, and may be divided into three parts.

1. Man’s intellectual and moral nature must have had for its author an intellectual and moral Being. The elements of the proof are as follows:—(a) Man, as an intellectual and moral being, has had a beginning upon the planet. (b) Material and unconscious forces do not afford a sufficient cause for man’s reason, conscience, and free will. (c) Man, as an effect, can be referred only to a cause possessing self-consciousness and a moral nature, in other words, personality.

This argument is is part an application to man of the principles of both the Cosmological and the Teleological Arguments. Flint, Theism, 74—“Although causality does not involve design, nor design goodness, yet design involves causality, and goodness both causality and design.” Jacobi: “Nature conceals God; man reveals him.”

Man is an effect. The history of the geologic ages proves that man has not always existed, and even if the lower creatures were his progenitors, his intellect and freedom are not eternal a parte ante. We consider man, not as a physical, but as a spiritual, being. Thompson, Christian Theism, 75—“Every true cause must be sufficient to account for the effect.” Locke, Essay, book 4, chap. 10—“Cogitable existence cannot be produced out of incogitable.” Martineau, Study of Religion, 1:258 sq.

Even if man had always existed, however, we should not need to abandon the argument. We might start, not from beginning of existence, but from beginning of phenomena. I might see God in the world, just as I see thought, feeling, will, in my fellow men. Fullerton, Plain Argument for God: I do not infer you, as cause of the existence of your body: I recognize you as present and working through your body. Its changes of gesture and speech reveal a personality behind them. So I do not need to argue back to a Being who once caused nature and history; I recognize a present Being, exercising wisdom and power, by signs such as reveal personality in man. Nature is itself the Watchmaker manifesting himself in the very process of making the watch. This is the meaning of the noble Epilogue to Robert Browning’s Dramatis Personæ, 252—“That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, Or decomposes but to recompose, Become my universe that feels and knows.” “That Face,” said Mr. Browning to Mrs. Orr, “That Face is the face of Christ; that is how I feel him.” Nature is an expression of the mind and will of Christ, as my face is an expression of my mind and will. But in both cases, behind and above the face is a personality, of which the face is but the partial and temporary expression.

Bowne, Philos. Theism, 104, 107—“My fellow beings act as if they had thought, feeling, and will. So nature looks as if thought, feeling, and will were behind it. If we deny mind in nature, we must deny mind in man. If there be no controlling mind in nature, moreover, there can be none in man, for if the basal power is blind and necessary, then all that depends upon it is necessitated also.” LeConte, in Royce’s Conception of God, 44—“There is only one place in the world where we can get behind physical phenomena, behind the veil of matter, namely, in our own brain, and we find there a self, a person. Is it not reasonable that, if we could get behind the veil of nature, we should find the same, that is, a Person? But if so, we must conclude, an infinite Person, and therefore the only complete Personality that exists. Perfect personality is not only self-conscious, but self-existent. They are only imperfect images, and, as it were, separated fragments, of the infinite Personality of God.”

Personality = self-consciousness + self-determination in view of moral ends. The brute has intelligence and will, but has neither self-consciousness, conscience, nor free-will. See Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:76 sq. Diman, Theistic Argument, 91, 251—“Suppose ‘the intuitions of the moral faculty are the slowly organized results of experience received from the race’; still, having found that the universe affords evidence of a supremely intelligent cause, we may believe that man’s moral nature affords the highest illustration of its mode of working”; 358—“Shall we explain the lower forms of will by the higher, or the higher by the lower?”

2. Man’s moral nature proves the existence of a holy Lawgiver and Judge. The elements of the proof are:—(a) Conscience recognizes the existence of a moral law which has supreme authority. (b) Known violations of this moral law are followed by feelings of ill-desert and fears of judgment. (c) This moral law, since it is not self-imposed, and these threats of judgment, since they are not self-executing, respectively argue the existence of a holy will that has imposed the law, and of a punitive power that will execute the threats of the moral nature.

See Bishop Butler’s Sermons on Human Nature, in Works, Bohn’s ed., 385-414. Butler’s great discovery was that of the supremacy of conscience in the moral constitution of man: “Had it strength as it has right, had it power as it has manifest authority, it would absolutely govern the world.” Conscience = the moral judiciary of the soul—not law, nor sheriff, but judge; see under Anthropology. Diman, Theistic Argument, 251—“Conscience does not lay down a law; it warns us of the existence of a law; and not only of a law, but of a purpose—not our own, but the purpose of another, which it is our mission to realize.” See Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 218 sq. It proves personality in the Lawgiver, because its utterances are not abstract, like those of reason, but are in the nature of command; they are not in the indicative, but in the imperative, mood; it says, “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not.” This argues will.

Hutton, Essays, 1:11—“Conscience is an ideal Moses, and thunders from an invisible Sinai”; “the Atheist regards conscience not as a skylight, opened to let in upon human nature an infinite dawn from above, but as a polished arch or dome, completing and reflecting the whole edifice beneath.” But conscience cannot be the mere reflection and expression of nature, for it represses and condemns nature. Tulloch, Theism: “Conscience, like the magnetic needle, indicates the existence of an unknown Power which from afar controls its vibrations and at whose presence it trembles.” Nero spends nights of terror in wandering through the halls of his Golden House. Kant holds that faith in duty requires faith in a God who will defend and reward duty—see Critique of Pure Reason, 359-387. See also Porter, Human Intellect, 524.

Kant, in his Metaphysic of Ethics, represents the action of conscience as like “conducting a case before a court,” and he adds: “Now that he who is accused before his conscience should be figured to be just the same person as his judge, is an absurd representation of a tribunal; since, in such an event, the accuser would always lose his suit. Conscience must therefore represent to itself always some other than itself as Judge, unless it is to arrive at a contradiction with itself.” See also his Critique of the Practical Reason, Werke, 8:214—“Duty, thou sublime and mighty name, that hast in thee nothing to attract or win, but challengest submission; and yet dost threaten nothing to sway the will by that which may arouse natural terror or aversion, but merely holdest forth a Law; a Law which of itself finds entrance into the mind, and even while we disobey, against our will compels our reverence, a Law in presence of which all inclinations grow dumb, even while they secretly rebel; what origin is there worthy of thee? Where can we find the root of thy noble descent, which proudly rejects all kinship with the inclinations?” Archbishop Temple answers, in his Bampton Lectures, 58, 59, “This eternal Law is the Eternal himself, the almighty God.” Robert Browning: “The sense within me that I owe a debt Assures me—Somewhere must be Somebody, Ready to take his due. All comes to this: Where due is, there acceptance follows: find Him who accepts the due.”

