If the atheist, in the common affairs of life, should talk and act as if he believed there were no causes for all the existences and changes around him, he would be regarded as having "lost his reason." And thus Holy Writ sanctions the decision: "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God."
We find, then, that our minds are made so that we can not help believing that whatever begins to be has an antecedent cause that produces it, and every change in any kind of existence has a cause. We find, also, the universe around us to be a succession of changes, and these we trace back and back again to antecedent causes.
But at last we come to the grand question, "Who first started this vast system of endless and wonderful contrivances?"
Only two replies are possible. The first is that of the atheist, that the whole started into existence without a cause, which we have shown that no sane mind can really believe.
The only remaining reply is, there is some great self-existent Cause, who never began to be, and who is the author of the universe of matter and mind.[1]
It must, however, be conceded that this intuitive truth does not aid us in deciding what is the nature and character of this First Cause. We are obliged to resort to other intuitive truths to settle this question.
Neither does this principle aid us in deciding whether there may not be more than one self-existent cause; for several minds can be supposed to have united in will and action to bring forth this "universal frame," each one of which might have existed without beginning.
The second intuitive truth is this:
Two classes of causes exist, viz., material things, which act on mind, and immaterial or spiritual things, which act on matter.
Some metaphysicians maintain that every thing is matter, and that mind or spirit is only one particular species of matter. Others teach that every thing is mind, and that all which we suppose to be material things are merely ideas in the mind of what really has no existence.