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

by Various

It may be needful, however, as the evidence of our intuitions is so generally suspected, to examine a little more fully into the credentials of this one, in common with all its allies.

Our knowledge of the object which intuition discloses is at first, in all cases, necessarily unreflective. In the presence of that object, the mind does not double back upon itself, to scrutinise the origin and test the accuracy of the report that has reached it. And thus the truth which it apprehends is at first only presumptive. It remains to be afterwards tested by reflection, that no illusion be mistaken for reality. What, then, are the tests of our intuitions?[15]

The following seem sufficient criteria of their validity and truthworthiness. 1. The persistence with which they appear and reappear after experimental reflection upon them, the obstinacy with which they reassert themselves when silenced, the tenacity with which they cling to us. 2. Their historical permanence; the confirmation of ages and of generations. The hold they have upon the general mind of the race is the sign of some 'root of endurance' planted firmly in the soil of human nature. If 'deep in the general heart of men, their power survives,' we may accept them as true, or interpret them as a phase of some deeper yet kindred truth, of which they are the popular distortion. 3. The interior harmony which they exhibit with each other, and with the rest of our psychological nature; each of the intuitions being in harmony with the entire circle, and with the whole realm of knowledge. If any alleged intuition should come into collision with any other and disturb it, there would be good reason for suspecting its genuineness; and in that case the lower and less authenticated must always yield to the higher and better attested. But if the critical intellect carrying our intuition (if we may so speak in a figure) round the circle of our nature, and in turn placing it in juxtaposition with the rest, finds that no collision ensues, we may safely conclude that the witness of that intuition is true. 4. If the results of its action and influence are such as to elevate and etherealize our nature, its validity may be assumed. This is no test by itself, for an erroneous belief might for a time even elevate the mind that held it; as the intellectual life evoked by many of the erroneous theories and exploded hypotheses of the past has been great. But no error could do so permanently. No illusion could survive as an educative and elevating power over humanity; and no alleged instinct could sustain its claim, and vindicate its presumptive title, if it could not stand the test we mention. A theoretic error is seen to be such when we attempt to reduce it to practice; as a hidden crack or fissure in a metal becomes visible when a strain is applied, or the folly of an ideal Utopia is seen in the actual life of a mixed commonwealth. Many of those scientific guesses which have served as good provisional hypotheses, have been abandoned in the actual working of them out, and so the flaw that lurks within an alleged intuition, (if there be a flaw) will become apparent when we try to apply it in actual life, and take it as a regulative principle in action. Thus, take the belief in the Divine existence, attested, as we affirm, by intuition, and apply it in the act of worship or adoration. Does that belief (which fulfils the conditions of our previous tests,—for it appears everywhere and clings tenaciously to man, and comes into collision with no other normal tendency of our nature, or defrauds any instinct of its due) does it elevate the nature of him who holds it? The reply of history is conclusive, and its attestation is abundantly clear. The power of the theistic faith over the rest of human nature is such that it has quickened the other faculties into a more vigorous life. Its moral leverage has been vast, while it has sharpened the æsthetic sense to some of its most delicate perceptions, and in some instances brought a new accession of intellectual power. The intuition which men trust in the dark, gradually leads the whole nature towards the light. Its dimness and its dumbness are exchanged for clearness and an intelligible voice; and while it thus grows luminous, it gains new power, and our confidence in its verdict strengthens.

We have now stated what seems to us the general nature of the theistic intuition, and added one or two criteria by which all intuitions must be tested. It remains that we indicate more precisely the phases which it assumes; and the channels in which it works. Though ultimate and insusceptible of analysis, it has a triple character. It manifests itself in the consciousness which the human mind has of the Infinite (an intellectual phase); in its perception of the world-soul, which is Nature's 'open secret' revealed to the poet (an æsthetic phase); and in the act of worship, in which an object correlative to the worshipper is revealed in his very sense of dependence (a moral and religious phase).

