We say not only that atheism is absurd, but that it is impossible; and they who with the fool say there is no God, if sincere, deceive themselves, or are deceived by the false methods and theories of philosophers, or sophists rather. No man can think a single thought without thinking both God and himself. The man may not advert, as St. Augustine says, to the fact that he thinks God, but he certainly thinks, as we showed in our article last May, on An Old Quarrel, that which is God. No man ever thinks the imperfect without thinking the perfect, the particular without the universal, the mutable without the immutable, the temporal without the eternal, the contingent without the necessary. The perfect, the universal, the immutable, the eternal, the necessary are not abstract ideas, for there are no abstractions in nature. Abstractions are nullities, and cannot be thought. The ideas must be real, and therefore being; and what is perfect, universal, immutable, eternal, real and necessary being but God? That which is God enters into every one of our thoughts, and can no more be denied or doubted than our own existence. Those poor people who regard themselves as atheists so regard themselves because they do not understand that the so-called abstract or necessary ideas are not simply ideas in the mind or psychological phenomena, but are objective, real being, the eternal, immutable, self-existent God, in whom we live, and move, and have our being. No doubt we need instruction and reflection to understand this, but this instruction is within the reach of all men, and every mind of ordinary capacity is adequate to the necessary reflection. In point of fact, it is the philosophers that make atheists, and the atheism is always theoretical, never real.
There is no doubt that a little ingenuity may deduce something like this doctrine from Descartes's assertion of innate ideas, but not in the sense Descartes himself understood the word idea. With Descartes the word idea never means the objective reality, but its image in the mind; never being itself, but its mental representation, leaving it necessary, after having ascertained that we have the idea, to prove that it represents an objective reality—a thing which no man has ever done or ever can do. His subsequent explanation that he meant, by asserting that the idea of God is innate, simply the innate faculty of thinking God, was a nearer approach to the truth perhaps, but did not reach it, because it assumed that the intuition of that which really is God follows the exercise of the faculty of thinking, instead of preceding and constituting it, and is not an à priori but an empirical intuition. If we could suppose the faculty constituted, existing, and operative, without the intuition of real and necessary being, and that the idea is obtained by our thinking, there would still remain the question as to the objective validity of the thought. If Descartes had identified the idea with being regarded as intelligible to us, and represented it as creating or constituting the faculty of thinking, he would have reached the truth; but this he could not do by his method, which required him to recognize as his principle only his own personal existence, and to deduce from it, after the manner of the geometricians, whatever he recognized as true. God, or what is God, could be obtained or presented only by the exercise of our faculty of thinking, and not by the creative act of God affirming himself as the first principle alike of thought and the faculty of thinking.
If Descartes had properly analyzed thought and ascertained its essential and indestructible elements, he would have avoided the error of resolving the thinker into thought, la pensée, which denied the substantive character of the soul and made it purely phenomenal, and have ascertained that, beside the subject or our personal existence, but simultaneously with it, there is affirmed what in the order of reality precedes it,—God himself, under the form, if I may so speak, of real, necessary, universal, eternal, and independent idea or being. There is given in every thought, as its primary and essential element, a real ontological element, without which no thought is possible. This, not our personal existence, is the first truth or principle which every philosopher must recognize, if he would build on a solid foundation and not in the air, and this principle can no more be denied or doubted than our personal existence itself, for without it we could not think our personal existence, nay, could not exist at all, as capable of thought.
But even if, by a just analysis, Descartes had found that this ontological element is a necessary and indestructible element of thought, he would have still greatly, fatally erred if he had taken it as his first principle and refused to admit any existence not logically deducible from it, that is, deducible from it "after the manner of the geometricians," as required by his method. Father Rothenflue, Father Fournier, and the Louvain professors reject the Cartesian psychology, and assume Ens, or being, which they very properly identify with God, as the first principle in science. This is proper. But how do they pass from being to existences, from the necessary to the contingent, from God to creation? We cannot deduce logically existences from being, because logic can deduce from being only what is necessarily contained in being, that is, only being. If we say, given being existences logically follow, we assume with Cousin that God cannot but create, that creation is a necessity of his own nature, and therefore necessary, as necessary as God himself, which denies the contingency of creatures, and identifies them with necessary being. This is precisely what Descartes himself does after he has once got possession, as he supposes, of the idea of God, or proved that God is. Creation on his system is the necessary, not the free act of the Creator.
