"To such readers as have reflected on man's life; who understand that for man's well-being Faith is properly the one thing needful; how with it martyrs, otherwise weak, can cheerfully endure the shame and the cross; and without it worldlings puke up their sick existence by suicide in the midst of luxury: to such it will be clear that for a pure moral nature, the loss of religious belief is the loss of every thing.
"All wounds, the crush of long-continued destitution, the stab of false friendship and of false love, all wounds in thy so genial heart, would have healed again had not its life-warmth been withdrawn.
"Well mayest thou exclaim,'Is there no God, then; but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his universe and seeing it go?' 'Has the word Duty no meaning; is what we call Duty no Divine messenger and guide, but a false earthly phantasm made up of desire and fear?' 'Is the heroic inspiration we name Virtue but some passion; some bubble of the blood, bubbling in the direction others profit by?' I know not; only this I know, If what thou namest Happiness be our true aim, then are we all astray. 'Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the universe is—the Devil's.'"—Carlyle.
[CHAPTER I.]
THE PROBLEM STATED.
As Archimedes demanded only one fixed point in order to move the world, so Descartes desired to find one certain and indubitable principle upon which he could plant his feet and lift himself out of the universal doubt which environed him. He found it in the proposition—I exist. This for me is the most direct, immediate, and certain of all intuitions. I can not doubt, I can not deny my own existence. Whatever else I doubt, I can not doubt that I, the doubter, exist. This I that thinks, that is conscious, is the fundamental reality.[7]
I see around me a plurality of personal existences who are self-conscious and self-manifesting beings—beings who think and feel, and display their activities in time and space, as I do; and I can no more doubt their existence than I can doubt my own. This combination of the content of external perception with that of internal perception gives the immediate consciousness of external reality.[8]
Besides these personal existences analogous to my own, there are other objects which exist in relation to my corporeal organism—relations of position, distance, and direction, which are purely objective. These existences offer resistance to my muscular effort to displace them in space, and defy all my mental effort to reduce them to the category of subjective phenomena. These objects have specific properties or exist in certain conditions which, in their mutual relation with my sensitive organism, produce in me certain vital affections, as heat, light, color, and sound. These affections presuppose a force or energy outside of my consciousness, and distinct from myself. Thus I am constrained to believe that the earth on which I tread, the heavens that shine upon me, the forms and movements which surround me, are not vain shadows, unreal phantoms of my own creation, but real entities. The totality of existence called the universe is for me a reality.