British Quarterly Review, American Edition, Vol. LIV / July and October, 1871

by Various

Thus the teleological argument must be pronounced fallacious. It is illusive as well as incomplete: and were we to admit its relevancy, it would afford no basis for worship, or the recognition of the object it infers. The conception of deity as a workman, laying stress upon the notion of cleverness in contrivance, and subordinating moral character to skill, would never lead to reverence, or the adoration of the architect.

It must be conceded, however, that there is a subsidiary value in this as in all the other arguments, even while their failure is most conspicuous. They prove (as Kant has shown) that if they cannot lead us to the reality we are in search of, the phenomena of nature cannot discredit its existence. They do not turn the argument the other way, or weight the scales on the opposite side. They are merely negative, and indeed clear the ground for other and more valid modes of proof.

They are of farther use (as Kant has also shown) in correcting our conceptions of the Divine Being, when from other sources we have learned his existence, in defining and enlarging our notions of his attributes. They discourage and disallow some unworthy conceptions, and enlarge the scope of others. But to leave those celebrated lines of argument which have gathered around them so much of the intellectual strife of rival philosophies, it is needful now to tread warily when we are forced to come to so decided a conclusion against them.

We do not deny that the idea of God exists in the human mind as one of its ultimate and ineradicable notions: we only dispute the inference which ontology has deduced from its existence there. We do not deny that by regressive ascent from finite sequences we are at length constrained to rest in some causal fountain-head; we only dispute the validity of the process by which that fountain-head is identified with the absolute source of existence, and that source of existence with a personal God. We do not deny the presence of design in nature when by that term is meant the signs or indices of mind in the relation of phenomena to phenomena as means to ends; we only assert that these designs have no theistic value, and are only intelligible after we have discovered the existence of a supreme mind within the universe, from another and independent source. Till then the book of nature presents us only with blank, unilluminated pages. Thereafter it is radiant with the light of design, full of that mystic tracery which proclaims the presence of a living will behind it. To a mind that has attained to the knowledge or belief in God, it becomes the 'garment it thereafter sees Him by,' as one might see a pattern issuing from a loom while the weaver was concealed, and infer some of the designs of the workman from the characteristics of his work.

The remaining lines of proof, followed, though not worked out in the past, are the intuitional and the moral. And it is by a combination of the data from which they spring and a readjustment of their respective parts and harmonies, that the foundations of theism can alone be securely laid. As the evidence of intuition is of greatest value, and is also most generally disesteemed, we shall take its testimony first, and examine the moral evidence of conscience afterwards.

The modern spirit is suspicious of the evidence of intuition. It is loudly proclaimed on all sides by the teachers of positive science that instinct is a dubious guide, liable to the accidents of chance interpretation, variously understood by various minds; that in following it we may be pursuing an ignis fatuus; that it is at best only valid for the individual who may happen to feel its force; that it is not a universal endowment (as it should be if trustworthy), but often altogether wanting; and that it can never yield us certainty, because its root is a subjective feeling or conviction, which cannot be verified by external test. These charges cannot be ignored, or lightly passed over. And for the theist merely to proclaim, as an ultimate fact, that the human soul has an intuition of God, that we are endowed with a faculty of apprehension of which the correlative object is divine, will carry no conviction to the atheist. Suppose that he replies, 'This intuition may be valid evidence for you, but I have no such irrepressible instinct; I see no evidence in favour of innate ideas in the soul, or of a substance underneath the phenomena of nature of which we can have any adequate knowledge;' we may close the argument by simple re-assertion, and vindicate our procedure on the ground that in the region of first principles there can be no farther proof. We may also affirm that the instinct being a sacred endowment, and delicate in proportion to the stupendous nature of the object it attests, it may, like every other function of the human spirit, collapse from mere disuse. But if we are to succeed in even suggesting a doubt in the mind of our opponent as to the accuracy of his analysis, we must verify our primary belief, and exhibit its credentials so far as that is possible. We must show why we cannot trace its genealogy farther back, or resolve it into simpler elements, and we must not keep its nature shrouded in darkness, but disclose it so far as may be. This, then, is our task.