There are, as has often been remarked, two systems in Descartes, the one psychological and the other ontological; as there are in his great admirer and follower, Victor Cousin. The two systems are found in juxtaposition indeed, but without any logical or genetic relation. Descartes proceeds from his personal existence as his principle, which gives him nothing but his personal existence; then finding that he has the idea of God, for we presume he had been taught his catechism, he takes the idea as his principle, and erects on it a system of ontology. In this last he was followed by Malebranche, a far greater man than himself. Malebranche perceived, what we have shown, that we have direct and immediate intelligence of God, that he, as idea, is the immediate object of the understanding, and that we see all things in him. Hence his well-known Visio in Deo, or Vision in God, which would be true enough if we had the vision of the blest, and could see God as he is in himself; for God sees or knows all things in himself, and has no need to go out of himself to know anything he has made. But this is not the case with us. We do not see things themselves in God, but only their idea or possibility. From the idea of God we may deduce his ability to create, and that the type of all creatable things must be in him; but as creation is on his part a free, not a necessary act, we can, as Malebranche was told at the time, see a possible, but not an actual universe in God; hence, by his vision in God, he attained only to a pure idealism, in which nothing actually distinguishable from God was apprehended or asserted.
Spinoza, greater still than Malebranche, followed also Descartes in his ontological system, and took being, which he calls substance, as his principle. Substance, he said, is one and ultimate, and nothing is to be admitted not obtainable from it by way of logical deduction. Spinoza was too good a logician to suppose that the idea of creation is deducible from the idea of God, for a necessary creation is no creation at all, but the simple evolution of necessary being or substance. Hence nothing is or exists except the one only substance and its modes and attributes. His attributes are infinite, since he is infinite substance; but we know only two, thought and extension. The so-called German ontologists in the main follow Spinoza, and like him admit only being or substance, or its attributes or modes. This system makes what are called creatures, men and things, modes of the Divine Being, in which he manifests his attributes, thought and extension; hence it is justly called pantheism, which, under some of its forms, no one can escape who admits nothing not logically deducible from the idea of substance, being, or God; for deduction, we have said, is simply analysis, and analysis can give only the subject analyzed. As the analysis of my personal existence or the soul can give only me and my attributes, modes, and affections, and therefore the egoism of Fichte, which underlies every purely psychological system, so the analysis of the idea of being can give only being and its modes or attributes, or the pantheism of Spinoza, which underlies the ontology of Descartes, and every system of exclusive ontology.
No philosopher is ever able to develop his whole system, and present it in all its parts, or foresee all its logical consequences. It is only time that can do this, and the vices of a method or a system can be collected fully only from its historical developments. The disciples of Descartes, who in France started with his psychological principle, ended in the pure sensism, or sensation transformed, of Condillac, and those who in Germany started with the same principle, ended in the absolute egoism of Fichte, who completed the subjectivism of Kant, and reached the point where egoism and pantheism become identical. Those, again, who in any country have started with the ontological principle of Descartes and followed his method, have, however they may have attempted to disguise their conclusions, ended in denying creation and asserting some form of pantheism. The materialism which prevailed in the last century, and obtains to a great extent even in the present, is not a historical development of Cartesianism, so much as of the English school founded by Bacon, and developed by Hobbes and Locke, and completed by the French idealogists of Autueil, who were noted for their Anglomania. Cartesianism led rather to what is improperly termed idealism, to the denial of the material universe, or its resolution into pure sensation.
Yet it is instructive to observe that the historical development of the psychological principle represented by Fichte and that of the ontological principle represented by Spinoza terminate in identity. Fichte saw he could not make the soul the first principle without taking it as ultimate and denying its contingency, or that he could not make the soul that from which all that exists proceeds without assuming that the soul, the ego, is God. Hence his twofold ego, the one absolute and the other phenomenal or modal. He thus identifies the soul with God, and concludes that nothing except me and my phenomen, or attributes and modes, is or exists: I am all. Spinoza, starting from the opposite pole, the ontological, finds that he can logically deduce from being only being; and calling being substance, and substance God, he concludes with an invincible logic nothing is or exists, except God and his modes or attributes. The form may differ, but the conclusion is identical with the last conclusion of egoism, and it is noteworthy that even Fichte, in the last transformation of his doctrine, substituted God for the soul, and made God the absolute, and the soul relative and phenomenal, or a mode of the Divine Being.