This law of thought lies at the basis of that universal desire of unity, and that universal effort to reduce all our knowledge to unity, which has revealed itself in the history of philosophy, and also of inductive science. "Reason, intellect, νοῦς, concatenating thoughts and objects into system, and tending upward from particular facts to general laws, from general laws to universal principles, is never satisfied in its ascent till it comprehends all laws in a single formula, and consummates all conditional knowledge in the unity of unconditional existence." "The history of philosophy is only the history of this tendency, and philosophers have borne ample testimony to its reality. 'The mind,' says Anaxagoras, 'only knows when it subdues its objects, when it reduces the many to the one.' 'The end of philosophy,' says Plato, 'is the intuition of unity.' 'All knowledge,' say the Platonists, 'is the gathering up into one, and the indivisible apprehension of this unity by the knowing mind.'" [370]
[Footnote 370: ][ (return) ] Hamilton's "Metaphysics," vol. i. pp. 68, 69.
This law has been the guiding principle of the Inductive Sciences, and has led to some of its most important discoveries. The unity which has been attained in physical science is not, however, the absolute unity of a material substratum, but a unity of Will and of Thought. The late discovery of the monogenesis, reciprocal convertibility, and indestructibility of all Forces in nature, leads us upward towards the recognition of one Omnipresent and Omnipotent Will, which, like a mighty tide, sweeps through the universe and effects all its changes. The universal prevalence of the same physical laws and numerical relations throughout all space, and of the same archetypal forms and teleology of organs throughout all past time, reveals to us a Unity of Thought which grasps the entire details of the universe in one comprehensive plan. [371] The positive à priori intuitions of reason and the à posteriori inductions of science equally attest that God is one.
[Footnote 371: ][ (return) ] We refer with pleasure to the articles of Dr. Winchell, in the North-western Christian Advocate, in which the à posteriori proof of "the Unity of God" is forcibly exhibited, and take occasion to express the hope they will soon be presented to the public in a more permanent form.
4th. By denying that man has any intuitive cognitions of right and wrong, or any native and original feeling of obligation, Mr. Watson invalidates "the moral argument" for the existence of a Righteous God.
"As far as man's reason has applied itself to the discovery of truth or duty it has generally gone astray." [372] "Questions of morals do not, for the most part, lie level to the minds of the populace." [373] "Their conclusions have no authority, and place them under no obligation." [374] And, indeed, man without a revelation "is without moral control, without principles of justice, except such as may be slowly elaborated from those relations which concern the grosser interests of life, without conscience, without hope or fear in another life." [375]
[Footnote 372: ][ (return) ] "Institutes of Theology," vol. ii. p. 470.
[Footnote 373: ][ (return) ] Ibid., vol. i. p. 15.
[Footnote 374: ][ (return) ] Ibid., vol. i. p. 228.
[Footnote 375: ][ (return) ] Ibid., vol. ii. p. 271.