Now, we venture to tell our learned and philosophic author that his whole argument for natural theology falls to the ground before a mind that has no intuition of the relation of cause and effect, that is not previously furnished with the knowledge of design and of a designing cause. Hence, from the alleged marks of design and adaptation of means to ends, it is impossible to infer a designer. When the watch was presented for the first time to the untutored savage, he looked upon it as a living thing, not as a piece of artificial mechanism constructed by a watchmaker. He must know that it is a piece of artificial mechanism before he can conclude man has made it. There falls under our observation no more perfect adaptation of means to ends than the octagonal cell of the bee. Does the bee work by design in constructing it? Does the beaver work by design, by intelligent design, in building its dam and constructing
its house? It is generally held that the bee as well as the beaver works by instinct, or by a law of its nature, as does the swallow in building its nest. This proves that a designer cannot be inferred from the simple facts observed in nature, as the Positivists maintain. This is the condemnation of the so-called inductive philosophy. The induction, to be valid, must be by virtue of a principle already held by the mind, intuitively or otherwise, and therefore can never of itself supply or give its principle, or by itself alone obtain its principle. God is not an induction from the facts observed in nature; and the Positivists have shown, demonstrated so much, and have therefore shown that observation and induction alone can give no principle, and, therefore, end in nescience—the termination of the so-called philosophie positive.
Dr. McCosh is not wholly insensible to this conclusion, and seeks to escape it by proving that there is a mind in man endowed with the capacity of knowing things as they are. But if the existence of the mind needs to be proved, with what can we prove it? By consciousness, the author answers; but that is a sheer paralogism, for consciousness is simply an act of the mind, and presupposes it. God can no more be an induction from the facts of consciousness than from the facts of nature. In either case, the God induced is a generalization; in the one case, the generalization of nature, and, in the other, the generalization of consciousness. The former usually goes by the name of atheism, the latter by the name of egoism.
Dr. McCosh very properly rejects Hamilton’s and Mansel’s doctrine of the pure relativity of all knowledge, and Herbert Spencer’s doctrine that all knowledge is restricted to the
knowledge of phenomena or appearances, though conceding that appearances are unthinkable without a reality beyond them, but that the reality beyond them, and which appears in them, is itself unknowable; and maintains truly that we know things themselves, both sensibles and supersensibles. We know them, he contends, by intuition, or a direct looking on or beholding them by the simple intellectual force of our minds. Of this we are not so certain, for we do not ourselves know by intuition why salt is bitter and sugar sweet, and we think the doctor knows things themselves only in so far as he excepts their essence or substance, and confounds the thing with its properties, or its accidents, as say the schoolmen, in which case he makes no appreciable advance on Mr. Herbert Spencer. I know the appearances and the sensible properties of bread, but I do not know its essence or substance. Has the Presbyterian doctor, who seems to have a holy horror of Catholicity, invented a philosophy for the express purpose of combating with apparent reason the mystery of transubstantiation, by making it conflict with the positive testimony of the senses and the human intellect?
But let that pass. The intuition the doctor recognizes is empirical intuition, and intuition of particular or individual things, not of principles, causes, relations. And from the knowledge of those individual things, he holds that man rises by generalization and abstraction—that is, induction—from one degree of knowledge to another, till he finally attains to the knowledge of God distinct from the world, and clothes him with infinite perfections. Yet the good doctor claims to be a philosopher, and enjoys a high reputation as such. None of these individual things, nor
all of them together, are God, or contain him; how, then, from them, supposing you know them, rise scientifically to him? and what by abstraction and generalization is that to which the mind attains? Only their generalization or abstraction, which as a creation of the mind is a nullity. He, like Hamilton, in this would make philosophy end in nescience.
We, of course, hold that we apprehend and know things themselves, not phenomena merely, and as they are, not as they are not—that is, in their real relations, not to us only, but in the objective world. But to know things as they are, in their real objective relations, or to know them at all, demands intuition of them, in their contingency or in their character of creatures or effects—that is to say, as existences, not as independent, self-existent beings, which they are not. And this is not possible without the intuition of the necessary, of real being, on which they depend and from which they are derived. When I say a thing is an effect, I say it has been caused, and therefore, in order to say it, I must have intuition of cause; and if I say of a thing that it is a particular cause, I deny that it is a universal cause, which I could not do without the intuition of universal cause. So when I say of a thing it is contingent, I simply deny it to be necessary being, and I could not deny a thing to be necessary being if I had no intuition of necessary being. If the author means by abstracting and generalizing our knowledge of things or individual existence, distinguishing this ideal intuition, or the intuition of real necessary and universal being—what philosophers sometimes call necessary ideas—from the intuition of things or contingent existences, along with which it is presented in thought, and
as the necessary condition of our apprehending them, and by reflection and contemplation ascertaining that this ideal, necessary and universal, is really God, though not intuitively known to be God, we do not object to the assertion that we rise from our knowledge of things to the knowledge of God himself. What we deny is that God can be concluded from the intuition or apprehension of things. We rise to him from the ideal intuition, or intuition of the real and necessary, which enters the mind with the intuition of the things, and without which we never do or could have intuition of them, any more than they could exist without the creative act of real and necessary being creating them from nothing and sustaining them in existence; but it needs to be disengaged by a mental process from the empirical intuition with which it is presented.
This ideal intuition is not immediate and direct intuition of God, as the pseudo-ontologists contend, and which the church has condemned; but is intuition under the form of necessary, universal, eternal, and immutable ideas—of that which the mind, by reasoning, reflection, and contemplation, proves really is God. What misleads the author and so many others who use the argument he uses, is that the intuition of real and necessary being, and the intuition of contingencies, are given both in the same thought, the one along with the other, and most minds fail to distinguish them—which is done, according to St. Thomas, by the intellectus agens, in distinction from the passive or receptive intellect—and hence they suppose that they conclude the ideal intuition from the empirical intuition. This is decidedly the case with Dr. McCosh. The learned doctor admits intuitions, but only intuitions of individual existences—what