Chapter IV: Part 4

The following seem sufficient criteria of their validity and truthworthiness. 1. The persistence with which they appear and reappear after experimental reflection upon them, the obstinacy with which they reassert themselves when silenced, the tenacity with which they cling to us. 2. Their historical permanence; the confirmation of ages and of generations. The hold they have upon the general mind of the race is the sign of some 'root of endurance' planted firmly in the soil of human nature. If 'deep in the general heart of men, their power survives,' we may accept them as true, or interpret them as a phase of some deeper yet kindred truth, of which they are the popular distortion. 3. The interior harmony which they exhibit with each other, and with the rest of our psychological nature; each of the intuitions being in harmony with the entire circle, and with the whole realm of knowledge. If any alleged intuition should come into collision with any other and disturb it, there would be good reason for suspecting its genuineness; and in that case the lower and less authenticated must always yield to the higher and better attested. But if the critical intellect carrying our intuition (if we may so speak in a figure) round the circle of our nature, and in turn placing it in juxtaposition with the rest, finds that no collision ensues, we may safely conclude that the witness of that intuition is true. 4. If the results of its action and influence are such as to elevate and etherealize our nature, its validity may be assumed. This is no test by itself, for an erroneous belief might for a time even elevate the mind that held it; as the intellectual life evoked by many of the erroneous theories and exploded hypotheses of the past has been great. But no error could do so permanently. No illusion could survive as an educative and elevating power over humanity; and no alleged instinct could sustain its claim, and vindicate its presumptive title, if it could not stand the test we mention. A theoretic error is seen to be such when we attempt to reduce it to practice; as a hidden crack or fissure in a metal becomes visible when a strain is applied, or the folly of an ideal Utopia is seen in the actual life of a mixed commonwealth. Many of those scientific guesses which have served as good provisional hypotheses, have been abandoned in the actual working of them out, and so the flaw that lurks within an alleged intuition, (if there be a flaw) will become apparent when we try to apply it in actual life, and take it as a regulative principle in action. Thus, take the belief in the Divine existence, attested, as we affirm, by intuition, and apply it in the act of worship or adoration. Does that belief (which fulfils the conditions of our previous tests,--for it appears everywhere and clings tenaciously to man, and comes into collision with no other normal tendency of our nature, or defrauds any instinct of its due) does it elevate the nature of him who holds it? The reply of history is conclusive, and its attestation is abundantly clear. The power of the theistic faith over the rest of human nature is such that it has quickened the other faculties into a more vigorous life. Its moral leverage has been vast, while it has sharpened the æsthetic sense to some of its most delicate perceptions, and in some instances brought a new accession of intellectual power. The intuition which men trust in the dark, gradually leads the whole nature towards the light. Its dimness and its dumbness are exchanged for clearness and an intelligible voice; and while it thus grows luminous, it gains new power, and our confidence in its verdict strengthens.

We have now stated what seems to us the general nature of the theistic intuition, and added one or two criteria by which all intuitions must be tested. It remains that we indicate more precisely the phases which it assumes; and the channels in which it works. Though ultimate and insusceptible of analysis, it has a triple character. It manifests itself in the consciousness which the human mind has of the Infinite (an intellectual phase); in its perception of the world-soul, which is Nature's 'open secret' revealed to the poet (an æsthetic phase); and in the act of worship, in which an object correlative to the worshipper is revealed in his very sense of dependence (a moral and religious phase).

It is not only essential to the validity of the theistic intuition that the human mind has a positive though imperfect knowledge of the infinite, but the assertion of this is involved in the very intuition itself. If we had no positive knowledge of the source it seeks to reach, the instinct, benumbed as by an intellectual frost, and unable to rise, would be fatally paralysed; or if it could move along its finite area, it would wander helplessly, feeling after its object, 'if haply it might find it.' And it will be found that all who deny the validity of our intuition, either limit us to the knowledge of phenomena, or while admitting that we have a certain knowledge of finite substance adopt the cold theory of nescience. From the earliest Greek schools, or from the earlier speculation of the Chinese mind, a powerful band of thinkers have denied to man the knowledge of aught beyond phenomena, and from Confucius to Comte the list is an ample one. In our own day this school includes some of the clearest and subtilest minds devoted to philosophy. Comte, Lewes, Mill, Mr. Bain, Herbert Spencer, and the majority of our best scientific guides (however they differ in detail) agree in the common postulate that all that man can know, and intelligibly reason about, are phenomena, and the laws of these phenomena, 'that which doth appear.' There is, however, a positivist 'religion,' which consists now in the worship of phenomena, and again in homage paid to mystery, to the unknown and the unknowable which lies beyond the known. Comte deified man and nature, in their phenomenal aspects, without becoming pantheist; and the instinct of worship though outlawed from his philosophy (which denies the existence of its object), asserted itself within his nature--at least in the second period of his intellectual career--and led him not only to deify humanity, but to prescribe a minute and cumbrous ritual, as puerile as it is inconsistent. It is true that worship is philosophically an excrescence on his system. The advanced secularist who disowns it is logically more consistent with the first principle of positivism. To adore the _grande être_ as personified in woman is as great a mimicry of worship as to offer homage to the law of gravitation. Comte, says his acutest critic, 'forgot that the wine of the real Presence was poured out, and adored the empty cup.' But we may note in this latter graft upon his earlier system a testimony to the operation of that very intuition which positivism disowns; its uncouth form, when distorted by an alien philosophy, being a more expressive witness to its irrepressible character.