Salter, Ethical Religion, quoted in Pfleiderer’s article on Religionless Morality, Am. Jour. Theol., 3:237—“The earth and the stars do not create the law of gravitation which they obey; no more does man, or the united hosts of rational beings in the universe, create the law of duty.” The will expressed in the moral imperative is superior to ours, for otherwise it would issue no commands. Yet it is one with ours as the life of an organism is one with the life of its members. Theonomy is not heteronomy but the highest autonomy, the guarantee of our personal freedom against all servitude of man. Seneca: “Deo parere libertas est.” Knight, Essays in Philosophy, 272—“In conscience we see an ‘alter ego’, in us yet not of us, another Personality behind our own.” Martineau, Types, 2:105—“Over a person only a person can have authority.... A solitary being, with no other sentient nature in the universe, would feel no duty”; Study, 1:26—“As Perception gives us Will in the shape of Causality over against us in the Non-Ego, so Conscience gives us Will in the shape of Authority over against us in the Non-Ego.... 2:7—We cannot deduce the phenomena of character from an agent who has none.” Hutton, Essays, 1:41, 42—“When we disobey conscience, the Power which has therein ceased to move us has retired only to observe—to keep watch over us as we mould ourselves.” Cardinal Newman, Apologia, 377—“Were it not for the voice speaking so clearly in my conscience and my heart, I should be an atheist, or a pantheist, or a polytheist, when I looked into the world.”

3. Man’s emotional and voluntary nature proves the existence of a Being who can furnish in himself a satisfying object of human affection and an end which will call forth man’s highest activities and ensure his highest progress.

Only a Being of power, wisdom, holiness, and goodness, and all these indefinitely greater than any that we know upon the earth, can meet this demand of the human soul. Such a Being must exist. Otherwise man’s greatest need would be unsupplied, and belief in a lie be more productive of virtue than belief in the truth.

Feuerbach calls God “the Brocken-shadow of man himself”; “consciousness of God = self-consciousness”; “religion is a dream of the human soul”; “all theology is anthropology”; “man made God in his own image.” But conscience shows that man does not recognize in God simply his like, but also his opposite. Not as Galton: “Piety = conscience + instability.” The finest minds are of the leaning type; see Murphy, Scientific Bases, 370; Augustine, Confessions, 1:1—“Thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless till it finds rest in thee.” On John Stuart Mill—“a mind that could not find God, and a heart that could not do without him”—see his Autobiography, and Browne, in Strivings for the Faith (Christ. Ev. Socy.), 259-287. Comte, in his later days, constructed an object of worship in Universal Humanity, and invented a ritual which Huxley calls “Catholicism minus Christianity.” See also Tyndall, Belfast Address: “Did I not believe, said a great man to me once, that an Intelligence exists at the heart of things, my life on earth would be intolerable.” Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, 1:505,506.

The last line of Schiller’s Pilgrim reads: “Und das Dort ist niemals hier.” The finite never satisfies. Tennyson, Two Voices: “’Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant, Oh life, not death, for which we pant; More life, and fuller, that I want.” Seth, Ethical Principles, 419—“A moral universe, an absolute moral Being, is the indispensable environment of the ethical life, without which it cannot attain to its perfect growth.... There is a moral God, or this is no universe.” James, Will to Believe, 116—“A God is the most adequate possible object for minds framed like our own to conceive as lying at the root of the universe. Anything short of God is not a rational object, anything more than God is not possible, if man needs an object of knowledge, feeling, and will.”

Romanes, Thoughts on Religion, 41—“To speak of the Religion of the Unknowable, the Religion of Cosmism, the Religion of Humanity, where the personality of the First Cause is not recognized, is as unmeaning as it would be to speak of the love of a triangle or the rationality of the equator.” It was said of Comte’s system that, “the wine of the real presence being poured out, we are asked to adore the empty cup.” “We want an object of devotion, and Comte presents us with a looking-glass” (Martineau). Huxley said he would as soon adore a wilderness of apes as the Positivist’s rationalized conception of humanity. It is only the ideal in humanity, the divine element in humanity that can be worshiped. And when we once conceive of this, we cannot be satisfied until we find it somewhere realized, as in Jesus Christ.

Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 265-272—Huxley believes that Evolution is “a materialized logical process”; that nothing endures save the flow of energy and “the rational order which pervades it.” In the earlier part of this process, nature, there is no morality or benevolence. But the process ends by producing man, who can make progress only by waging moral war against the natural forces which impel him. He must be benevolent and just. Shall we not say, in spite of Mr. Huxley, that this shows what the nature of the system is, and that there must be a benevolent and just Being who ordained it? Martineau, Seat of Authority, 63-68—“Though the authority of the higher incentive is self-known, it cannot be self-created; for while it is in me, it is above me.... This authority to which conscience introduces me, though emerging in consciousness, is yet objective to us all, and is necessarily referred to the nature of things, irrespective of the accidents of our mental constitution. It is not dependent on us, but independent. All minds born into the universe are ushered into the presence of a real righteousness, as surely as into a scene of actual space. Perception reveals another than ourselves; conscience reveals a higher than ourselves.”

We must freely grant, however, that this argument from man’s aspirations has weight only upon the supposition that a wise, truthful, holy, and benevolent God exists, who has so constituted our minds that their thinking and their affections correspond to truth and to himself. An evil being might have so constituted us that all logic would lead us into error. The argument is therefore the development and expression of our intuitive idea of God. Luthardt, Fundamental Truths: “Nature is like a written document containing only consonants. It is we who must furnish the vowels that shall decipher it. Unless we bring with us the idea of God, we shall find nature but dumb.” See also Pfleiderer, Die Religion, 1:174.

A. The defects of the Anthropological Argument are: (a) It cannot prove a creator of the material universe. (b) It cannot prove the infinity of God, since man from whom we argue is finite. (c) It cannot prove the mercy of God. But,

B. The value of the Argument is, that it assures us of the existence of a personal Being, who rules us in righteousness, and who is the proper object of supreme affection and service. But whether this Being is the original creator of all things, or merely the author of our own existence, whether he is infinite or finite, whether he is a Being of simple righteousness or also of mercy, this argument cannot assure us.

Among the arguments for the existence of God, however, we assign to this the chief place, since it adds to the ideas of causative power (which we derived from the Cosmological Argument) and of contriving intelligence (which we derived from the Teleological Argument), the far wider ideas of personality and righteous lordship.

