It will be useful, before exhibiting this kind of influence in reference to religion, to illustrate its character by selecting an instance from some region of thought where its effects would be least suspected. The example shall be taken from the history of literature.
If we compare three poets selected from the last three centuries, the contrast will exhibit at once the change which has taken place in the literary spirit and standard of judgment, and the correspondence of the change with fluctuations in the predominant philosophy of the time.—If we commence with the author of the Paradise Lost, we listen to the last echo of the poetry which had belonged to the great outburst of mind of the earlier part of the seventeenth century, and of the faith in the supernatural which had characterized Puritanism. His philosophy is Hebrew: he hesitates not to interpret the divine counsels; but it is by the supposed light of revelation. Doubt is unknown to him. The anthropomorphic conception of Deity prevails. Material nature is the instrument of God's personal providence for the objects of His care.—But if we pass to the author of the Essay on Man, the revolution which has given artistic precision to the form is not more observable [pg 023] than the indications of a philosophy which has chilled the spiritual faculties. The supernatural is gone. Nature is a vast machine which moves by fixed laws impressed upon it by a Creator. The soul feels chilled with the desolation of a universe wherein it cannot reach forth by prayer to a loving Father. Scripture is displaced by science. Doubt has passed into unbelief. The universe is viewed by the cold materialism which arraigns spiritual subjects at the bar of sense.—If now we turn to the work consecrated by the great living poet to the memory of his early friend, we find ourselves in contact with a meditative soul, separated from the age just named by a complete intellectual chasm; whose spiritual perceptions reflect a philosophy which expresses the sorrows and doubts of a cultivated mind of the present day, “perplext in faith but not in deeds.”[94] The material has become transfigured into the spiritual. The objective has been replaced by the subjective. Nature is studied, as in Pope, without the assumption of a revelation; but it is no longer regarded as a machine conducted by material laws: it is a motive soul which embodies God's presence; a mystery to be felt, not understood. God is not afar off, so that we cannot reach Him: He is so nigh, that His omnipresence seems to obscure His personality.
These instances will illustrate the difference which philosophy produces in the classes of ideas in which the mind of an age is formed. In Milton, the appeal is made to the revelation of God in the Book; in Pope, to the revelation in Nature; in the living poet, to the revelation in man's soul, the type of the infinite Spirit and interpreter of God's universe and God's book.[95]
It is an analysis of a similar kind which we must conduct in reference to sceptical opinions. The influence of the first of the two classes of intellectual causes above named,[96] viz. the various forms of knowledge [pg 024] there described, could not exist unobserved, for they are present from time to time as rival doctrines in contest with Christianity; but the kind of influence of which we now treat, which relates to the grounds of belief on which a judgment is consciously or unconsciously formed, is more subtle, and requires analysis for its detection.
We must briefly explain its nature, and illustrate its influence on religion.
Metaphysical science is usually divided into two branches; of which one examines the objects known, the other the human mind, that is the organ of knowledge. ([7]) When Psychology has finished its study of the structure and functions of the mind, it supplies the means for drawing inferences in reply to a question which admits of a twofold aspect, viz. which of the mental faculties,—sense, reason, feeling, furnishes the origin of knowledge; and which is the supreme test of truth? These two questions form the subjective or Psychological branch of Metaphysics. According to the answer thus obtained we deduce a corollary in reference to the objective side. We ask what information is afforded by these mental faculties in respect to the nature or attributes of the objects known,—matter, mind, God, duty. The answer to this question is the branch commonly called the Ontological. The one inquiry treats of the tests of knowledge, the other of the nature of being. The combination of the two furnishes the answer on its two sides, internally and externally, to the question, What is truth?
The right application of them to the subject of religion would give a philosophy of religion; either objectively by the process of constructing a theodicée or theory to reconcile reason and faith; or subjectively, by separating their provinces by means of such an inquiry into the functions of the religious faculty, and the nature of the truths apprehended by it, as might furnish criteria to determine the amount that is to be appropriated respectively from our own consciousness and from external authority.
The influence of the Ontological branch of the inquiry in producing a struggle with Christianity, has been already included under the difficulties previously named, which are created by the growth of the various sciences.[97] It is the influence of the Psychological branch that we are now illustrating, by showing that the various theories in respect of it give their type to various forms of belief and doubt.
The well-known threefold distribution of the faculties that form the ultimate grounds of conviction will suffice for our purpose: viz., sensational consciousness revealing to us the world of matter; intuitive reason that of mind; and feeling that of emotion.[98] These are the forms of consciousness which supply the material from which the reflective powers draw inferences and construct systems.
It is easy to exhibit the mental character which each would have a tendency to generate when applied to a special subject like religion, natural or revealed.