Mr. Spencer, on the other hand, with some of our scientific teachers, bids us bow down before the unknown and unknowable power which subsists in the universe. The highest triumph of the human spirit, according to him, is to ascertain the laws of phenomena, and then to worship the dark abyss of the inscrutable beyond them. But there is surely neither humility nor sanity in worshipping darkness, any more than there would be in erecting an altar to chaos: and the advice seems strange coming from those who claim to be the special teachers of clear knowledge and comprehensible law. If we must at length erect an altar at all, we must have some knowledge of the existence to whom it is erected, and have some better reason for doing so than the blank and bland confession that we have not the smallest idea of its nature! Mr. Spencer undertakes to 'reconcile' the claims of science and religion; and he finds the rallying-point to be the recognition of mystery, into which all knowledge recedes. But if religion has any function, and a reconciliation between her and science be possible, the harmony cannot be effected by first denying the postulate from which religion starts, and quietly sweeping her into the background of the inconceivable, consigning her to the realm of the unknowable, and then proclaiming that the conciliation is complete. This is to silence or annihilate one of the two powers which the philosopher undertook to reconcile. It is annexation accomplished by conquest, the cessation of strife, effected by the destruction of one opposing force, not by an armistice, or the ratification of articles of peace. Mr. Spencer does not come between two combatants who are wounding each other needlessly, and bid each put his sword into its sheath, for they are brethren; but he turns round and (to his own satisfaction) slays one of them, and then informs the other that the reconciliation is effected.

We must therefore ask the positivist for his warrant, on the one hand, in denying the existence of a world of substance, underneath the fleeting phenomena of being, _out of which a revelation may emerge_, apprehensible by man; and on the other, in denying to man positive knowledge of the infinite as a substance. We must remind him that infinite and finite, absolute and relative, substance and phenomena, are terms of a relation: while we ask him for his warrant in differentiating these terms, and proclaiming that the one set are knowable and known, the others unknown and unknowable. He arbitrarily singles out one of the two factors which together constitute a relation, and are only known as complementary terms, and he bestows upon it a spurious honour, by proclaiming that it alone is intelligible, while he relegates the other term to the region of darkness. We ask him on what ground he does so? and whether the law of contrast does not render phenomena as unintelligible, without substance, as substance without phenomena? Can we pronounce the one to be known and the other unknown, merely because the former reaches us through the five gateways of sense, and the latter through the avenue of intuition? Now, no wise theist ever asserted that God was phenomenally known. God is no phenomenon, but the noumenal essence underlying all phenomena. We have admitted and contended that no study of the laws of the universe can give us direct information as to the first cause; for a first cause could never be revealed to the senses, nor be an inference deduced from the data which sense supplies. The assertion therefore, that nature (of which the physical sciences are the interpretation) does not reveal God by its phenomena, is as strongly asserted by the theist as by the positivist. It may reveal his footprints, but we only know whose foot has left its mark on nature when we have learned _from another source_ that He _is_. As little, however, can the laws of nature discredit faith in a first cause, which springs from a region at once beneath, above, and beyond phenomena. And our theistic faith is not an _inference_; it is a _postulate_: an axiomatic truth, affirmed on the report of that intuition, of which the root is planted so firmly in the soil of consciousness, that no form of the positivist philosophy can tear it thence. Let science, therefore, march as it will, and where it will, being hemmed in by the very laws of the universe which give rise to it, and of which it is the exposition, it cannot interfere with or encroach upon the theistic intuition. If there be a region behind phenomena and their laws, accessible to knowledge or to philosophic faith, no conclusion gathered from the scientific survey can touch it, whether to discredit or attest.

The fundamental doctrine of both the schools of nescience is the relativity of human knowledge, and that doctrine as taught by the Scottish psychologists (and notably by Scotland's greatest metaphysician since Hume, Sir William Hamilton) has been wrested out of their hands, and turned against the theism they also advocate. Mr. Spencer would exhibit them all as 'hoist with their own petard.' It is necessary, therefore, to enquire whether this doctrine of relativity favours a theory of nescience, or warrants a counter-doctrine of the knowledge of the infinite, or is indifferent to both.