Sir Wm. Hamilton, Works of Reid, 2:974, note U; Lect. on Metaph., 1:33—“The only valid arguments for the existence of God and for the immortality of the soul rest upon the ground of man’s moral nature”; “theology is wholly dependent upon psychology, for with the proof of the moral nature of man stands or falls the proof of the existence of a Deity.” But Diman, Theistic Argument, 244, very properly objects to making this argument from the nature of man the sole proof of Deity: “It should be rather used to show the attributes of the Being whose existence has been already proved from other sources”; “hence the Anthropological Argument is as dependent upon the Cosmological and Teleological Arguments as they are upon it.”

Yet the Anthropological Argument is needed to supplement the conclusions of the two others. Those who, like Herbert Spencer, recognize an infinite and absolute Being, Power and Cause, may yet fail to recognize this being as spiritual and personal, simply because they do not recognize themselves as spiritual and personal beings, that is, do not recognize reason, conscience and free-will in man. Agnosticism in philosophy involves agnosticism in religion. R. K. Eccles: “All the most advanced languages capitalize the word ‘God,’ and the word ‘I.’ ” See Flint, Theism, 68; Mill, Criticism of Hamilton, 2:266; Dove, Logic of Christian Faith, 211-236, 261-299; Martineau, Types, Introd., 3; Cooke, Religion and Chemistry: “God is love; but nature could not prove it, and the Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world in order to attest it.”

Everything in philosophy depends on where we begin, whether with nature or with self, whether with the necessary or with the free. In one sense, therefore, we should in practice begin with the Anthropological Argument, and then use the Cosmological and Teleological Arguments as warranting the application to nature of the conclusions which we have drawn from man. As God stands over against man in Conscience, and says to him: “Thou”; so man stands over against God in Nature, and may say to him: “Thou.” Mulford, Republic of God, 28—“As the personality of man has its foundation in the personality of God, so the realization by man of his own personality always brings man nearer to God.” Robert Browning: “Quoth a young Sadducee: ‘Reader of many rolls, Is it so certain we Have, as they tell us, souls?’ ‘Son, there is no reply!’ The Rabbi bit his beard: ‘Certain, a soul have I—We may have none,’ he sneered. Thus Karshook, the Hiram’s Hammer, The Right-hand Temple-column, Taught babes in grace their grammar, And struck the simple, solemn.”

It is very common at this place to treat of what are called the Historical and the Biblical Arguments for the existence of God—the former arguing, from the unity of history, the latter arguing, from the unity of the Bible, that this unity must in each case have for its cause and explanation the existence of God. It is a sufficient reason for not discussing these arguments, that, without a previous belief in the existence of God, no one will see unity either in history or in the Bible. Turner, the painter, exhibited a picture which seemed all mist and cloud until he put a dab of scarlet into it. That gave the true point of view, and all the rest became intelligible. So Christ’s coming and Christ’s blood make intelligible both the Scriptures and human history. He carries in his girdle the key to all mysteries. Schopenhauer, knowing no Christ, admitted no philosophy of history. He regarded history as the mere fortuitous play of individual caprice. Pascal: “Jesus Christ is the centre of everything, and the object of everything, and he that does not know him knows nothing of nature, and nothing of himself.”

IV. The Ontological Argument, or Argument from our Abstract and Necessary Ideas.

This argument infers the existence of God from the abstract and necessary ideas of the human mind. It has three forms:

1. That of Samuel Clarke. Space and time are attributes of substance or being. But space and time are respectively infinite and eternal. There must therefore be an infinite and eternal substance or Being to whom these attributes belong.

Gillespie states the argument somewhat differently. Space and time are modes of existence. But space and time are respectively infinite and eternal. There must therefore be an infinite and eternal Being who subsists in these modes. But we reply:

Space and time are neither attributes of substance nor modes of existence. The argument, if valid, would prove that God is not mind but matter, for that could not be mind, but only matter, of which space and time were either attributes or modes.

The Ontological Argument is frequently called the a priori argument, that is, the argument from that which is logically prior, or earlier than experience, viz., our intuitive ideas. All the forms of the Ontological Argument are in this sense a priori. Space and time are a priori ideas. See Samuel Clarke, Works, 2:521; Gillespie, Necessary Existence of God. Per contra, see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 364: Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 226—“To begin, as Clarke did, with the proposition that ‘something has existed from eternity,’ is virtually to propose an argument after having assumed what is to be proved. Gillespie’s form of the a priori argument, starting with the proposition ‘infinity of extension is necessarily existing,’ is liable to the same objection, with the additional disadvantage of attributing a property of matter to the Deity.”

H. B. Smith says that Brougham misrepresented Clarke: “Clarke’s argument is in his sixth proposition, and supposes the existence proved in what goes before. He aims here to establish the infinitude and omnipresence of this First Being. He does not prove existence from immensity.” But we reply, neither can he prove the infinity of God from the immensity of space. Space and time are neither substances nor attributes, but are rather relations; see Calderwood, Philos. of Infinite, 331-335; Cocker, Theistic Conception of the World, 66-96. The doctrine that space and time are attributes or modes of God’s existence tends to materialistic pantheism like that of Spinoza, who held that “the one and simple substance” (substantia una et unica) is known to us through the two attributes of thought and extension; mind = God in the mode of thought; matter = God in the mode of extension. Dove, Logic of the Christian Faith, 127, says well that an extended God is a material God; “space and time are attributes neither of matter nor mind”; “we must carry the moral idea into the natural world, not the natural idea into the moral world.” See also, Blunt, Dictionary Doct. and Hist. Theol., 740; Porter, Human Intellect, 567. H. M. Stanley, on Space and Science, in Philos. Rev., Nov. 1898:615—“Space is not full of things, but things are spaceful.... Space is a form of dynamic appearance.” Prof. C. A. Strong: “The world composed of consciousness and other existences is not in space, though it may be in something of which space is the symbol.”

2. That of Descartes. We have the idea of an infinite and perfect Being. This idea cannot be derived from imperfect and finite things. There must therefore be an infinite and perfect Being who is its cause.

But we reply that this argument confounds the idea of the infinite with an infinite idea. Man’s idea of the infinite is not infinite but finite, and from a finite effect we cannot argue an infinite cause.

