The Origin of Thought and Speech

by M. Moncalm

An Excursion into a Country little known

If there are proofs of the existence of God, they should be within reach of all the world, both the learned and the ignorant, since God is no more the God of a certain class of person than He is of a certain nation.

In some modern books on philosophy we see this phrase, “The influence of the Infinite on souls,” though we may not pay much attention to it, we perhaps have the feeling that the infinite does not exercise much influence on us; but it does not allude to ourselves, it refers to our primitive ancestors, who sought to discover what there could be behind all they saw and heard; common sense, with its uncertain but powerful instincts directed primitive man towards an invisible magnet. This is not our common sense, that is, not as we should define it, self-evident principles, spontaneous judgments, which direct our acts; but common sense as Aristotle would understand the word; the faculty of feeling and perceiving, where all our sensations are united, because all our external senses converge thither; this common sense is so truly a sense, that it has its own central organ, which is what we call heart. But this influence of the invisible—another name for the infinite—had at first no connection with religion; it merely deposited a germ in the soul, without which no religious tendency could make itself felt; and under the impulse of this power—this divine sense which Aristotle calls the attraction of the desirable and the intelligible—the passing from the finite to the infinite—the most natural and the most necessary act of the moral life—is accomplished by a simple flight or upward movement of the human spirit.

Plato explains this mental phenomenon: “There is in the depth of our soul a point which is the root of the soul and which forms a connecting link between God and the soul; the soul apprehends because God has touched it.”

Perceiving in itself and all around it traces of goodness, beauty, justice, love, and joy; feeling in itself and around it, life and its forces; it is only necessary for the soul to send its ideas beyond the limits of its own confined being, with its imperfect capabilities and joys, and it will approach God.

Kepler, when discovering the laws governing the planetary system, found geometry in the sky; since then, the learned have found mathematics in all the branches of physics. They have seen numbers and geometrical figures in light and colour, in sound and in music under its sensible form. Leibnitz, one of the world’s greatest mathematicians, who discovered the infinitesimal calculus, saw that in this way one could pass from finite grandeur to mathematical laws and forms such as belong eternally to God—independent of all dimensions.

Between the spontaneous flight of the soul with spreading wings, going from finite facts to infinite, and the highest mathematics, which have existed for about two hundred years only, the analogy is complete; the learned demonstrations of the existence of God given by all true philosophers are results which correspond with those obtained by the ordinary methods used by all men. Thus the identity of the fundamental process of a reasonable life with that of the geometrical process, which both demonstrate the existence of God, is established. The metaphysical certainty of the first process equals the geometrical certainty of the second. For this reason Leibnitz could say, “There are geometry, metaphysics, harmony, and morality everywhere.”

I have well said that the human Ego used science and philosophy, before the appearance of philosophers, to attest that the true path leading to God is that natural movement of the soul described by the Hindoo poets—during a time of great ignorance—in the Vedic hymns. This movement is the universal act of prayer.

For the philosopher, the proof of the existence of God may appear to rest on a syllogism; for the historian it rests on the complete evolution of the human mind.

Is it necessary still to ask how the idea of a super-sensible principle penetrated into the human mind, and how it is diffused over the world? The reply to this question is in the Veda, where the hymns show methodically, under an apparent confusion, what we have been able to glean here and there from the mouth of sages of all times. This idea revealed itself to man at first in external nature; then man discovered it in his own personal and phenomenal self, the abridgment of humanity in its entirety with its living and its dead. “At last the consciousness of self arose from out the clouds of psychological mythology, and became the consciousness of the Infinite or the Divine within us. The individual self found itself again in the Divine Self. Socrates knew it, but he called it Daimonion, the indwelling God. The early Christian philosophers called it the Holy Ghost, a name which received many interpretations and misinterpretations in different schools of theology, but which ought to become again what it was meant for in the beginning, the spirit which unites all that is holy within man, with the Holy of Holies, or the Infinite.”[126] This may be called natural religion, since it was revealed by nature, and the truth of this revelation is demonstrated mathematically.

All that I have just said has been epitomised in a few lines by a thinker of our century, Bordas-Desmoulins: “Without mathematics it would be impossible to penetrate to the depths of philosophy; without philosophy it would be impossible to arrive at the foundations of mathematics; without the two we could penetrate nothing.”

Aristotle quotes these words of Anaxagoras, who lived one hundred and fifty years before him: “The man who recognised in nature an intelligence which is the cause of the arrangement and order of the universe has alone kept his reason in the midst of the follies of his predecessors.”

There has been no break in the continuity of the first impression experienced by man at the sight of lightning, and God whom each nation named after its own way, and Him whom the Athenians worshipped without knowing, whom the Apostle declared to them.

I will here repeat the words of Aristotle, which must never be effaced from our memories: “Man is face to face with the light that lighteth every one that cometh into the world.” It was this that caused the same philosopher to use those other surprising words, so difficult to grasp when reading them for the first time in a book: “All who see see the same things, and all that a man has seen is true.”