With us the relativity of knowledge is a first principle in philosophy. But to affirm it, is merely to assert that all that is known occupies a fixed relation to the knower. It is to affirm nothing as to the character or contents of his knowledge. As regards the objects known we further maintain that they are apprehended only in their differences and contrasts. We know self only in its contrast with what is not self, a particular portion of matter only in its relation to other portions which surround and transcend it. So also and for the same reason, with the finite and the infinite. The one is not a positive notion, and the other negative; the one clear, and the other obscure. Both are equally clear, both sharply defined, so far as they are given us in relation. If the one notion suffers, the other suffers with it. In short, if we discharge any notion from all relation with its opposite or contrary, it ceases to be a notion at all. The finite, if we take it alone, is as inconceivable as the infinite, if we take it alone; phenomena by themselves are as incogitable as substance by itself: and the relative as a notion cut off from the absolute which antithetically bounds it, is not more intelligible than the absolute as an essence absolved from all relations. And thus the entire fabric of our knowledge being founded on contrasts, and arising out of differences, involving in its every datum another element hidden in the background, may be said to be a vast double chain of relatives mutually complementary. It looks ever in two directions, without and within, above and beneath, before and after.

We maintain, therefore, that we have positive knowledge of the infinite. Whosoever says that the infinite cannot be known contradicts himself. For he must possess a notion of it before he can deny that he has a positive knowledge of it, before he can predict aught regarding it. And so he says he cannot know what he says, though in another fashion, that he does know. It could never have come within the horizon of hypothetical knowledge, never have become the subject of discussion, unless positively (though inadequately) known; and thus the infinite stands as the antithetic background of the finite. Sir William Hamilton's and Dr. Mansel's doctrine of nescience, no less than Mr. Spencer's, we regard as absolute intellectual suicide. It implies that we have no knowledge of that which we are compelled to conceive in order to know that it is unknowable. We could not compare the two notions, if the one were unthinkable. For if all knowledge is a relation, in each act of knowing I must know both the terms related. The one term causes us no difficulty, being admitted on both sides. But the other which so perplexes our teachers of nescience, is, it must be owned, as to its contents a somewhat vague residuum. It is without an outline. It is not given us with the luminous clearness that its correlative is given. Nevertheless, it is a real term in a real relation. The moment we proceed to analyse our consciousness of the relative, we find it as the penumbra of the notion, its shadowy complement. We may never obtain more than a vague, and what we might call a moonlight view of it: nevertheless behold it we do; apprehend it we must.

But it is objected that as human knowledge is always finite, we can never have a positive apprehension of an infinite object; that as the subject of knowledge is necessarily finite, its object must be the same. Let us sift this objection.

I may know an object in itself as related to me the knower, or I may know it in its relation to other objects also known by me the knower. But in both and in all cases, knowledge is limited by the power of the knower, therefore it is always finite knowledge. But it may be finite knowledge of an infinite object, incomplete knowledge of a complete object, partial knowledge of a transcendent object. The boundary or fence may be within the faculty of the knower, while the object he imperfectly grasps may not only be infinite, but be known to transcend his faculties in the very act of conscious knowledge. For example, I may know that a line is infinite while I have only a finite knowledge of the points along which that line extends. And similarly my knowledge of the Infinite Mind is partial and incomplete, but it is clear and defined. It is definite knowledge of an indefinite object. We may have a partial knowledge not only of a part, but of the whole. Thus, I have a partial knowledge of a circle, because I know only a few of its properties; but it is not to a part of the circle that my partial knowledge extends, but to the whole which I know in part. In like manner as the Infinite Object has no parts, it is not of a portion of His being that we possess a partial knowledge, but of the whole. We know Him as we know the circle, inadequately yet directly, immediately, though in part. He is dark to us by excess of light. Thus, although our knowledge of the infinite may be _vivified_, it is not really _enlarged_ by goading our thought to wider and wider imaginings, or spurring our faculties onwards over areas of space, or intervals of time. That knowledge is directly revealed while we are apprehending any finite object, as its correlative and complementary antithesis.

Again it is said that to know the infinite is to know the sum of all reality, and as that would include the universe and its source together, it must necessarily include on the one hand the knower along with his knowledge, and on the other all the possibilities of existence. The possibility of our knowing the Infinite Being as distinct from the universe is denied, since infinite existence is said to be coextensive with the whole universe of things. But that the source of the universe must necessarily exhaust existence and contain within himself all actual being is a mere theoretic assumption. The presence of the finite does not limit the infinite as if the area of the latter were contracted by so much of the former as exists within it. For the relation of the infinite being to the finite is not similar to the relation between infinite space and a segment of it. It is true that so much of finite space is so much cut out of the whole area of infinite space--though, if the remainder is infinite, the portion removed will not really limit it. But as our intuition of the infinite has no resemblance to our knowledge of space, we believe that the relations which their respective objects sustain have no affinity with each other. The intuition of God is a purely spiritual revelation, informing us not of the quantity but of the quality of the supreme being in the universe. And to affirm that the finite spirit of man standing in a fixed relation to the infinite spirit of God limits it, by virtue of that relation, is covertly to introduce a spatial concept into a region to which it is utterly foreign, and which it has no right to enter.[16]

We therefore maintain, in opposition to the teachers of nescience, that a positive knowledge of the Infinite is competent to man, because involved in his very consciousness of the finite. And when psychologically analysed, this intuition explains and vindicates itself.

