Now, although this argument has been more fully elaborated by other writers, the above presentation contains its whole essence. It will be seen that it has the great advantage of resting immediately upon the foundation from which all argument concerning this or any other matter, must necessarily arise, viz.,—upon the very existence of our argumentative faculty itself. For the sake of a critical examination, it is desirable to throw the argument before us into the syllogistic form. It will then stand thus:—
All known minds are caused by an unknown mind. Our mind is a known mind; therefore, our mind is caused by an unknown mind.
[§ 11]. Now the major premiss of this syllogism is inadmissible for two reasons: in the first place, it is assumed that known mind can only be caused by unknown mind; and, in the second place, even if this assumption were granted, it would not explain the existence of Mind as Mind. To take the last of these objections first, in the words of Mr. Mill, "If the mere existence of Mind is supposed to require, as a necessary antecedent, another Mind greater and more powerful, the difficulty is not removed by going one step back: the creating mind stands as much in need of another mind to be the source of its existence as the created mind. Be it remembered that we have no direct knowledge (at least apart from Revelation) of a mind which is even apparently eternal, as Force and Matter are: an eternal mind is, as far as the present argument is concerned, a simple hypothesis to account for the minds which we know to exist. Now it is essential to an hypothesis that, if admitted, it should at least remove the difficulty and account for the facts. But it does not account for mind to refer our mind to a prior mind for its origin. The problem remains unsolved, nay, rather increased."
Nevertheless, I think that it is open to a Theist to answer, "My object is not to explain the existence of Mind in the abstract, any more than it is my object to explain Existence itself in the abstract—to either of which absurd attempts Mr. Mill's reasoning would be equally applicable;—but I seek for an explanation of my own individual finite mind, which I know to have had a beginning in time, and which, therefore, in accordance with the widest and most complete analogy that experience supplies, I believe to have been caused. And if there is no other objection to my believing in Intelligence as the cause of my intelligence, than that I cannot prove my own intelligence caused, then I am satisfied to let the matter rest here; for as every argument must have some basis of assumption to stand upon, I am well pleased to find that the basis in this case is the most solid which experience can supply, viz.,—the law of causation. Fully admitting that it does not account for Mind (in the abstract) to refer one mind to a prior mind for its origin; yet my hypothesis, if admitted, does account for the fact that my mind exists; and this is all that my hypothesis is intended to cover. For to endeavour to explain the existence of an eternal mind, could only be done by those who do not understand the meaning of these words."
Now, I think that this reply to Mr. Mill, on the part of a theist, would so far be legitimate; the theistic hypothesis does supply a provisional explanation of the existence of known minds, and it is, therefore, an explanation which, in lieu of a better, a theist may be allowed to retain. But a theist may not be allowed to confuse this provisional explanation of his own mind's existence with that of the existence of Mind in the abstract; he must not be allowed to suppose that, by thus hypothetically explaining the existence of known minds, he is thereby establishing a probability in favour of that hypothetical cause, an Unknown Mind. Only if he has some independent reason to infer that such an Unknown Mind exists, could such a probability be made out, and his hypothetical explanation of known mind become of more value than a guess. In other words, although the theistic hypothesis supplies a possible explanation of known mind, we have no reason to conclude that it is the true explanation, unless other reasons can be shown to justify, on independent grounds, the validity of the theistic hypothesis. Hence it is manifestly absurd to adduce this explanation as evidence of the hypothesis on which it rests—to argue that Theism must therefore be true; because we assume it to be so, in order to explain known mind, as distinguished from Mind. If it be answered, We are justified in assuming Theism true, because we are justified in assuming that known mind can only have been caused by an unknown mind, and hence that Mind must somewhere be self-existing, then this is to lead us to the second objection to the above syllogism.
[§ 12]. And this second objection is of a most serious nature. "Mind can only be caused by Mind," and, therefore, Mind must either be uncaused, or caused by a Mind. What is our warrant for ranking this assertion? Where is the proof that nothing can have caused a mind except another mind? Answer to this question there is none. For aught that we can ever know to the contrary, anything within the whole range of the Possible may be competent to produce a self-conscious intelligence—and to assume that Mind is so far an entity sui generis, that it must either be self-existing, or derived from another mind which is self-existing, is merely to beg the whole question as to the being of a God. In other words, if we can prove that the order of existence to which Mind belongs, is so essentially different from that order, or those orders, to which all else belongs, as to render it abstractedly impossible that the latter can produce the former—if we can prove this, we have likewise proved the existence of a Deity. But this is just the point in dispute, and to set out with a bare affirmation of it is merely to beg the question and to abandon the discussion. Doubtless, by the mere act of consulting their own consciousness, the fact now in dispute appears to some persons self-evident. But in matters of such high abstraction as this, even the evidence of self-evidence must not be relied upon too implicitly. To the country boor it appears self-evident that wood is annihilated by combustion; and even to the mind of the greatest philosophers of antiquity it seemed impossible to doubt that the sun moved over a stationary earth. Much more, therefore, may our broad distinction between "cogitative and incogitative being"[[5]] not be a distinction which is "legitimated by the conditions of external reality."