It is not only essential to the validity of the theistic intuition that the human mind has a positive though imperfect knowledge of the infinite, but the assertion of this is involved in the very intuition itself. If we had no positive knowledge of the source it seeks to reach, the instinct, benumbed as by an intellectual frost, and unable to rise, would be fatally paralysed; or if it could move along its finite area, it would wander helplessly, feeling after its object, 'if haply it might find it.' And it will be found that all who deny the validity of our intuition, either limit us to the knowledge of phenomena, or while admitting that we have a certain knowledge of finite substance adopt the cold theory of nescience. From the earliest Greek schools, or from the earlier speculation of the Chinese mind, a powerful band of thinkers have denied to man the knowledge of aught beyond phenomena, and from Confucius to Comte the list is an ample one. In our own day this school includes some of the clearest and subtilest minds devoted to philosophy. Comte, Lewes, Mill, Mr. Bain, Herbert Spencer, and the majority of our best scientific guides (however they differ in detail) agree in the common postulate that all that man can know, and intelligibly reason about, are phenomena, and the laws of these phenomena, 'that which doth appear.' There is, however, a positivist 'religion,' which consists now in the worship of phenomena, and again in homage paid to mystery, to the unknown and the unknowable which lies beyond the known. Comte deified man and nature, in their phenomenal aspects, without becoming pantheist; and the instinct of worship though outlawed from his philosophy (which denies the existence of its object), asserted itself within his nature—at least in the second period of his intellectual career—and led him not only to deify humanity, but to prescribe a minute and cumbrous ritual, as puerile as it is inconsistent. It is true that worship is philosophically an excrescence on his system. The advanced secularist who disowns it is logically more consistent with the first principle of positivism. To adore the grande être as personified in woman is as great a mimicry of worship as to offer homage to the law of gravitation. Comte, says his acutest critic, 'forgot that the wine of the real Presence was poured out, and adored the empty cup.' But we may note in this latter graft upon his earlier system a testimony to the operation of that very intuition which positivism disowns; its uncouth form, when distorted by an alien philosophy, being a more expressive witness to its irrepressible character.

Mr. Spencer, on the other hand, with some of our scientific teachers, bids us bow down before the unknown and unknowable power which subsists in the universe. The highest triumph of the human spirit, according to him, is to ascertain the laws of phenomena, and then to worship the dark abyss of the inscrutable beyond them. But there is surely neither humility nor sanity in worshipping darkness, any more than there would be in erecting an altar to chaos: and the advice seems strange coming from those who claim to be the special teachers of clear knowledge and comprehensible law. If we must at length erect an altar at all, we must have some knowledge of the existence to whom it is erected, and have some better reason for doing so than the blank and bland confession that we have not the smallest idea of its nature! Mr. Spencer undertakes to 'reconcile' the claims of science and religion; and he finds the rallying-point to be the recognition of mystery, into which all knowledge recedes. But if religion has any function, and a reconciliation between her and science be possible, the harmony cannot be effected by first denying the postulate from which religion starts, and quietly sweeping her into the background of the inconceivable, consigning her to the realm of the unknowable, and then proclaiming that the conciliation is complete. This is to silence or annihilate one of the two powers which the philosopher undertook to reconcile. It is annexation accomplished by conquest, the cessation of strife, effected by the destruction of one opposing force, not by an armistice, or the ratification of articles of peace. Mr. Spencer does not come between two combatants who are wounding each other needlessly, and bid each put his sword into its sheath, for they are brethren; but he turns round and (to his own satisfaction) slays one of them, and then informs the other that the reconciliation is effected.