But there is another aspect, no less important, in which it may be regarded. To say that the infinite is wholly inscrutable by man, is to limit not man's faculty only, but the possibilities of the divine nature itself. If God cannot unveil himself to man through the openings of those clouds which ordinarily conceal His presence, can His resources be illimitable, can He be the infinitely perfect? It is said, on the one hand, that the unknown Force reveals itself in the laws of nature, but cannot disclose its essence; and, on the other, that the infinite being reveals His handiwork, from which He permits us to infer His existence, but cannot reveal Himself. Such assertions are either subtle instances of verbal jugglery or manifest contradictions in terms. All revelation of whatever kind, presupposes some knowledge of the revealer. That knowledge may be imparted the moment the revelation is made, or prior to it, and from an independent source; but no revelation could be made, were the being to whom it was addressed ignorant of the source whence it came. Is there really any special difficulty in supposing that the infinite intelligence can directly disclose His nature to a creature fashioned in His image, the disclosure quickening the latent power of intuition, which, thus touched from above, springs forth to meet its source and object?

The question between the theist and the positivist is brought to its real issue when the latter is forced to recognise that the God of theism is no inference from phenomena, but if we may so speak, a _postulate of intuition_. And hence it is so necessary to concede frankly the failure of the teleological argument from final causes, as well as the ontological argument from the necessary notions of the intellect. We not only admit, we are forward to proclaim that by inductive science we can never rise higher than phenomena; and hence at the end of our researches we should be no nearer God than at the outset. But though we cannot reach Him by induction, we may do so before we begin our induction, by simply giving the intuition of the soul free scope to rise towards its source. And to dislodge the theist from his position, his opponent must succeed in proving that this intuition, whose root springs from a region beneath phenomena, and which in its flight outsoars phenomena, is as baseless and unauthenticated as a dream.

There are two principles, one of them metaphysical, and the other scientific, which are helpful at this point in our inquiry. These are the principle of causality, and the doctrine of the correlation of forces, or the conservation of energy. We cannot discuss them at any length, but we shall briefly state their nature, and their relation to the theistic intuition.

The phenomena of nature (using that term in its widest sense) are not only a series of sequences, they are also the revelation of a mysterious Power or living Force. All that we perceive by the senses, and, inductively register in nature, is a series of phenomena, of which the laws of nature are the generalized expression and interpretation. But every change is a revelation not only of succession, but of causal power. No matter where we take our stand along the line of sequence, mental or material, always and at every point this conviction is flashed in upon the mind, 'there is a hidden Power behind.' But we instinctively ask, 'what is this power or force determining the changes of the universe?' Is it material or spiritual? Can the force which moves the particles of matter be material? We do not perceive it by the senses, which take note only of the modified phenomena of matter. It is neither visible, nor audible, nor tangible. It is invisible; must we not therefore believe it to be incorporeal? We cannot reach it by analysis. We conclude that it is not physical but hyper-physical, not natural but supranatural. We have an intellectual intuition of it. It announces its presence in every change that occurs, but it nowhere shows its face as a material entity. It is a mystic agency endlessly revealing its existence, everywhere concealing its source. We watch its evolutions, but it escapes our scrutiny; we try to detain it, and we find that it is gone; yet it reappears in the next thing we examine, and in the very phenomena of our search for it; the agency is manifest, but it is the Agent we wish to discover. Must it be, like the sangreal of mediæval legend, sought for in many lands, but nowhere found by any wanderer in quest of it?

Before attempting an answer, we shall state the scientific principle referred to, which is entitled to rank as one of the greatest of modern discoveries. All the forms of force are convertible amongst themselves. They are all ultimately identical, and are endlessly passing and repassing into each other: the mechanical, the chemical, the vital, are all one. 'The many' _are_ 'the one,' its varying phrases, its protean raiment. In short, there is but a single supreme force, ubiquitous and plastic, the fountain of all change. It now evolves itself in heat, now masks itself in light, reveals itself in electricity, or sleeps in the law of gravitation: one solitary pulse within Nature's vast machine, and behind the barrier of her laws. This force, thus endlessly changing, is neither diminished nor replenished; it is not added to, nor subtracted from; it is perennial, and is its own conservator. It is not synthesis, but analysis that has resolved it into unity. But can synthesis combine its manifold phases under one regulative notion? In realizing its general character we cannot discharge from our minds in turn all the known features of particular forces, so as to leave a vague resultant common to all, yet especially identified with none. The diverse types must have an _archetype_. What is that archetype?

It seems to us self-evident that we must seek for it, not in nature, but in man; not in the lower plane of the cosmical forces, but in the human _will_, the root of our personality. Comte begins with the lowermost grade of force (to wit, the mechanical), and ascends with it, bringing all the finer and more subtle forms under its sway, and interpreting the higher by the lower. We, on the contrary, begin with the highest known type, that which lies nearest ourselves, with which we are earliest acquainted, and whence we derive our notion of force beyond ourselves; and we descend with it as a light to guide our footsteps amongst the lower. This we hold to be the correct, to be indeed the only admissible philosophical procedure. If it is only through the consciousness of force within ourselves that we have any intelligible notion of it in nature (and are thus first initiated into the idea), we must come back to the will for an explanation of what the one force external to us is. Our own personality supplies us with the archetype of which we are in search. We thus throw the plank across the chasm between man and nature; we interpret the latter by the former (not the reverse); and the discovery of the correlation of forces, and the conservation of energy, becomes the scientific equivalent of the doctrine of philosophical theology, that one supreme Will pervades the universe, that in nature lives and moves and has its being.

