Chapter I: Origin Of Our Idea Of God’s Existence (1)

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

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

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

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

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

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

I. First Truths in General.

1. _Their nature._

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II. The Existence of God a first truth.

1. Its universality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Its necessity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Its logical independence and priority.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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