This form of the Ontological Argument, while it is a priori, as based upon a necessary idea of the human mind, is, unlike the other forms of the same argument, a posteriori, as arguing from this idea, as an effect, to the existence of a Being who is its cause. A posteriori argument = from that which is later to that which is earlier, that is, from effect to cause. The Cosmological, Teleological, and Anthropological Arguments are arguments a posteriori. Of this sort is the argument of Descartes; see Descartes, Meditation 3: “Hæc idea quæ in nobis est requirit Deum pro causa; Deusque proinde existit.” The idea in men’s minds is the impression of the workman’s name stamped indelibly on his work—the shadow cast upon the human soul by that unseen One of whose being and presence it dimly informs us. Blunt, Dict. of Theol., 739; Saisset, Pantheism, 1:54—“Descartes sets out from a fact of consciousness, while Anselm sets out from an abstract conception”; “Descartes’s argument might be considered a branch of the Anthropological or Moral Argument, but for the fact that this last proceeds from man’s constitution rather than from his abstract ideas.” See Bib. Sac., 1849:637.

3. That of Anselm. We have the idea of an absolutely perfect Being. But existence is an attribute of perfection. An absolutely perfect Being must therefore exist.

But we reply that this argument confounds ideal existence with real existence. Our ideas are not the measure of external reality.

Anselm, Proslogion, 2—“Id, quo majus cogitari nequit, non potest esse in intellectu solo.” See translation of the Proslogion, in Bib. Sac., 1851:529, 699; Kant, Critique, 368. The arguments of Descartes and Anselm, with Kant’s reply, are given in their original form by Harris, in Journ. Spec. Philos., 15:420-428. The major premise here is not that all perfect ideas imply the existence of the object which they represent, for then, as Kant objects, I might argue from my perfect idea of a $100 bill that I actually possessed the same, which would be far from the fact. So I have a perfect idea of a perfectly evil being, of a centaur, of nothing,—but it does not follow that the evil being, that the centaur, that nothing, exists. The argument is rather from the idea of absolute and perfect Being—of “that, no greater than which can be conceived.” There can be but one such being, and there can be but one such idea.

Yet, even thus understood, we cannot argue from the idea to the actual existence of such a being. Case, Physical Realism, 173—“God is not an idea, and consequently cannot be inferred from mere ideas.” Bowne, Philos. Theism, 43—The Ontological Argument “only points out that the idea of the perfect must include the idea of existence; but there is nothing to show that the self-consistent idea represents an objective reality.” I can imagine the Sea-serpent, the Jinn of the Thousand and One Nights, “The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders.” The winged horse of Uhland possessed every possible virtue, and only one fault,—it was dead. If every perfect idea implied the reality of its object, there might be horses with ten legs, and trees with roots in the air.

“Anselm’s argument implies,” says Fisher, in Journ. Christ. Philos., Jan. 1883:114, “that existence in re is a constituent of the concept. It would conclude the existence of a being from the definition of a word. This inference is justified only on the basis of philosophical realism.” Dove, Logic of the Christ. Faith, 141—“The Ontological Argument is the algebraic formula of the universe, which leads to a valid conclusion with regard to real existence, only when we fill it in with objects with which we become acquainted in the arguments a posteriori.” See also Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:331, Dogm. Theol., 1:221-241, and in Presb. Rev., April, 1884:212-227 (favoring the argument); Fisher, Essays, 574; Thompson, Christian Theism, 171; H. B. Smith, Introd. to Christ. Theol., 122; Pfleiderer, Die Religion, 1:181-187; Studien und Kritiken, 1875:611-655.

Dorner, in his Glaubenslehre, 1:197, gives us the best statement of the Ontological Argument: “Reason thinks of God as existing. Reason would not be reason, if it did not think of God as existing. Reason only is, upon the assumption that God is.” But this is evidently not argument, but only vivid statement of the necessary assumption of the existence of an absolute Reason which conditions and gives validity to ours.

Although this last must be considered the most perfect form of the Ontological Argument, it is evident that it conducts us only to an ideal conclusion, not to real existence. In common with the two preceding forms of the argument, moreover, it tacitly assumes, as already existing in the human mind, that very knowledge of God’s existence which it would derive from logical demonstration. It has value, therefore, simply as showing what God must be, if he exists at all.

But the existence of a Being indefinitely great, a personal Cause, Contriver and Lawgiver, has been proved by the preceding arguments; for the law of parsimony requires us to apply the conclusions of the first three arguments to one Being, and not to many. To this one Being we may now ascribe the infinity and perfection, the idea of which lies at the basis of the Ontological Argument—ascribe them, not because they are demonstrably his, but because our mental constitution will not allow us to think otherwise. Thus clothing him with all perfections which the human mind can conceive, and these in illimitable fullness, we have one whom we may justly call God.

McCosh, Div. Govt., 12, note—“It is at this place, if we do not mistake, that the idea of the Infinite comes in. The capacity of the human mind to form such an idea, or rather its intuitive belief in an Infinite of which it feels that it cannot form an adequate conception, may be no proof (as Kant maintains) of the existence of an infinite Being; but it is, we are convinced, the means by which the mind is enabled to invest the Deity, shown on other grounds to exist, with the attributes of infinity, i. e., to look on his being, power, goodness, and all his perfections, as infinite.” Even Flint, Theism, 68, who holds that we reach the existence of God by inference, speaks of “necessary conditions of thought and feeling, and ineradicable aspirations, which force on us ideas of absolute existence, infinity, and perfection, and will neither permit us to deny these perfections to God, nor to ascribe them to any other being.” Belief in God is not the conclusion of a demonstration, but the solution of a problem. Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 226—“Either the whole question is assumed in starting, or the Infinite is not reached in concluding.”

Clarke, Christian Theology, 97-114, divides his proof into two parts: I. Evidence of the existence of God from the intellectual starting-point: The discovery of Mind in the universe is made, 1. through the intelligibleness of the universe to us; 2. through the idea of cause; 3. through the presence of ends in the universe. II. Evidence of the existence of God from the religious starting-point: The discovery of the good God is made, 1. through the religious nature of man; 2. through the great dilemma—God the best, or the worst; 3. through the spiritual experience of men, especially in Christianity. So far as Dr. Clarke’s proof is intended to be a statement, not of a primitive belief, but of a logical process, we must hold it to be equally defective with the three forms of proof which we have seen to furnish some corroborative evidence of God’s existence. Dr. Clarke therefore does well to add: “Religion was not produced by proof of God’s existence, and will not be destroyed by its insufficiency to some minds. Religion existed before argument; in fact, it is the preciousness of religion that leads to the seeking for all possible confirmations of the reality of God.”

