If the eye of sense be the sole guide in looking around on nature, we discover only a universe of brute matter, phenomena linked together in uniform succession of antecedents and consequents. Mind becomes only a higher form of matter. Sin loses its poignancy. Immortality disappears. God exists not, except as a personification of the Cosmos. Materialism, atheism, [pg 026] fatalism, are the ultimate results which are proved by logic and history[99] to follow from this extreme view. The idea of spirit cannot be reached by it. For if some other form of experience than the sensitive be regarded as the origin of knowledge; if a nobler view be forced on us by the very inability even to express nature's phenomena without superadding spiritual qualities; if regularity of succession[100] suggest the idea of order and purpose and mind; if adaptation suggest the idea of morality; if movement suggest the idea of form and will; if will suggest the idea of personality; if the idea of the Cosmos suggest unity, and thus we mount up, step by step, to the conception of a God, possessing unity, intelligence, will, character, we really transfer into the sphere of nature ideas taken from another region of being, viz., from our consciousness of ourselves, our consciousness of spirit. It is mental association that links these ideas to those of sense, and gives to a sensational philosophy properties not its own. If however sensational experience can by any means arrive at the notion of natural religion; yet it will find a difficulty, created by its belief of the uniformity of nature, [pg 027] in taking the further step of admitting the miraculous interference which gives birth to revealed: and even if this difficulty should be surmounted, the disinclination to the supernatural would nevertheless have a tendency to obliterate mystery by empirical rationalism, and to reduce piety to morality, morality to expedience,[101] the church to a political institution, religion to a ritual system, and its evidence to external historic testimony.
The rival system of proof founded in intuitive consciousness is however not free from danger. A difference occurs, according as this endowment is regarded as merely revealing the facts of our own inner experience, or on the other hand as possessing a power to apprehend God positively, and spirit to spirit.[102] The result of the former belief would be indeed an ethical religion, compared with the political one just described. If it did not rise from the law to the law-giver, it would at least present morality as a law obligatory on man by his mental structure, independently of the consideration of reward and punishment. The ideas of God, duty, immortality, would be established as a necessity of thought, if not as matters of objective fact. Yet religion would be rather rational than supernatural; obedience to duty instead of communion with Deity; and unless the mind can find ground for a belief in God and the divine attributes through some other faculty, the idealism must destroy the evidence of revealed religion. Or at least, if the mind admit its truth, it must renounce the right to criticise the material of that which it confesses to be beyond the limits of its own consciousness; [pg 028] and thus, by abdicating its natural powers, blindly submit to external authority, and accept belief as the refuge from its own Pyrrhonism.
If, on the other hand, instead of regarding all attempts to pass beyond logical forms of thought to be mental impotence, the mind follows its own instincts, and, relying upon the same natural realism which justifies its belief in the immediate character of its sensitive perceptions, ventures to depend with equal firmness on the reality of its intuitional consciousness, religion, natural or revealed, wears another aspect; and both the advantages and the dangers of such a view are widely different.[103] The soul no longer regards the landscape to be a scene painted on the windows of its prison-house, a subjective limit to its perceptions, but not speculatively true; but it wanders forth from its cell unfettered into the universe around. God is no longer an inference from final causes, nor a principle of thought. He is the living God, a real personal spirit with whom the soul is permitted to hold direct communion. Providence becomes the act of a personal agent. Religion is the worship in spirit. Sin is seen in its heinousness. Prayer is justified as a reality, as the breathing of the human soul for communion with its infinite Parent ([8]). And by the light of this intuition, God, nature, and man, look changed. Nature is no longer a physical engine; man no longer a moral machine. Material nature becomes the regular expression of a personal fixed will; Miracle the direct interposition of a personal free will. Revelation is probable, as the voice of God's mercy to the child of His love. Inspiration becomes [pg 029] possible, for the intuitional consciousness seems adapted to be used by divine Providence as its instrument.[104]
But the type of mind created by the use of intuition as a test of truth is rarely alone. It is cognate to, if it is not connected with, that produced by the third of the above-named tests, feeling. The emotions, according to a law of spiritual supply and demand, suggest the reality of the objects toward which they are aspirations. The longing for help, the feeling of dependence, is the justification of prayer; the sense of remorse is the witness to divine judgment; the consciousness of penitence is the ground for hope in God's merciful interference; the ineradicable sense of guilt is the eternal witness to the need of atonement; the instinct for immortality is the pledge of a future life.
