As to Paley, it gives one pleasure to quote the following passage from Sir William Thomson's address to the British Association in 1871; because the foolish writing which is so frequently met with in books and journals about "the mechanical God of Paley," about Paley representing Deity as "outside of the universe," or as "a God who makes the world after the manner that a watchman manufactures a watch," &c., can only be explained by utter ignorance of Paley's views: "I feel profoundly convinced that the argument of design has been greatly too much lost sight of in recent zoological speculations. Reaction against the frivolities of teleology, such as are to be found, not rarely, in the notes of the learned commentators on Paley's 'Natural Theology,' has, I believe, had a temporary effect of turning attention from the solid irrefragable argument so well put forward in that excellent old book. But overpowering proof of intelligence and benevolent design lies all around us; and if ever perplexities, whether metaphysical or scientific, turn us away from them for a time, they come back upon us with irresistible force, showing to us through nature the influence of a free will, and teaching us that all living beings depend upon one ever-acting Creator and Ruler."
Note XXV., page [214].
Kant's Moral Argument.
The unsatisfactoriness of the position that conscience can supply the place of reason, and can do without its help, in the search after God, is clearly seen in the case of the thinker who undertook with most deliberation to maintain that position. When Kant said,—Although all other arguments for the existence of God are delusive, still conscience gives us a feeling of responsibility and a sense of freedom which compel us to believe in One through whom virtue and fortune, duty and inclination, will be reconciled, and in whom the will will be free to do all that it ought,—he saw that he would be met with the retort and reproach that the same process by which he pretended to have demolished the other arguments was just as applicable to this new one; that the ideas of freedom and responsibility might be as delusive when supposed to assure us of reality, as those of causation and design; that if the latter were mere forms of human thought, the former might be held to be so likewise with equal reason, and to be equally incapable of affording a warrant to belief in God Himself; and consequently, that the final religious result of his philosophy was, not that there is a God, but that there is an idea of God, which, although we cannot get rid of it, is full of contradictions, and wholly incapable of justification or verification. He saw all this as clearly as man could do, and it is marvellous that so many authors should have written as if he had not seen it; but certainly he might as well not have seen it, for all that he was able to do in the way of repelling the objection. His reply amounted merely to reaffirming that we are under the necessity of associating the idea of a Supreme Being with the moral law, and then qualifying the statement by the admission that we can know, however, nothing about that Being; that as soon as we try to know anything about Him we make a speculative, not a practical, use of reason, and fall back into the realm of sophistry and illusion from which the Critical Philosophy was designed to deliver us. In other words, what he tells us is, that the argument is good, but only on the conditions that it is not to be subjected to rational scrutiny, and that no attempt is to be made to determine what its conclusion signifies. It seems to me that, on these conditions, he might have found any argument good. Such conditions are inconsistent with the whole spirit and very existence of a critical philosophy. And it is not really God that Kant reaches by his argument: it is a mere moral ideal—a dead, empty, abstract assumption, which is regarded as practically useful, although rationally baseless—a necessary presupposition of moral action, but one which tells us nothing about the nature of its object. Fichte was only consistent when he refused to speak of that object as a Will or Person, and affirmed that God exists only as the Moral Order of the universe, and that we can neither know nor conceive of any other God. He was also, only following out the principles of his master when he represented that order as the creation of the individual mind, the form of the individual conscience, a mode of mental action.
Kant has expounded his argument, and discussed its bearings fully and minutely, in his 'Kritik der Urtheilskraft,' sec. 86-90, and 'Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft, Zweites Buch, Zweites Hauptstück,' v.-viii. M. Renouvier, in an article entitled "De la Contradiction reprochée à la doctrine de Kant" (La Critique Philosophique, 3ieme. Année, No. 29), has exposed some errors on the subject which are common in France, and equally common in England.
Note XXVI., page [217].
Dr Schenkel's View of Conscience as the Organ of Religion.