The three forms of proof already mentioned—the Cosmological, the Teleological, and the Anthropological Arguments—may be likened to the three arches of a bridge over a wide and rushing river. The bridge has only two defects, but these defects are very serious. The first is that one cannot get on to the bridge; the end toward the hither bank is wholly lacking; the bridge of logical argument cannot be entered upon except by assuming the validity of logical processes; this assumption takes for granted at the outset the existence of a God who has made our faculties to act correctly; we get on to the bridge, not by logical process, but only by a leap of intuition, and by assuming at the beginning the very thing which we set out to prove. The second defect of the so-called bridge of argument is that when one has once gotten on, he can never get off. The connection with the further bank is also lacking. All the premises from which we argue being finite, we are warranted in drawing only a finite conclusion. Argument cannot reach the Infinite, and only an infinite Being is worthy to be called God. We can get off from our logical bridge, not by logical process, but only by another and final leap of intuition, and by once more assuming the existence of the infinite Being whom we had so vainly sought to reach by mere argument. The process seems to be referred to in Job 11:7—“Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?”

As a logical process this is indeed defective, since all logic as well as all observation depends for its validity upon the presupposed existence of God, and since this particular process, even granting the validity of logic in general, does not warrant the conclusion that God exists, except upon a second assumption that our abstract ideas of infinity and perfection are to be applied to the Being to whom argument has actually conducted us.

But although both ends of the logical bridge are confessedly wanting, the process may serve and does serve a more useful purpose than that of mere demonstration, namely, that of awakening, explicating, and confirming a conviction which, though the most fundamental of all, may yet have been partially slumbering for lack of thought.

Morell, Philos. Fragments, 177, 179—“We can, in fact, no more prove the existence of a God by a logical argument, than we can prove the existence of an external world; but none the less may we obtain as strong a practical conviction of the one, as the other.” “We arrive at a scientific belief in the existence of God just as we do at any other possible human truth. We assume it, as a hypothesis absolutely necessary to account for the phenomena of the universe; and then evidences from every quarter begin to converge upon it, until, in process of time, the common sense of mankind, cultivated and enlightened by ever accumulating knowledge, pronounces upon the validity of the hypothesis with a voice scarcely less decided and universal than it does in the case of our highest scientific convictions.”

Fisher, Supernat. Origin of Christianity, 572—“What then is the purport and force of the several arguments for the existence of God? We reply that these proofs are the different modes in which faith expresses itself and seeks confirmation. In them faith, or the object of faith, is more exactly conceived and defined, and in them is found a corroboration, not arbitrary but substantial and valuable, of that faith which springs from the soul itself. Such proofs, therefore, are neither on the one hand sufficient to create and sustain faith, nor are they on the other hand to be set aside as of no value.” A. J. Barrett: “The arguments are not so much a bridge in themselves, as they are guys, to hold firm the great suspension-bridge of intuition, by which we pass the gulf from man to God. Or, while they are not a ladder by which we may reach heaven, they are the Ossa on Pelion, from whose combined height we may descry heaven.”

Anselm: “Negligentia mihi videtur, si postquam confirmati sumus in fide non studemus quod credimus intelligere.” Bradley, Appearance and Reality: “Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.” Illingworth, Div. and Hum. Personality, lect. III—“Belief in a personal God is an instinctive judgment, progressively justified by reason.” Knight, Essays in Philosophy, 241—The arguments are “historical memorials of the efforts of the human race to vindicate to itself the existence of a reality of which it is conscious, but which it cannot perfectly define.” H. Fielding, The Hearts of Men, 313—“Creeds are the grammar of religion. They are to religion what grammar is to speech. Words are the expression of our wants; grammar is the theory formed afterwards. Speech never proceeded from grammar, but the reverse. As speech progresses and changes from unknown causes, grammar must follow.” Pascal: “The heart has reasons of its own which the reason does not know.” Frances Power Cobbe: “Intuitions are God’s tuitions.” On the whole subject, see Cudworth, Intel. System, 3:42; Calderwood, Philos. of Infinite, 150 sq.; Curtis, Human Element in Inspiration, 242; Peabody, in Andover Rev., July, 1884; Hahn, History of Arguments for Existence of God; Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 8-34; Am. Jour. Theol., Jan. 1906:53-71.

Hegel, in his Logic, page 3, speaking of the disposition to regard the proofs of God’s existence as the only means of producing faith in God, says: “Such a doctrine would find its parallel, if we said that eating was impossible before we had acquired a knowledge of the chemical, botanical and zoölogical qualities of our food; and that we must delay digestion till we had finished the study of anatomy and physiology.” It is a mistake to suppose that there can be no religious life without a correct theory of life. Must I refuse to drink water or to breathe air, until I can manufacture both for myself? Some things are given to us. Among these things are “grace and truth”_ (John 1:17; __cf.__ 9)_. But there are ever those who are willing to take nothing as a free gift, and who insist on working out all knowledge, as well as all salvation, by processes of their own. Pelagianism, with its denial of the doctrines of grace, is but the further development of a rationalism which refuses to accept primitive truths unless these can be logically demonstrated. Since the existence of the soul, of the world, and of God cannot be proved in this way, rationalism is led to curtail, or to misinterpret, the deliverances of consciousness, and hence result certain systems now to be mentioned.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

III. Erroneous Explanations, And Conclusion

Any correct explanation of the universe must postulate an intuitive knowledge of the existence of the external world, of self, and of God. The desire for scientific unity, however, has occasioned attempts to reduce these three factors to one, and according as one or another of the three has been regarded as the all-inclusive principle, the result has been Materialism, Materialistic Idealism, or Idealistic Pantheism. This scientific impulse is better satisfied by a system which we may designate as Ethical Monism.

We may summarize the present chapter as follows: 1. Materialism: Universe = Atoms. Reply: Atoms can do nothing without force, and can be nothing (intelligible) without ideas. 2. Materialistic Idealism: Universe = Force + Ideas. Reply: Ideas belong to Mind, and Force can be exerted only by Will. 3. Idealistic Pantheism: Universe = Immanent and Impersonal Mind and Will. Reply: Spirit in man shows that the Infinite Spirit must be Transcendent and Personal Mind and Will. We are led from these three forms of error to a conclusion which we may denominate 4. Ethical Monism: Universe = Finite, partial, graded manifestation of the divine Life; Matter being God’s self-limitation under the law of necessity, Humanity being God’s self-limitation under the law of freedom, Incarnation and Atonement being God’s self-limitations under the law of grace. Metaphysical Monism, or the doctrine of one Substance, Principle, or Ground of Being, is consistent with Psychological Dualism, or the doctrine that the soul is personally distinct from matter on the one hand and from God on the other.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

I. Materialism

Materialism is that method of thought which gives priority to matter, rather than to mind, in its explanations of the universe. Upon this view, material atoms constitute the ultimate and fundamental reality of which all things, rational and irrational, are but combinations and phenomena. Force is regarded as a universal and inseparable property of matter.