The instinct to which we make our ultimate appeal is in its first rise in the soul, crude, dim, and inarticulate. Gradually it shapes itself into greater clearness, aided, in the case of most men, by the myriad influences of religious thought and of historical tradition,—heightening and refining it when educed, but not creating it; separating the real gold from any spurious alloy it may have contracted. Like all our innate instincts this one is at first infantile, and, when it begins to assert itself, it prattles rather than speaks coherently. We do not here raise the general question of the existence of à priori principles. We assume that the mind is not originally an abrasa tabula, but the endowments with which it starts are all gifts in embryo. They are not full-formed powers, so much as the capacities and potentialities of mental life. Their growth to maturity is most gradual, and the difference between their adult and their rudimentary phases is as wide as is the interval between a mature organization and the egg from which it springs. It is therefore no evidence against the reality or the trustworthiness of the intuition to which we appeal, that its manifestations are not uniform, or that it sometimes seems absent in the abnormal states of consciousness, or among the ruder civilizations of the world. We admit that it is difficult for the uninitiated to trace any affinity between its normal and its abnormal manifestations, when it is modified by circumstances to any extent. We farther admit that while never entirely absent, it may sometimes seem to slumber not only in stray individuals, but in a race or an era, and be transmitted from generation to generation in a latent state. It may hybernate, and then awake as from the sleep of years, arising against the will of its possessor and refusing to be silenced. Almost any phenomenon may call it forth, and no single phenomenon can quench it. It is the spontaneous utterance of the soul in presence of the object whose existence it attests, and as such it is necessarily prior to any act of reflection upon its character, validity, or significance. Reflex thought, which is the product of experience, cannot in any case originate an intuition, or account for those phenomena which we may call by that name, supposing them to be delusive. Nothing in us, from the simplest instinct to the loftiest intuition, could in any sense create the object it attests, or after which it seeks and feels. And all our ultimate principles, irreducible by analysis, simply attest and assert.

The very existence of the intuition of which we now speak is itself a revelation, because pointing to a Revealer within or behind itself. And however crude in its elementary forms, it manifests itself in its highest and purest state at once as an act of intelligence and of faith. It may be most fitly described as a direct gaze by the inner eye of the spirit, into a region over which mists usually brood. The great and transcendant Reality it apprehends lies evermore behind the veil of phenomena. It does not see far into that reality, yet it grasps it, and recognises in it 'the open secret' of the universe. This, then, is the main characteristic of the theistic intuition. It proclaims a supreme Existence without and beyond the mind, which it apprehends in the act of revealing itself. It perceives through the vistas of phenomenal sequence, as through breaks in the cloud, the glimpses of a Presence which it can know only in part, but which it does not follow in the dark, or merely infer from its obscure and vanishing footprints. Unlike the 'necessary notion' of the Cartesian school, unlike the space and time which are but subjective forms of thought, unlike the 'regressive inference' from the phenomena of the world, the conclusion it reaches is not the creation of its own subjectivity. The God of the logical understanding, whose existence is supposed to be attested by the necessary laws of the mind, is the mere projected shadow of self. It has no more than an ideal significance. The same may be said, with some abatements, of the being whose existence is inferred from the phenomena of design. The ontologist and the teleologist unconsciously draw their own portrait, and by an effort of thought project it outwards on the canvass of infinity. The intuitionalist, on the other hand, perceives that a revelation has been made to him, descending as through an opened cloud, which closes again. It is 'a moment seen, then gone;' for while we are always conscious of our contact with the natural, we are less frequently aware of the presence of the supernatural.

The difference between the evidence of intuition and the supposed warrant of the other proofs we have reviewed is apparent. It is one thing to create or evolve (even unconsciously) a mental image of ourselves which we vainly attempt to magnify to infinity, and thereafter worship the image that our minds have framed; it is another to discern for a moment an august Presence, other than the human, through a break in the clouds which usually veil Him from our eyes. And it is to the inward recognition of this self-revealing object that the theist makes appeal. What he discerns is at least not a 'form of his mind's own throwing;' while his knowledge is due not to the penetration of his own finite spirit, but to the condescension of the infinite.

But we admit that this intuition is not naturally luminous. It is the presence of the transcendant Object which makes it luminous.[14] Its light is therefore fitful. It is itself rather an eye than a light; (a passive organ, rather than an active power); and when not lit up by light strictly supra-natural,—because emanating from the object it discerns,—it is dull and lustreless. The varying intelligence it reports of that object, corresponds to the changing perceptions of the human eye in a day of alternate gloom and sunlight. It is itself a human trust which ripens gradually into a matured belief, rather than a clear perception, self-luminous from the first.