on considerations drawn from the order, fitness, and beauty discovered by observations made in the material world; nor yet on the à priori argument, on considerations drawn from the eternal nature of things, and observations made in the spiritual world. It depends primarily on no argument whatever; not on reasoning but Reason. The fact is given outright, as it were, and comes to the man, as soon and as naturally as the consciousness of his own existence, and is indeed logically inseparable from it, for we cannot be conscious of ourselves except as dependent beings.[1]
This intuitive perception of God is afterwards fundamentally and logically established by the à priori argument, and beautifully confirmed by the à posteriori argument; but we are not left without the Idea of God till we become metaphysicians and naturalists, and so can discover it by much thinking. It comes spontaneously, by a law, of whose action we are, at first, not conscious. The belief always precedes the proof, intuition giving the thing to be reasoned about. Unless this intuitive function be performed, it is not possible to attain a knowledge of God. For all arguments to that end must be addressed to a faculty which cannot originate the Idea of God, but only confirm it when given from some other quarter. Any argument is vain when the logical condition of all argument has not been complied with.[2] If the reasoner, as Dr. Clarke has done,[3] presuppose that his opponent has “no transcendent idea of God,” all his reasoning could never produce it, howsoever capable of confirming and legitimating that idea if already existing in the consciousness. As we may speak of sights to the blind, and sounds to the deaf, and convince them that things called sights and sounds actually exist,
- ↑ This doctrine seems to be implied in the writings of the Alexandrian fathers.
- ↑ Kant has abundantly shown the insufficiency of all the philosophical arguments for the existence of God, the physico-theological, the cosmological, and the ontological. See the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 7th edition, p. 444, et seq. But the fact of the Idea given in man's nature cannot be got rid of. It is not a little curious that none of the Christian writers seem to have attempted an ontological proof of the existence of God till the eleventh century, when Anselm led the way. See Bouchitté Histoire des Preuves de l'Existence de Dieu dépuis les Temps les plus reculés jusqu'au Monologium d'Anselme, in the Mem. de l'Acad. des Sciences Morales, &c., Tom. I. Savants Etrangères, Paris, 1841, p. 395, et seq., and his second Mémoire, p. 461, et seq., which brings the history down to that time. Tom. II. p. 59, et seq., 77, et seq.
- ↑ In his Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God.