We must therefore ask the positivist for his warrant, on the one hand, in denying the existence of a world of substance, underneath the fleeting phenomena of being, out of which a revelation may emerge, apprehensible by man; and on the other, in denying to man positive knowledge of the infinite as a substance. We must remind him that infinite and finite, absolute and relative, substance and phenomena, are terms of a relation: while we ask him for his warrant in differentiating these terms, and proclaiming that the one set are knowable and known, the others unknown and unknowable. He arbitrarily singles out one of the two factors which together constitute a relation, and are only known as complementary terms, and he bestows upon it a spurious honour, by proclaiming that it alone is intelligible, while he relegates the other term to the region of darkness. We ask him on what ground he does so? and whether the law of contrast does not render phenomena as unintelligible, without substance, as substance without phenomena? Can we pronounce the one to be known and the other unknown, merely because the former reaches us through the five gateways of sense, and the latter through the avenue of intuition? Now, no wise theist ever asserted that God was phenomenally known. God is no phenomenon, but the noumenal essence underlying all phenomena. We have admitted and contended that no study of the laws of the universe can give us direct information as to the first cause; for a first cause could never be revealed to the senses, nor be an inference deduced from the data which sense supplies. The assertion therefore, that nature (of which the physical sciences are the interpretation) does not reveal God by its phenomena, is as strongly asserted by the theist as by the positivist. It may reveal his footprints, but we only know whose foot has left its mark on nature when we have learned from another source that He is. As little, however, can the laws of nature discredit faith in a first cause, which springs from a region at once beneath, above, and beyond phenomena. And our theistic faith is not an inference; it is a postulate: an axiomatic truth, affirmed on the report of that intuition, of which the root is planted so firmly in the soil of consciousness, that no form of the positivist philosophy can tear it thence. Let science, therefore, march as it will, and where it will, being hemmed in by the very laws of the universe which give rise to it, and of which it is the exposition, it cannot interfere with or encroach upon the theistic intuition. If there be a region behind phenomena and their laws, accessible to knowledge or to philosophic faith, no conclusion gathered from the scientific survey can touch it, whether to discredit or attest.

The fundamental doctrine of both the schools of nescience is the relativity of human knowledge, and that doctrine as taught by the Scottish psychologists (and notably by Scotland's greatest metaphysician since Hume, Sir William Hamilton) has been wrested out of their hands, and turned against the theism they also advocate. Mr. Spencer would exhibit them all as 'hoist with their own petard.' It is necessary, therefore, to enquire whether this doctrine of relativity favours a theory of nescience, or warrants a counter-doctrine of the knowledge of the infinite, or is indifferent to both.

With us the relativity of knowledge is a first principle in philosophy. But to affirm it, is merely to assert that all that is known occupies a fixed relation to the knower. It is to affirm nothing as to the character or contents of his knowledge. As regards the objects known we further maintain that they are apprehended only in their differences and contrasts. We know self only in its contrast with what is not self, a particular portion of matter only in its relation to other portions which surround and transcend it. So also and for the same reason, with the finite and the infinite. The one is not a positive notion, and the other negative; the one clear, and the other obscure. Both are equally clear, both sharply defined, so far as they are given us in relation. If the one notion suffers, the other suffers with it. In short, if we discharge any notion from all relation with its opposite or contrary, it ceases to be a notion at all. The finite, if we take it alone, is as inconceivable as the infinite, if we take it alone; phenomena by themselves are as incogitable as substance by itself: and the relative as a notion cut off from the absolute which antithetically bounds it, is not more intelligible than the absolute as an essence absolved from all relations. And thus the entire fabric of our knowledge being founded on contrasts, and arising out of differences, involving in its every datum another element hidden in the background, may be said to be a vast double chain of relatives mutually complementary. It looks ever in two directions, without and within, above and beneath, before and after.

We maintain, therefore, that we have positive knowledge of the infinite. Whosoever says that the infinite cannot be known contradicts himself. For he must possess a notion of it before he can deny that he has a positive knowledge of it, before he can predict aught regarding it. And so he says he cannot know what he says, though in another fashion, that he does know. It could never have come within the horizon of hypothetical knowledge, never have become the subject of discussion, unless positively (though inadequately) known; and thus the infinite stands as the antithetic background of the finite. Sir William Hamilton's and Dr. Mansel's doctrine of nescience, no less than Mr. Spencer's, we regard as absolute intellectual suicide. It implies that we have no knowledge of that which we are compelled to conceive in order to know that it is unknowable. We could not compare the two notions, if the one were unthinkable. For if all knowledge is a relation, in each act of knowing I must know both the terms related. The one term causes us no difficulty, being admitted on both sides. But the other which so perplexes our teachers of nescience, is, it must be owned, as to its contents a somewhat vague residuum. It is without an outline. It is not given us with the luminous clearness that its correlative is given. Nevertheless, it is a real term in a real relation. The moment we proceed to analyse our consciousness of the relative, we find it as the penumbra of the notion, its shadowy complement. We may never obtain more than a vague, and what we might call a moonlight view of it: nevertheless behold it we do; apprehend it we must.