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THE EXISTENCE OF GOD - CHAPTER 1.

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, Systematic Theology, 1:366. Other definitions are those of Calovius: “Essentia spiritualis infinita”; Ebrad: “The eternal, uncaused, independent, necessary Being, that hath active power, life, wisdom, goodness, and whatever 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 the 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 of 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) 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 thing in entire ignorance of the principles which underlie and determine thinking. But as anatomy reveals that the apparently simple act of waling 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 you might to do something difficult, e.g. to shut a door against a furious wind, and you recognize Self and Nature — casual will, over against external causality”; 201 — “Hence our fellow feeling with Nature”; 65 — “As Perception gives 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 ß244 — “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 volition’s, 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 Muller, 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; Bibliotheca Sacra, July, 1872:533, and January, 1873:204; Miller, Fetich in theology, 110-122; Fisher, Essays, 565-572; Tulloch, Christian Belief, 75, 76; Raymond, Syst. Theology, 1:247-262; Bascom, Science of Mind, 256, 247; Knight, Studies in Philos. And Lit, 155-224; A.H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 76-89.

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 contrary to all we know of the laws of mental growth.

Cicero, De Natura Deorum, 1:17 — “Intelligi necesse est esse deos, quoiam 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 rational ideas are conditioned by the sense experience and are sequent to it, is unquestioned by anyone; and that experience shows a successive order of manifestation 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 gave been the direct motives which cooperated 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 preexisted 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 preexisted 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 in 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 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, Introduction, 1. See also Basom, in Bibliotheca Sacra, 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 nonexistence.

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 knockdown 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 Knowing, 59 — “The cogito , in barbarous Latin = cogitans sum : thinking is self-consciousness 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 on one lives 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 incausation 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 hew was.” On the criteria of first truths, see Porter, Human Intellect, 510, 511. On denial of them, see Shedd, dogmatic Theology, 1:213.

II. THE EXISTENCE OF GOD A FIRST TRUTH.

1. 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 Muller, 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, Gotzebduebst 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 fur deutsche Theologie, 1860, and vol. 5L669; Max Muller, 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 Bibliotheca Sacra, 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, does yet indirectly manifest the existence of such an idea in their minds and its positive influence over them.

Comnte 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, Soencer gives us a 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 oJ qeo>v and Sophocles of oJ me>gav qeo>v . The term for “God” is identical in all the Indo-European languages, and therefore belonged to the time before those languages separated; sees Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 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 skeptic, but he said to Ferguson, as they walked on a starry night: “Adam, there is a God!” Voltaire prayed in an alpine thunderstorm. Shelley6 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 shadow fly.” Strauss worships the Cosmos, because “order and law, reason and goodness” are the soul of it.

Renan trusts in goodness, design, and 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 limitation, 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 is 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 heavens above, and by what he knew of causality within. For the evidence of a universal recognition of a superior power, see Flint, Antitheistic theories, 250-289, 522-533; Renouf, Hibbert Lectures for 1879:100; Bibliotheca Sacra, 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. 2. 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. 1893:113526 — “There is no consciousness of self 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 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, Dogmatic Theology, 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 truer, 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 ß7 — “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, Beginning of Ethics, — “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, it’s many a word 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 Idea of God, in Studies in Philos. Of Relig. And History; Martineau, Religion and Materialism, 45; Bishop Temple, Bampton Lectures, 1884:37-65. 3. 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 senseperception, 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 intelligence 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, no contradicting the fundamental law of uniformity but accounting for it.”

Ritchie, Darwin and Hegel, 18 — “There is such a thing as error; but error 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 thing 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 other on the tree. Newton argued from the fall of an apple to gravitation in the moon and through the solar system.

Rowland argued from the chemistry of our world to that of Siruis. In all such argument there is assumed a unifying thought and a thinking Deity.

This Tyndall’s “scientific use of the imagination.” “Nourished,” he says, “by knowledge partially won, and bounded by cooperant reason, imagination is the mightiest instrument of the physical discoverer.” What Tyndall call “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 Geothe 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 thing Deity exists”; 658 — “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, 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”; 500 — “The existence of a personal God is a necessary datum of scientific knowledge.” So also, Fisher, Essays on Supernat. Prigin 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 of it is realizes 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 is, 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, the universe and history are ordered and administered in harmony with reason; then suffering and sorrow can be neither meaningless or 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. Proportions, order, harmony, unity in diversity — all these things 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 being, are symbols and manifestations of him who is the author and lover of beauty, and who is himself in 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 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, Bibliotheca Sacra, 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; Bibliotheca Sacra, 7:415- 425; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:197; Trendelenburg, Logische Untersuchungen, ch. “Zweck”; Ulrci Gott un die Natur, 540-626; Lachilier, 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, ‘Tomorrow,’ ‘The Unknown,’ ‘The Future,’ trusts that Power alone, Nor dares disown.” Jones, Robert Browning, — “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, But 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 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.”

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 myth, in New Englander, 1878:355 — We cannot derive from a sundial our knowledge of the existence of a sun. The sundial 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 it 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 service 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 of a being from whom such a revelation might come. If the knowledge thus handed down is simply knowledge of the results of the reasoning of the race, then the knowledge of God comes originally from reasoning — an explanation that 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 Ethic, 453, and in Bibliotheca Sacra, 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” ( <19B110> Psalm 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, not 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 Lock (Essay of 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 insensu,” Leibnitz replied: “Nisi intellectu ipse.” Consciousness is sometime 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 Gottesbewusstein = not “consciousness of God” but “knowledge of God”; Bewesstein 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 — “Develop 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 Zooilogy, 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 deliverance 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, — “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 fantasies, 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 amúba 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 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 today 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 Today, 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 arc 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 ease 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 skeptics, 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 Win. 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 Win. 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 knothole 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 reasoning cannot itself prove that which is presupposed in all 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 indicate I.

Substantially the same error is committed by H. B. Smith, Introduction 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. All the others, as the condition of every mental process and the guarantee of its validity presuppose this idea.

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 ( Matthew 5:8 — “the pure in heart...shall see God”; Revelation 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 in tuition 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”; Timothy 1:12 — “I know him whom I have believed”).

Plato said, for substance, that there can be o[ti oi=den without something of the aj oi=den . 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; Lownes, 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 Bibliotheca Sacra, 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, 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