If we can vindicate this procedure, and prove our right to interpret the forces, if not the phenomena of nature, as the outcome of a living will, the energy of a nature like our own, our goal is reached. But, say the Comtists, that is a mere imagination of theology, the creation of a superstitious mind, 'transcendant audacity,' 'a form of the mind's own throwing,' just as much as the teleological explanation of nature. It has been spoken of as presumptuous, as well as fanciful, betokening a lack of humility and philosophic caution; it being sheer egotism to interpret nature by what we are, and a return to the Protagorean doctrine that 'man is the measure of all things.' In reply, we give only hints and suggestions, for the region is high, and the atmosphere rarefied.

In the first place, it is to be observed that we do not take one class of phenomena to explain the inner nature of another class; the phenomena of will to explain, say those of electricity, in outward nature; for in that case we might as well, with just as much reason and plausibility, with just as much authority, take the latter class of phenomena to explain the former; and we should learn quite as much, that is to say, we should learn nothing at all. But we take a certain special _noumenal_ force, one that is transcendant but revealed in our innermost life and consciousness, in the will's _autocracy_, and by the help and suggestion of this known force we explain (not the phenomena of Nature nor her laws), but the darker, the unknown noumenal Force, the pulse of nature.

In the next place, it is also to be observed that as the human will, while noumenally free, is phenomenally under law and governed most rigidly by motives, so the force which we interpret as the expression of personal will in nature, acts in perfect conformity to law. The laws of nature are the expression of its bondage. The minor scattered forces, which may be spoken of as the messengers and servitors of the supreme will, are no more fitful but no less capricious than is the human will, in which the causal nexus is not broken while it remains free. The supernatural reveals itself in an orderly fashion through the natural. Its will is expressed by law.

In the third place, so far as bridging the chasm between the two orders of phenomena, it is not accomplished by the poetic intuition (to which we shall immediately refer), but by the human intellect, it seems legitimated by _analogy_. In our inductive interpretation of nature we perceive resemblances, and infer a likeness. 'Analogy is the soul of induction.' If, therefore, it be an illicit act of the reason which ventures to trace a parallel between nature and man, and interpret the former by the latter, how fares it with the foundations of human knowledge, and with the pillars of science herself? Is not all physical science the rational interpretation of nature? If we may not read the meaning of the great central force in the light of that force which we carry in the will, how can we warrantably interpret the laws of nature, in the light of that which we carry in the intellect? Are we not left in uncertainty as to the character of the entire fabric of our knowledge? The oracle is altogether dumb. If the way which seems to lead from the interior of the human will into the temple of outward nature be really a _cul-de-sac_, what warrant have we for opening a door on the other side, and walking down the avenues of positive science, imagining that in these pathways we shall find the only key to nature? To bring the analogy into effect, let us take two instances: the force with which I discharge a projectile and the force of gravitation. The former proceeds from the will, which is the originating power, though mechanical and physiological causes intervene. Since, therefore, similar effects have similar or resembling causes, it is a strictly analogical inference that as the effects correspond, the causes will resemble each other, and the essential part of the correspondence will not consist in the apparatus used (the phenomena), but in the will underlying, which is noumenal.[17]

In the fourth place, as the force of the will is both higher and better known than the mechanical, chemical, and vital forces of nature, we are warranted in interpreting the lower by the higher, and not in reducing the higher to the level of the lower. As we ascend in nature from the lowest vital forms to the highest type of organization, we find that the higher is not only an advance upon the lower, but that it _includes_ it; and no naturalist would describe a vertebrated animal by that which it held in common with the mollusca. That in which it differs from the types beneath it is held to be its distinctive and descriptive feature. When, therefore, we reach man at the top of the scale, separated by a distinct endowment from the classes beneath him, yet conserving all their main characteristics in his nature, and describe him not by what he has in common with the lower animals, but by that in which he differs from them, we act on the principle of selecting the highest feature we can find, and taking it as our guide. And similarly when we are in search of the Supreme Principle of the universe, the _causa causarum_, we interpret it by the highest features in human nature, because that nature is the highest with which we are experimentally acquainted. And we may validly throw the burden of proof upon the positivist, and ask why the great cosmical force that rules in nature should be radically different from the volitional force which is the root of our personality? Reverting again to the force of gravitation, why should it not be the outcome in nature of a Will vaster than man's, resembling, yet transcending it? To what does that force amount? The phenomenalist cannot arrest our inquiry by simply drawing the veil of nescience over it. He cannot slip a lid over the end of our telescope turned skyward by merely exclaiming 'mystery of mysteries, all is mystery.' And it seems to us that we must either divest the word gravitation of all intelligible meaning, or while perceiving the unlikeness at a glance, we must 'invest it with a human or _quasi-human_ vitality.'