The element of truth in materialism is the reality of the external world. Its error is in regarding the external world as having original and independent existence, and in regarding mind as its product.

Materialism regards atoms as the bricks of which the material universe, the house we inhabit, is built. Sir William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) estimates that, if a drop of water were magnified to the size of our earth, the atoms of which it consists would certainly appear larger than boy’s marbles, and yet would be smaller than billiard balls. Of these atoms, all things, visible and invisible, are made. Mind, with all its activities, is a combination or phenomenon of atoms. “Man ist was er iszt: ohne Phosphor kein Gedanke”—“One is what he eats: without phosphorus, no thought.” Ethics is a bill of fare; and worship, like heat, is a mode of motion. Agassiz, however, wittily asked: “Are fishermen, then, more intelligent than farmers, because they eat so much fish, and therefore take in more phosphorus?”

It is evident that much is here attributed to atoms which really belongs to force. Deprive atoms of force, and all that remains is extension, which = space = zero. Moreover, “if atoms are extended, they cannot be ultimate, for extension implies divisibility, and that which is conceivably divisible cannot be a philosophical ultimate. But, if atoms are not extended, then even an infinite multiplication and combination of them could not produce an extended substance. Furthermore, an atom that is neither extended substance nor thinking substance is inconceivable. The real ultimate is force, and this force cannot be exerted by nothing, but, as we shall hereafter see, can be exerted only by a personal Spirit, for this alone possesses the characteristics of reality, namely, definiteness, unity, and activity.”

Not only force but also intelligence must be attributed to atoms, before they can explain any operation of nature. Herschel says not only that “the force of gravitation seems like that of a universal will,” but that the atoms themselves, in recognizing each other in order to combine, show a great deal of “presence of mind.” Ladd, Introd. to Philosophy, 269—“A distinguished astronomer has said that every body in the solar system is behaving as if it knew precisely how it ought to behave in consistency with its own nature, and with the behavior of every other body in the same system.... Each atom has danced countless millions of miles, with countless millions of different partners, many of which required an important modification of its mode of motion, without ever departing from the correct step or the right time.” J. P. Cooke, Credentials of Science, 104, 177, suggests that something more than atoms is needed to explain the universe. A correlating Intelligence and Will must be assumed. Atoms by themselves would be like a heap of loose nails which need to be magnetized if they are to hold together. All structures would be resolved, and all forms of matter would disappear, if the Presence which sustains them were withdrawn. The atom, like the monad of Leibnitz, is “parvus in suo genere deus”—“a little god in its nature”—only because it is the expression of the mind and will of an immanent God.

Plato speaks of men who are “dazzled by too near a look at material things.” They do not perceive that these very material things, since they can be interpreted only in terms of spirit, must themselves be essentially spiritual. Materialism is the explanation of a world of which we know something—the world of mind—by a world of which we know next to nothing—the world of matter. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 297, 298—“How about your material atoms and brain-molecules? They have no real existence save as objects of thought, and therefore the very thought, which you say your atoms produce, turns out to be the essential precondition of their own existence.” With this agree the words of Dr. Ladd: “Knowledge of matter involves repeated activities of sensation and reflection, of inductive and deductive inference, of intuitional belief in substance. These are all activities of mind. Only as the mind has a self-conscious life, is any knowledge of what matter is, or can do, to be gained.... Everything is real which is the permanent subject of changing states. That which touches, feels, sees, is more real than that which is touched, felt, seen.”

H. N. Gardner, Presb. Rev., 1885:301, 665, 666—“Mind gives to matter its chief meaning,—hence matter alone can never explain the universe.” Gore, Incarnation, 31—“Mind is not the product of nature, but the necessary constituent of nature, considered as an ordered knowable system.” Fraser, Philos. of Theism: “An immoral act must originate in the immoral agent; a physical effect is not known to originate in its physical cause.” Matter, inorganic and organic, presupposes mind; but it is not true that mind presupposes matter. LeConte: “If I could remove your brain cap, what would I see? Only physical changes. But you—what do you perceive? Consciousness, thought, emotion, will. Now take external nature, the Cosmos. The observer from the outside sees only physical phenomena. But must there not be in this case also—on the other side—psychical phenomena, a Self, a Person, a Will?”

The impossibility of finding in matter, regarded as mere atoms, any of the attributes of a cause, has led to a general abandonment of this old Materialism of Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Condillac, Holbach, Feuerbach, Büchner; and Materialistic Idealism has taken its place, which instead of regarding force as a property of matter, regards matter as a manifestation of force. From this section we therefore pass to Materialistic Idealism, and inquire whether the universe can be interpreted simply as a system of force and of ideas. A quarter of a century ago, John Tyndall, in his opening address as President of the British Association at Belfast, declared that in matter was to be found the promise and potency of every form of life. But in 1898, Sir William Crookes, in his address as President of that same British Association, reversed the apothegm, and declared that in life he saw the promise and potency of every form of matter. See Lange, History of Materialism; Janet, Materialism; Fabri, Materialismus; Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Materialismus; but esp., Stallo, Modern Physics, 148-170.

In addition to the general error indicated above, we object to this system as follows:

1. In knowing matter, the mind necessarily judges itself to be different in kind, and higher in rank, than the matter which it knows.

We here state simply an intuitive conviction. The mind, in using its physical organism and through it bringing external nature into its service, recognizes itself as different from and superior to matter. See Martineau, quoted in Brit. Quar., April, 1882:173, and the article of President Thomas Hill in the Bibliotheca Sacra, April, 1852:353—“All that is really given by the act of sense-perception is the existence of the conscious self, floating in boundless space and boundless time, surrounded and sustained by boundless power. The material moved, which we at first think the great reality, is only the shadow of a real being, which is immaterial.” Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 317—“Imagine an infinitesimal being in the brain, watching the action of the molecules, but missing the thought. So science observes the universe, but misses God.” Hebberd, in Journ. Spec. Philos., April, 1886:135.

