The major premise of this syllogism is a fact of observation. To the eye of sense and sensible observation, to scientific induction even in its highest generalizations, the visible universe presents nothing but a history and aggregation of phenomena--a succession of appearances or effects having more or less resemblance. It is a ceaseless flow and change, "a generation and corruption," "a becoming, but never really is;" it is never in two successive moments the same. [890] All our cognitions of sameness, uniformity, causal connection, permanent Being, real Power, are purely rational conceptions given in thought, supplied by the spontaneous intuition of reason as the correlative prefix to the phenomena observed. [891]
[Footnote 890: ][ (return) ] "Timæus," ch. ix.
Therefore the ancient philosophers concluded justly, there must be something ἀγέννητον--something which was never generated, something αὐτοϕυής and αὐθυπόστατον--self-originated and self-existing, something ταὐτόν and αἰώνιον--immutable and eternal, the object of rational apperception--which is the real ground and efficient cause of all that appears.
(2.) The COSMOLOGICAL proof, or the argument based upon the principle of order, and thus presented:
Order, proportion, harmony, are the product and expression of Mind.
The created universe reveals order, proportion, and harmony.
Therefore, the created universe is the product of Mind.
The fundamental law of thought which underlies this mode of proof was clearly recognized by Pythagoras. All harmony and proportion and symmetry is the result of unity evolving itself in and pervading multiplicity. Mind or reason is unity and indivisibility; matter is diverse and multiple. Mind is the determinating principle; matter is indeterminate and indefinite. Confused matter receives form, and proportion, and order, and symmetry, by the action and interpenetration of the spiritual and indivisible element. In presence of facts of order, the human reason instinctively and necessarily affirms the presence and action of Mind.
"Pythagoras had long devoted his intellectual adoration to the lofty idea of Order. To his mind it seemed as the presiding genius of the serene and silent world. He had from his youth dwelt with delight upon the eternal relations of space and number, in which the very idea of proportion seems to find its first and immediate development, until at length it seemed as if the whole secret of the universe was hidden in these mysterious correspondences. The world, in all its departments, moral and material, is a living arithmetic in its development, a realized geometry in its repose; it is a 'cosmos' (for the word is Pythagorean), the expression of harmony, the manifestation to sense of everlasting order; and the science of numbers is the truest representation of its eternal laws." Therefore, argued Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, as the reason of man can perceive the relations of an eternal order in the proportions of extension and number, the laws of proportion, and symmetry, and harmony must inhere in a Divine reason, an intelligent soul, which moves and animates the universe. The harmonies of the world which address themselves to the human mind must be the product of a Divine mind. The world, in its real structure, must be the image and copy of that divine proportion which the mind of man adores. It is the sensible type of the Divinity, the outward and multiple development of the Eternal Unity, the Eternal One--that is, God.
The same argument is elaborated by Plato in his philosophy of beauty. God is with him the last reason, the ultimate foundation, the perfect ideal of all beauty--of all the order, proportion, harmony, sublimity, and excellence which reigns in the physical, the intellectual, and the moral world. He is the "Eternal Beauty, unbegotten and imperishable, exempt from all decay as well as increase--the perfect--the Divine Beauty" [892] which is beheld by the pure mind in the celestial world.