_Quasi_, for again in the fifth place, this all-pervasive protean force assumes many a phase which is exceedingly unlike the operations of a personal power. In many of her moods, Nature has the countenance of the sphinx. She is sublimely silent as to her inmost essence. Cold, stern, inflexible, neutral, taciturn, apathetic--all these terms seem applicable to her at times, as we gaze across the chasm between man and the universe. But the regulative idea, which we find in the analogy of the human will, is not to be regarded as exhaustive or exclusive of other notions which may unite with it. The personal force may at the same time be more than personal. Its highest quality becomes to us what we have called its regulative idea; but it contains elements within the infinite compass of its nature, different from those features of which we find the mirror in ourselves.[18] It is sufficient if we know that the _causa causarum_, the all-pervading life of the universe, can in any sense be described as personal, that we can speak of 'the soul of nature,' without being the dupes of a fanciful analogy, dealing merely with figure and hyperbole. Be it admitted by every theist that there are myriad facets which the subtle life of nature may present to the beholder. We not only may, we must think of it as

'He, they, one, all, within, without,
The power in darkness which we guess.'

It reveals itself to us now as personal, awakening and responding to the instinct of worship, calling forth our wonder and reverence, with the hunger and the thirst of the human spirit in rising to its source; now it turns its cold, impassive, silent face towards us; and as we feel its immeasurable transcendency we are warned against the error of construing it into a mere exaggeration of ourselves. We thus learn on the one hand, the indefinite unlikeness between man and the Supreme Spirit of the universe, and on the other their positive likeness or kindredness. We escape the prevailing error of mediævalism, and the equally fatal error of the modern scientific spirit. The tendency of the schoolmen was to interpret all the laws of nature in the light of _à priori_ notions of the mind. They did not search laboriously for her own meaning, and wait patiently for her revelations; but distorted nature by _outré_ hypotheses fetched altogether from within. It is, however, an equal if not a greater onesidedness to do exactly the reverse; to interpret the human spirit in the light of external nature and organic law. The apotheosis of man was at least no worse--(we think it rather better)--than making a fetish of nature, and explaining the sublime mysteries of the human will by the phenomena of molecular action. We therefore maintain that amid the many possible manifestations of the infinite Life, they may be reduced to two primary forms, the one impersonal and the other personal. God is infinitely unlike the creature. He is also the archetype of which we are the type. And we have less need to be philosophically warned against the possible caricature of the latter doctrine (of which the teachers of nescience remind us), than to be cautioned against the partial truth of the former, which, in isolation, may so easily drift into exaggeration and a lie.

The intellectual intuition of the infinite, which we have endeavoured to vindicate, so far attests this correspondence; but the inspired utterance of the Poet in reference to the soul of nature, no less bears it witness. The identity or affinity of the force within him and the forces without, is felt by the poet when the speculative thinker perceives it not. He cannot analyse into its constituent elements the mystic meaning of the universe which is flashed into his soul in moments of glowing inspiration, as the chemist analyses his earths in a crucible. But he is the

'Mighty prophet, seer blest,
With whom these truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our years to find
In darkness lost.'

And he may be able to help the merely scientific explorer out of that abyss of mystery in which he is speculatively lost, and to save him from erecting an altar to 'the unknown God.' While his soul, in 'a wise passiveness,' lies open to the visitations of the supernatural, he sees a vision, and he hears a voice, of which he can give no scientific explanation, but which announces to him the 'open secret.'

Perhaps the finest description of the characteristics of the soul's intuitions is that given by Lowell, 'the prevailing poet' of America. He writes--

'As blind nestlings, unafraid,
Stretch up wide-mouthed to every shade,
By which their downy dream is stirred,
Taking it for the mother-bird;
So, when God's shadow, which is light,
My wakening instincts falls across,
Silent as sunbeams over moss,
_In my heart's-nest half-conscious things
Stir with a helpless sense of wings,
Lift themselves up_, and tremble long
With premonitions sweet of song.'

The poet may thus throw the plank for us where the psychologist or metaphysician fails. He 'sees into the life of things.' His insight, which comes and goes in flashes marvellous but fugitive, which dart across the world and bring back this report of correspondence, illumines every realm of nature. He tells us that it is 'haunted for ever by the Eternal Mind.' He finds the whole temple of nature exquisitely filled with symbols of his own deepest thought. She is a storehouse of imagery expressing the subtlest gradations of his feeling. Wherever he moves he finds that the forms and the forces around him are an interpretation of what he _is_. They are the symbolic language of his deepest thoughts and highest aspirations, while his innermost life again interprets them. He explains the inner world in terms of the outer, and the outward in terms of the inward. In the grand vocation of the poet, we know of nothing grander than his function to mediate between the baffled ontologist and the man of science. He is a reconciler who presents a common truth which those on either side may recognise, and the recognition of which may draw them together.

