This second postulate embraces what has been recently called the “Principle of continuity,” indispensable to sane thought of any kind. A late work defines it as “the trust that the Supreme Governor of the Universe will not put us to permanent intellectual confusion.”[96-1] Looked at closely, it is the identification of order with reason.
The third and final postulate of the religious sentiment is that
III. All intelligence is one in kind.
Religion demands that there be a truth which is absolutely true, and that there be a goodness which is universally and eternally good. Each system claims the possession, and generally the exclusive possession, of this goodness and truth. They are right in maintaining these views, for unless such is the case, unless there is an absolute truth, cognizable to man, yet not transcended by any divine intelligence, all possible religion becomes mere child’s play, and its professed interpretation of mysteries but trickery.
The Grecian sophists used to meet the demonstrations of the mathematicians and philosophers by conceding that they did indeed set forth the truth, so far as man’s intelligence goes, but that to the intelligence of other beings—a bat or an angel, for example—they might not hold good at all; that there is a different truth for different intelligences; that the intelligence makes the truth; and that as for the absolutely true, true to every intelligence, there is no such thing. They acknowledged that a simple syllogism, constructed on these premises, made their own assertions partake of the doubtful character that was by them ascribed to other human knowledge. But this they gracefully accepted as the inevitable conclusion of reasoning. Their position is defended to-day by the advocates of “positivism,” who maintain the relativity of all truth.
But such a conclusion is wholly incompatible with the religious mind. It must assume that there are some common truths, true infinitely, and therefore, that in all intelligence there is an essential unity of kind. “This postulation,” says a close thinker, “is the very foundation and essence of religion. Destroy it, and you destroy the very possibility of religion.”[97-1]
Clear as this would seem to be to any reflective mind, yet, strange to say, it is to-day the current fashion for religious teachers to deny it. Scared by a phantasm of their own creation, they have deserted the only position in which it is possible to defend religion at all. Afraid of the accusation that they make God like man, they have removed Him beyond the pale of all intelligence, and logically, therefore, annihilated every conception of Him.
Teachers and preachers do not tire of telling their followers that God is incomprehensible; that his ways are past finding out; that he is the Unconditioned, the Infinite, the Unknowable. They really mean that he is another order of intelligence, which, to quote a famous comparison of Spinoza, has the same name as ours, but is no more one with it than the dog is one with his namesake, the dog-star!
They are eagerly seconded in this position by a school of writers who distinctly see where such a doctrine leads, and who do not hesitate to carry it home. Mr. Mill is right in his scorn for those who “erect the incurable limitations of the human conceptive faculty into laws of the outward universe,” if there are such limitations. And Mr. Spencer is justified in condemning “the transcendent audacity which passes current as piety,” if his definition of the underlying verity of religion is admitted—that it is “the consciousness of an inscrutable power which, in its nature, transcends intuition, and is beyond imagination.”[98-1] They are but following the orthodox Sir William Hamilton, who says: “Creation must be thought as the incomprehensible evolution of power into energy.”[99-1] We are to think that which by the terms of the proposition is unthinkable! A most wise master!
Let it be noted that the expressions such as inscrutable, incomprehensible, unknowable, etc., which such writers use, are avowedly not limited to man’s intelligence in its present state of cultivation, but are applied to his kind of intelligence, no matter how far trained. They mean that the inscrutable, etc., is not merely not at present open to man’s observation—that were a truism—but that it cannot be subsumed under the laws of his reasoning powers. In other words, they deny that all intelligence is one in kind. Some accept this fully, and concede that what are called the laws of order, as shown by science, are only matters of experience, true here and now, not necessarily and absolutely true.