As the vital and rudimentary germ of the oak is contained in the acorn; as it is quickened and excited to activity by the external conditions of moisture, light, and heat, and is fully de developed under the fixed and determinative laws of vegetable life--so the germs of the idea of God are present in the human mind as the intuitions of pure reason (Rational Psychology); these intuitions are excited to energy by our experiential and historical knowledge of the facts and laws of the universe (Phenomenology); and these facts and intuitions are developed into form by the necessary laws of the intellect (Nomology, or Primordial Logic).
The logical demonstration of the being of God commences with the analysis of thought. It asks, What are the ideas which exist in the human intelligence? What are their actual characteristics, and what their primitive characteristics? What is their origin, and what their validity? Having, by this process, found that some of our ideas are subjective, and some objective that some are derived from experience, and that some can not be derived from experience, but are inherent in the very constitution of the mind itself, as à priori ideas of reason; that these are characterized as self-evident, universal, and necessary and that, as laws of thought, they govern the mind in all its conceptions of the universe; it has formulated these necessary judgments, and presented them as distinct and articulate propositions. These à priori, necessary judgments constitute the major premise of the Theistic syllogism, and, in view of the facts of the universe, necessitate the affirmation of the existence of a God as the only valid explanation of the facts.
The natural or chronological order in which the idea of God is developed in the human intelligence, is the reverse process of the scientific or logical order, in which the demonstration of the being of God is presented by philosophy; the latter is reflective and analytic, the former is spontaneous and synthetic. The natural order commences with the knowledge of the facts of the universe, material and mental, as revealed by sensation and experience. In presence of these facts of the universe, the à priori ideas of power, cause, reason, and end are evoked into consciousness with greater or less distinctness; and the judgment, by a natural and spontaneous logic, free from all reflection, and consequently from all possibility of error, affirms a necessary relation between the facts of experience and the à priori ideas of the reason. The result of this involuntary and almost unconscious process of thought is that natural cognition of a God found, with greater or less clearness and definiteness, in all rational minds. The à posteriori, or empirical knowledge of the phenomena of the universe, in their relations to time and space, constitute the minor premise of the Theistic syllogism.
The Theistic argument is, therefore, necessarily composed of both experiential and à priori elements. An à posteriori element exists as a condition of the logical demonstration The rational à priori element is, however, the logical basis, the only valid foundation of the Theistic demonstration. The facts of the universe alone would never lead man to the recognition of a God, if the reason, in presence of these facts, did not enounce certain necessary and universal principles which are the logical antecedents, and adequate explanation of the facts. Of what use would it be to point to the events and changes of the material universe as proofs of the existence of a First Cause, unless we take account of the universal and necessary truth that "every change must have an efficient cause;" that all phenomena are an indication of power; and that "there is an ultimate and sufficient reason why all things exist, and are as they are, and not otherwise." There would be no logical force in enumerating the facts of order and special adaptation which literally crowd the universe, as proofs of the existence of an Intelligent Creator, if the mind did not affirm the necessary principle that "facts of order, having a commencement in time, suppose mind as their source and exponent." There is no logical conclusiveness in the assertion of Paley, "that experience teaches us that a designer must be a person," because, as Hume justly remarks, our "experience" is narrowed down to a mere point, "and can not be a rule for a universe;" but there is an infinitude of force in that dictum of reason, that "intelligence, self-consciousness, and self-determination necessarily constitute personality." A multiplicity of different effects, of which experience does not always reveal the connection, would not conduct to a single cause and to one God, but rather to a plurality of causes and a plurality of gods, did not reason teach us that "all plurality implies an ultimate indivisible unity," and therefore there must be a First Cause of all causes, a First Principle of all principles, the Substance of all substances, the Being of all beings--a God "of whom, in whom, and to whom are all things" (πάντα ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ, ἐν τῷ θεῷ, εἰς τὸν θεόν).
The conclusion, therefore, is, that, as the idea of God is a complex idea, so there are necessarily a number of simple à priori principles, and a variety of experiential facts conspiring to its development in the human intelligence.
(iii.) The universe presents to the human mind an aggregation and history of phenomena which demands the idea of a God--a self-existent, intelligent, personal, righteous First Cause--as its adequate explanation.