Doubtless many will fall back upon the position already indicated, "It is as repugnant to the idea of senseless matter, that it should put into itself sense, perception, and knowledge, as it is repugnant to the idea of a triangle, that it should put into itself greater angles than two right ones." But, granting this, and also that conscious matter is the sole alternative, and what follows? Not surely that matter cannot perceive, and feel, and know, merely because it is repugnant to our idea of it that it should. Granting that there is no other alternative in the whole possibility of things, than that matter must be conscious, or that self-conscious Mind must somewhere be self-existing; and granting that it is quite "impossible for us to conceive" of consciousness as an attribute of matter; still surely it would be a prodigious leap to conclude that for this reason matter cannot possess this attribute. Indeed, Locke himself elsewhere strangely enough insists that thought may be a property of matter, if only the Deity chose to unite that attribute with that substance. Why it should be deemed abstractedly impossible for matter to think if there is no God, and yet abstractedly possible that it should think if there is a God, I confess myself quite unable to determine; but I conceive that it is very important clearly to point out this peculiarity in Locke's views, for he is a favourite authority with theists, and this peculiarity amounts to nothing less than a suicide of his entire argument. The mere circumstance that he assumed the Deity capable of endowing matter with the faculty of thinking, could not have enabled him to conceive of matter as thinking, any more than he could conceive of this in the absence of his assumption. Yet in the one case he recognises the possibility of matter thinking, and in the other case denies such possibility, and this on the sole ground of its being inconceivable! However, I am not here concerned with Locke's eccentricities:[[6]] I am merely engaged with the general principle, that a subjective inability to establish certain relations in thought is no sufficient warrant for concluding that corresponding objective relations may not obtain.
[§ 13]. Hence, an objector to the above syllogism need not be a materialist; it is not even necessary that he should hold any theory of things at all. Nevertheless, for the sake of definition, I shall assume that he is a materialist. As a materialist, then, he would appear to be as much entitled to his hypothesis as a theist is to his—in respect, I mean, of this particular argument. For although I think, as before shown, that in strict reasoning a theist might have taken exception to the last-quoted passage from Mill in its connection with the law of causation, that passage, if considered in the present connection, is certainly unanswerable. What is the state of the present argument as between a materialist and a theist? The mystery of existence and the inconceivability of matter thinking are their common data. Upon these data the materialist, justly arguing that he has no right to make his own conceptive faculty the unconditional test of objective possibility, is content to merge the mystery of his own mind's existence into that of Existence in general; while the theist, compelled to accept without explanation the mystery of Existence in general, nevertheless has recourse to inventing a wholly gratuitous hypothesis to explain one mode of existence in particular. If it is said that the latter hypothesis has the merit of causing the mystery of material existence and the mystery of mental existence to be united in a thinkable manner—viz., in a self-existing Mind,—I reply, It is not so; for in whatever degree it is unthinkable that Matter should be the cause of Mind, in that precise degree must it be unthinkable that Mind was ever the cause of Matter, the correlatives being in each case the same, and experience affording no evidence of causality in either.
[§ 14]. The two hypotheses, therefore, are of exactly equivalent value, save that while the one has a certain basis of fact to rest upon,[[7]] the other is wholly arbitrary. But it may still be retorted, 'Is not that which is most conceivable most likely to be true? and if it is more conceivable that my intelligence is caused by another Intelligence than that it is caused by Non-intelligence, may I not regard the more conceivable hypothesis as also the more probable one? It is somewhat difficult to say how far this argument is, in this case, valid; only I think it is quite evident that its validity is open to grave dispute. For nothing can be more evident to a philosophical thinker than that the substance of Mind must—so far at least as we can at present see—necessarily be unknowable; so that if Matter (and Force) be this substance, we should antecedently expect to find that the actual causal connection should, in this particular case, be more inconceivable than some imaginary one: it would be more natural for the mind to infer that something conceivably more akin to itself should be its cause, than that this cause should be the entity which really gives rise to the unthinkable connection. But even waiving this reflection, and granting that the above argument is valid, it is still to an indefinite degree valueless, seeing that we are unable to tell how much it is more likely that the more conceivable should here be true than that the less conceivable should be so.
[§ 15]. Returning then to Locke's comparison between the certainty of this argument and that which proves the sum of the angles of a triangle to be equal to two right-angles, I should say that there is a virtual, though not a formal, fallacy in his presentation. For mathematical science being confessedly but of relative significance, any comparison between the degree of certainty attained by reasoning upon so transcendental a subject as the present, and that of mathematical demonstrations regarding relative truth, must be misleading. In the present instance, the whole strain of the argument comes upon the adequacy of the proposed test of truth, viz., our being able to conceive it if true. Now, will any one undertake to say that this test of truth is of equivalent value when it is applied to a triangle and when it is applied to the Deity. In the one case we are dealing with a geometrical figure of an exceedingly simple type, with which our experience is well acquainted, and presenting a very limited number of relations for us to contemplate. In the other case we are endeavouring to deal with the summum genus of all mystery, with reference to which experience is quite impossible, and which in its mention contains all the relations that are to us unknown and unknowable. Here, then, is the oversight. Because men find conceivability a valid test of truth in the affairs of everyday life—as it is easy to show à priori that it must be, if our experience has been formed under a given code of constant and general laws—therefore they conclude that it must be equally valid wherever it is applied; forgetting that its validity must perforce decrease in proportion to the distance at which the test is applied from the sphere of experience.[[8]]