This vast and varied region of our complex nature, the æsthetic or poetic, thus comes to the aid of our theology. The great imaginative poets, in their delineations of man and nature, do not idealise; they _see_: or they see before they idealise. Who will affirm that Wordsworth's 'inward eye'--by the use and cultivation of which he became the greatest of all interpreters of the symbolism of nature--in seeing visions, saw but the ghostly forms of his own imagination, and was not in contact with _real existence_? Are his 'spiritual presences' as unreal as the fawns and dryads of polytheistic legend? And was not even the early personification of nature a cruder testimony in the same direction,--the belief in these deities of the wood and hill and stream being a dumb homage by the savage mind to a divinity in nature kindred to man? Is the poet, then, _a seer_,[19] or only the elaborator of fancies?--the mere creator of ideal shapes, or the discerner of real existence? He tells us that nature is a luminous veil, behind which visions are to be seen, and voices heard; that sometimes, in a moment, he has come upon the footprints of the supernatural; and that, in such moments, he is in contact with a reality, which he calls 'the soul of the world.' Why should he call it a _soul_, if he has no intuition of its analogy and correspondence with his own nature? And what though he speaks continually in the plural, and tells us of the myriad 'presences,' as the scientific explorer speaks of manifold 'forces?' What though he lapses into a semipolytheist interpretation of nature? It is but the sign of a weight of inspiration too vast for one utterance. It indicates that his feeling of the central life has broken up the diversity; that nature's great soul--_the_ Presence--cannot reveal itself at once as all-in-all and all inclusive; within the boundaries of the finite mind. In its very wealth it reveals itself as manifold. But as the poet and the philosopher may combine the manifold in the unity of their own mind, why not also in the unity of the object revealing itself to them?

It is to be observed, however, that the object which the poet's insight attests and reveals, is not phenomenal, but substantial. Hence no question arises as to its origin. It is only that which enters on the theatre of phenomenal existence that demands a further explanation. The entrance and the exit of phenomena are explained, when we refer them to the substance out of which they have emerged, and to which they return. But we do not ask for the origin of substance, any more than for the origin of space, time, or number.

There is still another branch of the theistic evidence from intuition. It is the instinct of worship. Our space admits of but a sentence regarding it. It is seen in the mere uprise of the soul, spontaneously doing homage to a higher than itself; in the sense of dependence, felt by all men who 'know themselves;' in the need which the worshipper feels of approaching One who is higher and holier than himself, and in whom all perfection resides, who is recognisable by him, and is interested in his state; in the workings of the filial instinct seeking its source, and, as said St. Augustine, 'restless till it rests in Thee;' in the suffrage of the heart rising amid the miseries of its lot, and even against the surmises of the intellect, to the 'Rock that is higher than it;' in the soul's aspirations--its thirst for the ideal, while it feels the necessity of an absolute centre or ultimate standard of truth, beauty, and goodness; and even in the passionate longings of the mystic to reach an utterly transcendent good. All these things bear witness to an _instinct_, working often in the dark, but always seeking its source. They are almost universal, and they are certainly ineradicable. They show how deeply the roots of the theistic faith are planted in the soil of the moral consciousness. We cannot, however, pursue these several lines of proof in detail. They form a fitting link of connection with the more strictly ethical evidence, on which we must add a few paragraphs.

The Kantian argument is more intricate and much less satisfactory than the common evidence from the phenomena of conscience itself. It is founded on the moral law, with its 'categorical imperative,' asserting that certain actions are right and others wrong, in a world in which the right is often defrauded of its legitimate awards, and the wrong is temporarily successful. This, however, says Kant, points to a future; in which the irregularity will be redressed, and _therefore_ to a Supreme Moral Power, able to effect it. The argument is altogether inferential. It is circuitous, its conclusion being in a sense an appendix to the doctrine of immortality; and it has only a secondary connection with the data of the moral law itself. But the phenomena of conscience afford the data of theism directly. We do not raise the question of the nature or the origin of the moral faculty. We assume its existence, as an _à priori_ principle, carrying with it not a contingent but an absolute and unconditional authority. But this moral law within us is the index of another power, a higher personality whence it emanates, and of whose character it is the expression. The law carries in its very heart or centre the evidence of a moral law-giver, his existence not being an inference _from_, but a postulate _of_ this law. It is given with the direct and antithetic clearness with which the infinite is given as the correlative of the finite; and the ascent from the law to the supreme legislator is not greater than is the ascent from space and time, revealed in limited areas and intervals, to immensity and eternity. The two data are the terms of relation. And thus we do not rise to the divine existence by any 'regressive inference,' as the Kantian argument reaches it; we find God _in_ conscience. Moral analysis reveals _Another_, within and yet above our own personality: and if we _reject that implicate_ which is folded within the very idea of conscience, it ceases to be authoritative; and, divested of all ethical significance, it sinks to the level of expediency.