Robert Browning, “the subtlest assertor of the soul in song,” makes the Pope, in The Ring and the Book, say: “Mind is not matter, nor from matter, but above.” So President Francis Wayland: “What is mind?” “No matter.” “What is matter?” “Never mind.” Sully, The Human Mind, 2:369—“Consciousness is a reality wholly disparate from material processes, and cannot therefore be resolved into these. Materialism makes that which is immediately known (our mental states) subordinate to that which is only indirectly or inferentially known (external things). Moreover, a material entity existing per se out of relation to a cogitant mind is an absurdity.” As materialists work out their theory, their so-called matter grows more and more ethereal, until at last a stage is reached when it cannot be distinguished from what others call spirit. Martineau: “The matter they describe is so exceedingly clever that it is up to anything, even to writing Hamlet and discovering its own evolution. In short, but for the spelling of its name, it does not seem to differ appreciably from our old friends, Mind and God.” A. W. Momerie, in Christianity and Evolution, 54—“A being conscious of his unity cannot possibly be formed out of a number of atoms unconscious of their diversity. Any one who thinks this possible is capable of asserting that half a dozen fools might be compounded into a single wise man.”

2. Since the mind’s attributes of (a) continuous identity, (b) self-activity, (c) unrelatedness to space, are different in kind and higher in rank than the attributes of matter, it is rational to conclude that mind is itself different in kind from matter and higher in rank than matter.

This is an argument from specific qualities to that which underlies and explains the qualities. (a) Memory proves personal identity. This is not an identity of material atoms, for atoms change. The molecules that come cannot remember those that depart. Some immutable part in the brain? organized or unorganized? Organized decays; unorganized = soul. (b) Inertia shows that matter is not self-moving. It acts only as it is acted upon. A single atom would never move. Two portions are necessary, and these, in order to useful action, require adjustment by a power which does not belong to matter. Evolution of the universe inexplicable, unless matter were first moved by some power outside itself. See Duke of Argyll, Reign of Law, 92. (c) The highest activities of mind are independent of known physical conditions. Mind controls and subdues the body. It does not cease to grow when the growth of the body ceases. When the body nears dissolution, the mind often asserts itself most strikingly.

Kant: “Unity of apprehension is possible on account of the transcendental unity of self-consciousness.” I get my idea of unity from the indivisible self. Stout, Manual of Psychology, 53—“So far as matter exists independently of its presentation to a cognitive subject, it cannot have material properties, such as extension, hardness, color, weight, etc.... The world of material phenomena presupposes a system of immaterial agency. In this immaterial system the individual consciousness originates. This agency, some say, is thought, others will.” A. J. Dubois, in Century Magazine, Dec. 1894:228—Since each thought involves a molecular movement in the brain, and this moves the whole universe, mind is the secret of the universe, and we should interpret nature as the expression of underlying purpose. Science is mind following the traces of mind. There can be no mind without antecedent mind. That all human beings have the same mental modes shows that these modes are not due simply to environment. Bowne: “Things act upon the mind and the mind reacts with knowledge. Knowing is not a passive receiving, but an active construing.” Wundt: “We are compelled to admit that the physical development is not the cause, but much more the effect, of psychical development.”

Paul Carus, Soul of Man, 52-64, defines soul as “the form of an organism,” and memory as “the psychical aspect of the preservation of form in living substance.” This seems to give priority to the organism rather than to the soul, regardless of the fact that without soul no organism is conceivable. Clay cannot be the ancestor of the potter, nor stone the ancestor of the mason, nor wood the ancestor of the carpenter. W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 99—“The intelligibleness of the universe to us is strong and ever present evidence that there is an all-pervading rational Mind, from which the universe received its character.” We must add to the maxim, “Cogito, ergo sum,” the other maxim, “Intelligo, ergo Deus est.” Pfleiderer, Philos. Relig., 1:273—“The whole idealistic philosophy of modern times is in fact only the carrying out and grounding of the conviction that Nature is ordered by Spirit and for Spirit, as a subservient means for its eternal ends; that it is therefore not, as the heathen naturalism thought, the one and all, the last and highest of things, but has the Spirit, and the moral Ends over it, as its Lord and Master.” The consciousness by which things are known precedes the things themselves, in the order of logic, and therefore cannot be explained by them or derived from them. See Porter, Human Intellect, 22, 131, 132. McCosh, Christianity and Positivism, chap. on Materialism; Divine Government, 71-94; Intuitions, 140-145. Hopkins, Study of Man, 53-56; Morell, Hist. of Philosophy, 318-334; Hickok, Rational Cosmology, 403; Theol. Eclectic, 6:555; Appleton, Works, 1:151-154; Calderwood, Moral Philos., 235; Ulrici, Leib und Seele, 688-725, and synopsis, in Bap. Quar., July, 1873:380.

3. Mind rather than matter must therefore be regarded as the original and independent entity, unless it can be scientifically demonstrated that mind is material in its origin and nature. But all attempts to explain the psychical from the physical, or the organic from the inorganic, are acknowledged failures. The most that can be claimed is, that psychical are always accompanied by physical changes, and that the inorganic is the basis and support of the organic. Although the precise connection between the mind and the body is unknown, the fact that the continuity of physical changes is unbroken in times of psychical activity renders it certain that mind is not transformed physical force. If the facts of sensation indicate the dependence of mind upon body, the facts of volition equally indicate the dependence of body upon mind.

The chemist can produce organic, but not organized, substances. The life cannot be produced from matter. Even in living things progress is secured only by plan. Multiplication of desired advantage, in the Darwinian scheme, requires a selecting thought; in other words the natural selection is artificial selection after all. John Fiske, Destiny of the Creature, 109—“Cerebral physiology tells us that, during the present life, although thought and feeling are always manifested in connection with a peculiar form of matter, yet by no possibility can thought and feeling be in any sense the product of matter. Nothing could be more grossly unscientific than the famous remark of Cabanis, that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. It is not even correct to say that thought goes on in the brain. What goes on in the brain is an amazingly complex series of molecular movements, with which thought and feeling are in some unknown way correlated, not as effects or as causes, but as concomitants.”