The attempt of Positivism to confine all human knowledge to the observation and classification of phenomena, and arrest and foreclose all inquiry as to causes, efficient, final, and ultimate, is simply futile and absurd. It were just as easy to arrest the course of the sun in mid-heaven as to prevent the human mind from seeking to pass beyond phenomena, and ascertain the ground, and reason, and cause of all phenomena. The history of speculative thought clearly attests that, in all ages, the inquiry after the Ultimate Cause and Reason of all existence--the ἀρχή, or First Principle of all things--has been the inevitable and necessary tendency of the human mind; to resist which, skepticism and positivism have been utterly impotent. The first philosophers, of the Ionian school, had just as strong a faith in the existence of a Supreme Reality--an Ultimate Cause--as Leibnitz and Cousin. But when, by reflective thought, they attempted to render an account to themselves of this instinctive faith, they imagined that its object must be in some way appreciable to sense, and they sought it in some physical element, or under some visible and tangible shrine. Still, however imperfect and inadequate the method, and however unsatisfactory the results, humanity has never lost its positive and ineradicable confidence that the problem of existence could be solved. The resistless tide of spontaneous and necessary thought has always borne the race onward towards the recognition of a great First Cause; and though philosophy may have erred, again and again, in tracing the logical order of this inevitable thought, and exhibiting the necessary nexus between the premises and conclusion, yet the human mind has never wavered in the confidence which it has reposed in the natural logic of thought, and man has never ceased to believe in a God.
We readily grant that all our empirical knowledge is confined to phenomena in their orders of co-existence, succession, and resemblance. "To our objective perception and comparison nothing is given but qualities and changes; to our inductive generalization nothing but the shifting and grouping of these in time and space." Were it, however, our immediate concern to discuss the question, we could easily show that sensationalism has never succeeded in tracing the genetic origin of our ideas of space and time to observation and experience; and, without the à priori idea of space, as the place of bodies, and of time, as the condition of succession, we can not conceive of phenomena at all. If, therefore, we know any thing beyond phenomena and their mutual relations; if we have any cognition of realities underlying phenomena, and of the relations of phenomena to their objective ground, it must be given by some faculty distinct from sense-perception, and in some process distinct from inductive generalization. The knowledge of real Being and real Power, of an ultimate Reason and a personal Will, is derived from the apperception of pure reason, which affirms the necessary existence of a Supreme Reality--an Uncreated Being beyond all phenomena, which is the ground and reason of the existence--the contemporaneousness and succession--the likeness and unlikeness, of all phenomena.
The immediate presentation of phenomena to sensation is the occasion of the development in consciousness of these à priori ideas of reason: the possession of these ideas or the immanence of these ideas, in the human intellect, constitutes the original power to know external phenomena. The ideas of space, time, power, law, reason, and end, are the logical antecedents of the ideas of body, succession, event, consecution, order, and adaptation. The latter can not be conceived as distinct notions without the former. The former will not be revealed in thought without the presentation to sense, of resistance, movement, change, uniformity, etc. All actual knowledge must, therefore, be impure; that is, it must involve both à priori and à posteriori elements; and between these elements there must be a necessary relation.
This necessary relation between the à priori and à posteriori elements of knowledge is not a mere subjective law of thought. It is both a law of thought and a law of things. Between the à posteriori facts of the universe and the à priori ideas of the reason there is an absolute nexus, a universal and necessary correlation; so that the cognition of the latter is possible only on the cognition of the former; and the objective existence of the realities, represented by the ideas of reason, is the condition, sine qua non, of the existence of the phenomena presented to sense. If, in one indivisible act of consciousness, we immediately perceive extended matter exterior to our percipient mind, then Extension exists objectively; and if Extension exists objectively, then Space, its conditio sine qua non, also exists objectively. And if a definite body reveals to us the Space in which it is contained, if a succession of pulsations or movements exhibit the uniform Time beneath, so do the changeful phenomena of the universe demand a living Power behind, and the existing order and regular evolution of the universe presuppose Thought--prevision, and predetermination, by an intelligent mind.