Thus the moral part of our nature rests upon the background of another and a divine personality. Let us analyse the notion of duty, the idea of obligation contained in the word '_ought_.' If it resolves itself into this, 'it is expedient to act in a certain manner, because, if we do not, we injure the balance of our faculties, promote a schism amongst the several powers, and put the machinery of human nature out of working gear:' then it does not point to one behind it, any more than the phenomenal sequences and designs in nature point in that direction. But if we 'ought _simply because we ought_,' _i.e._, because the law which we find within us, but did not produce, controls us, haunts us, and claims supremacy over us, then we find in such a fact the revelation of One from whom the law has emanated. As Fenelon says in reference to the idea of the infinite, breathing the spirit of St. Augustine--

'Where have I obtained this idea, which is so much above
me, which infinitely surpasses me, which astonishes me,
which makes me disappear in my own eyes, which renders the
infinite present to me. It is in me; it is more than
myself. It seems to me everything, and myself nothing. I
can neither efface, obscure, diminish, nor contradict it.
It is in me; I have not put it there, I have found it
there: and I have found it there only because it was
already there before I sought it. It remains there
invariable even if I do not think of it, when I think of
something else. I find it wherever I seek it, and it often
presents itself when I am not seeking it. It does not
depend upon me. I depend upon it.'[20]

Similarly Newman writes of conscience,--

'A voice within forbids, and summons us to refrain;
And if we bid it to be silent, it yet is not still: it is
not in our control,
It acts without our order, without our asking, against our will.
It is _in_ us, it belongs to us, but it is not _of_ us: it
is _above_ us.
It is moral, it is intelligent, it is not _we_, nor at our bidding;
It pervades mankind, as one life pervades the trees.'[21]

Whence then comes this law which is 'in us, yet not of us, but above us,' which we did not create, and which circumstances do not fashion, though they modify its action? Is it not the moral echo within of a Voice louder and vaster without--a voice which legislates, and in its sanctity commands, issuing imperial edicts for the entire universe of moral agency? In one sense conscience is the viceroy or representative of a higher power; in another it is the voice of one crying in the wilderness of the human spirit, 'Prepare ye the way for the Law.' It ever speaks 'as one having authority,' and yet its central characteristic (as pointed out by a living teacher) is not that the conscience _has_ authority, but that it is 'the consciousness _of_ authority.' It testifies to another: the implanted instinct bearing witness to its Implanter; and through the hints and intimations of this master-faculty thus throned amidst the other powers, we are able to ascend intuitively and directly to God. We are 'constituted to transcend ourselves,' and conscience becomes a ladder by which we mount to the supernatural, as well as the voice inarticulate, yet audible, which speaks to us of God. Thus, to quote the language of one of the Cambridge Platonists of the 17th century (Dr. John Smith)--

'As Plotinus teaches us, "he who reflects upon himself
reflects upon his own _original_," God has so copied forth
himself into the whole life and energy of man's soul as
that the character of the divinity may be most easily seen
and read of all within themselves. And whenever we look
upon our souls in a right manner we shall find a _Urim_ and
a _Thummim_ there; and though the whole fabric of this
visible universe be whispering out the notion of a Deity,
yet we cannot understand it without _this interpreter
within_.'

FOOTNOTES:

[11] The terms _à priori_ and _à posteriori_ are misleading. Arguments called _à priori_ are usually mixed, and involve elements strictly _à posteriori_: experiential facts are inlaid within them. And the proof _à posteriori_ ascends (if it ascends high enough) by the aid of _à priori_ principles. In its rise to the supersensible, it makes use of the noetic principle of the reason.

[12] For other contributions we are indebted to the historians of philosophy (see especially Buhle) and of Christian doctrine, such as Neander and Hagenbach, and to one of the cleverest of French thinkers, Rémusat, who, in his 'Philosophie Religieuse,' has acutely criticised some of the developments of opinion since the rise of modern philosophy, and more especially some of the latest phenomena of British and Continental thought.

[13] And a _possible_ explanation is of no use. It must be the _only possible_ one, or it has no theistic value. It merely brings the hypothesis of deity within the limits of the conceivable.

[14] 'I would rather call it,' says John Smith in his 'Select Discourses,' (1660), alluding to this intuition, 'were I to speak precisely, I would rather call it ὁρμὴν πρὸς τὸν Θεὸν, than, with Plutarch, Θεοῦ νόησιν.'

[15] There are sundry elements in every intuition on which we do not here enlarge, as they are necessary features rather than criteria, characteristics rather than tests. Two of them may be merely stated--1. Every intuition is ultimate, and carries its own evidence within itself: it cannot appeal to any higher witness beyond itself; and 2. The fact or facts which it proclaims, while irreducible by analysis, must be incapable of any other explanation.

[16] Similarly with the action of the infinite and absolute _cause_. The creative energy of that cause is not inconsistent with its changelessness. To say so, is to introduce a quantitative notion into a sphere when quality is alone to be considered. A cause in action is the force which determines the changes which occur in time. But the _primum mobile_, the first cause, need not be itself changed by the forthputting of its causal power.

[17] 'I take the notion of a cause,' said Dr. Thomas Reid, in a letter to Dr. Gregory, 'to be derived from the power I feel in myself to produce certain effects. _In this sense_ we say that the Deity is the cause of the universe.'--(Works, Hamilton's Edition, p. 77).

[18] As one who sustains a fatherly relation is at the same time son, brother, citizen, member of a commonwealth, and member of a profession; or, as we describe a being of compound nature, such as man, who is both body and soul, by the higher term of the two.