Leibnitz’s “preëstablished harmony” indicates the difficulty of defining the relation between mind and matter. They are like two entirely disconnected clocks, the one of which has a dial and indicates the hour by its hands, while the other without a dial simultaneously indicates the same hour by its striking apparatus. To Leibnitz the world is an aggregate of atomic souls leading absolutely separate lives. There is no real action of one upon another. Everything in the monad is the development of its individual unstimulated activity. Yet there is a preëstablished harmony of them all, arranged from the beginning by the Creator. The internal development of each monad is so adjusted to that of all the other monads, as to produce the false impression that they are mutually influenced by each other (see Johnson, in Andover Rev., Apl. 1890:407, 408). Leibnitz’s theory involves the complete rejection of the freedom of the human will in the libertarian sense. To escape from this arbitrary connection of mind and matter in Leibnitz’s preëstablished harmony, Spinoza rejected the Cartesian doctrine of two God-created substances, and maintained that there is but one fundamental substance, namely, God himself (see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 172).

There is an increased flow of blood to the head in times of mental activity. Sometimes, in intense heat of literary composition, the blood fairly surges through the brain. No diminution, but further increase, of physical activity accompanies the greatest efforts of mind. Lay a man upon a balance; fire a pistol shot or inject suddenly a great thought into his mind; at once he will tip the balance, and tumble upon his head. Romanes, Mind and Motion, 21—“Consciousness causes physical changes, but not vice versa. To say that mind is a function of motion is to say that mind is a function of itself, since motion exists only for mind. Better suppose the physical and the psychical to be only one, as in the violin sound and vibration are one. Volition is a cause in nature because it has cerebration for its obverse and inseparable side. But if there is no motion without mind, then there can be no universe without God.”... 34—“Because within the limits of human experience mind is only known as associated with brain, it does not follow that mind cannot exist without brain. Helmholtz’s explanation of the effect of one of Beethoven’s sonatas on the brain may be perfectly correct, but the explanation of the effect given by a musician may be equally correct within its category.”

Herbert Spencer, Principles of Psychology, 1:§ 56—“Two things, mind and nervous action, exist together, but we cannot imagine how they are related” (see review of Spencer’s Psychology, in N. Englander, July, 1873). Tyndall, Fragments of Science, 120—“The passage from the physics of the brain to the facts of consciousness is unthinkable.” Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion, 95—“The metamorphosis of vibrations into conscious ideas is a miracle, in comparison with which the floating of iron or the turning of water into wine is easily credible.” Bain, Mind and Body, 131—There is no break in the physical continuity. See Brit. Quar., Jan. 1874; art. by Herbert, on Mind and the Science of Energy; McCosh, Intuitions, 145; Talbot, in Bap. Quar., Jan. 1871. On Geulincx’s “occasional causes” and Descartes’s dualism, see Martineau, Types, 144, 145, 156-158, and Study, 2:77.

4. The materialistic theory, denying as it does the priority of spirit, can furnish no sufficient cause for the highest features of the existing universe, namely, its personal intelligences, its intuitive ideas, its free-will, its moral progress, its beliefs in God and immortality.

Herbert, Modern Realism Examined: “Materialism has no physical evidence of the existence of consciousness in others. As it declares our fellow men to be destitute of free volition, so it should declare them destitute of consciousness; should call them, as well as brutes, pure automata. If physics are all, there is no God, but there is also no man, existing.” Some of the early followers of Descartes used to kick and beat their dogs, laughing meanwhile at their cries and calling them the “creaking of the machine.” Huxley, who calls the brutes “conscious automata,” believes in the gradual banishment, from all regions of human thought, of what we call spirit and spontaneity: “A spontaneous act is an absurdity; it is simply an effect that is uncaused.”

James, Psychology, 1:149—“The girl in Midshipman Easy could not excuse the illegitimacy of her child by saying that ‘it was a very small one.’ And consciousness, however small, is an illegitimate birth in any philosophy that starts without it, and yet professes to explain all facts by continued evolution.... Materialism denies reality to almost all the impulses which we most cherish. Hence it will fail of universal adoption.” Clerk Maxwell, Life, 391—“The atoms are a very tough lot, and can stand a great deal of knocking about, and it is strange to find a number of them combining to form a man of feeling.... 426—I have looked into most philosophical systems, and I have seen none that will work without a God.” President E. B. Andrews: “Mind is the only substantive thing in this universe, and all else is adjective. Matter is not primordial, but is a function of spirit.” Theodore Parker: “Man is the highest product of his own history. The discoverer finds nothing so tall or grand as himself, nothing so valuable to him. The greatest star is at the small end of the telescope—the star that is looking, not looked after, nor looked at.”

Materialism makes men to be “a serio-comic procession of wax figures or of cunning casts in clay” (Bowne). Man is “the cunningest of clocks.” But if there were nothing but matter, there could be no materialism, for a system of thought, like materialism, implies consciousness. Martineau, Types, preface, xii, xiii—“It was the irresistible pleading of the moral consciousness which first drove me to rebel against the limits of the merely scientific conception. It became incredible to me that nothing was possible except the actual.... Is there then no ought to be, other than what is?” Dewey, Psychology, 84—“A world without ideal elements would be one in which the home would be four walls and a roof to keep out cold and wet; the table a mess for animals; and the grave a hole in the ground.” Omar Khayyám, Rubaiyat, stanza 72—“And that inverted bowl they call the Sky, Whereunder crawling coop’d we live and die, Lift not your hands to It for help—for it As impotently moves as you or I.” Victor Hugo: “You say the soul is nothing but the resultant of bodily powers? Why then is my soul more luminous when my bodily powers begin to fail? Winter is on my head, and eternal spring is in my heart.... The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me.”

Diman, Theistic Argument, 348—“Materialism can never explain the fact that matter is always combined with force. Coördinate principles? then dualism, instead of monism. Force cause of matter? then we preserve unity, but destroy materialism; for we trace matter to an immaterial source. Behind multiplicity of natural forces we must postulate some single power—which can be nothing but coördinating mind.” Mark Hopkins sums up Materialism in Princeton Rev., Nov. 1879:490—“1. Man, who is a person, is made by a thing, i. e., matter. 2. Matter is to be worshiped as man’s maker, if anything is to be (Rom. 1:25). 3. Man is to worship himself—his God is his belly.” See also Martineau, Religion and Materialism, 25-31, Types, 1: preface, xii, xiii, and Study, 1:248, 250, 345; Christlieb, Modern Doubt and Christian Belief, 145-161; Buchanan, Modern Atheism, 247, 248; McCosh, in International Rev., Jan. 1895; Contemp. Rev., Jan. 1875, art.: Man Transcorporeal; Calderwood, Relations of Mind and Brain; Laycock, Mind and Brain; Diman, Theistic Argument, 358; Wilkinson, in Present Day Tracts, 3:no. 17; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:487-499; A. H. Strong, Philos. and Relig., 31-38.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us