Yet the use of these tests of intuition and feeling in religion, though possessing these advantages, has dangers. If the feelings, instead of being used to reinforce or check the other faculties, be relied upon as sole arbiters; especially if they be linked with the imagination instead of the intuition; they may conduct to mysticism and superstition by the very vividness of their perception of the supernatural.[105] Likewise the intuitive [pg 030] faculty, if it be regarded as giving a noble grasp over the fact of God as an infinite Spirit, may cause the mind to relax its hold on the idea of the Divine Personality, and fall into Pantheism, and identify God with the universe, not by degrading spirit to matter, but by elevating matter to spirit.[106] Or, instead of allowing experience and revelation to develop into conceptions of the fundamental truth whose existence it perceives, it may attempt to develop a religion wholly à priori,[107] and assert its right to create as well as to verify. Also, when applying itself to revealed religion, this type of thought necessarily makes its last appeal to inward insight. It cannot, like sensationalism, or subjective idealism, admit its own impotence, and receive on authority a revelation, the contents of which it ventures not to criticise. It must always appropriate that which it is to believe. Accordingly it will have a tendency to render religion subjective in its character, uncertain in its doctrines, individual in its constitution.
These general remarks, every one of which admits of historic exemplification,[108] will suffice to illustrate the kind of influence exercised by these respective tests of truth in forming the judgment or moulding the character in relation to the belief or disbelief of natural and revealed religion. These effects are not adduced as the [pg 031] necessary results but as the ordinary tendencies of these respective theories. The mind frequently stops short of the conclusions logically deducible from its own principles. To measure precisely the effect of each view would be impossible. In mental science analysis must be qualitative, not quantitative.
It will hardly be expected that we should arbitrate among these theories, inasmuch as our purpose is not to test the comparative truthfulness of metaphysical opinions, but to refer sceptical opinions in religion to their true scientific and metaphysical parentage. Truth is probably to be found in a selection from all; and historical investigation is the chief means of discovering the mode of conducting the process. It is at least certain, that if history be the form which science necessarily takes in the study of that which is subject to laws of life and organic growth, it must be the preliminary inquiry in any investigation in reference to mental phenomena. The history of philosophy must be the approach to philosophy.[109] The great problem of philosophy is method; and if there be a hope that the true method can ever be found it must be by uniting the historical analysis of the development of the universal mind with the psychological analysis of the individual. The history of thought indicates not only fact but truth; not only shows what has been, but, by exhibiting the proportions which different faculties contribute toward the construction of truth, and indicating tendencies as well as results, prepares materials to be collated with the decision previously made by mental and moral science concerning the question of what ought to be ([9]).
A definite conviction on this metaphysical inquiry seems perhaps to be involved in the very idea of criticism, and necessary for drawing the moral from the history; yet the independence of our historical inquiry ought to be sacrificed as little as possible to illustrate a foregone conclusion. It will be more satisfactory to present the evidence for a verdict without undue advocacy of a side in the metaphysical controversy.[110]
The execution of this design of analysing the intellectual causes of unbelief will necessarily involve to some extent a biographical treatment of the subject, both for theoretical and practical reasons, to discover truth and to derive instruction. This is so evident in the history of action, that there is a danger at the present time lest history should lose the general in the individual, and descend from the rank of science to mere biography.[111] The deeper insight which is gradually obtained into the complexity of nature, together with the fuller conviction of human freedom, is causing artistic portraiture and ethical analysis to be substituted for historical generalization. The same method however applies to the region of thought as well as will.
Thought, as an intellectual product, can indeed be studied apart from the mind that creates it, and can be treated by history as a material fact subject to the fixed succession of natural laws. But the exclusive use of such a method, at least in any other subject of study than that of the results of physical discovery, must be defective, even independently of the question of the action of free will, unless the thoughts which are the object of study be also connected with the personality of the thinker who produces them. His external biography is generally unimportant, save when the individual character may have impressed itself upon public events; but the internal portraiture, the growth of soul as known by psychological analysis, is the very instrument for understanding the expression of it in life or in literature.[112] It is requisite to know the mental bias of a writer, whether it be practical, imaginative or reflective; to see the idola specus which influenced him, the action of circumstances upon his character, and the reaction of his character upon circumstances; before we can gain the clue to the interpretation of his works. But if we wish further to derive moral instruction from him, the biographical mode of study becomes even more necessary. For the notion of freedom as the ground of responsibility is now superadded; and the story of his life is the sole means for such an apprehension of the causes of his heart-struggles as shall enable us to take the gauge of his moral character, and appropriate the lessons derivable from the study of it.