we call empirical intuitions—whether causes or effects, not intuition of the ideal; and hence his argument for the existence of God proves nothing, for the universal is not derivable from the particular, the necessary from the contingent, nor being from existences. Had he recognized that along with, as its necessary condition, the intuition of the particular there always is the intuition of the universal, etc., he would have placed theology against positivism on an impregnable foundation. The necessary ideas, the universal, the eternal, the immutable, the necessary, connoted in all our thoughts, cannot be simply abstractions, for abstractions have no existence a parte rei, and are formed by the mind operating on the concrete object of empirical intuition. As these ideas are objects of intuition, they are real; and if real, they are either being or existences. But no existences are or can be necessary, universal, eternal, immutable, for they depend to be on another, as is implied in the very word existence, from ex-stare. Then they must be being, and identifiable in the one universal, eternal, real, and necessary being, and distinguishable from existences or things, as the creator from his creatures, the actor from the act.
We have said that the ideal intuition is not intuition of God, but of that which is God; we say now that the ideal intuition is not formally intuition of ens or being, as erroneously supposed by some to be maintained by Gioberti and Dr. Brownson, but of that which is ens. The process of demonstrating that God is consists in identifying, by reflection and reasoning, the necessary ideas or ideal intuition with real, necessary, universal, eternal, and immutable being, and real and necessary being in which they are all identified with
God. This process is demonstration, not intuition. When I say, in the syllogism, the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises, I have intuition of the necessary, else I could not say it; but I have not intuition of the fact that the necessary is being, far less that it is God. This is known only by reflection and reasoning, disengaging the ideal from the empirical. The idea must be real, or there could be no intuition of it, but if real, it must be being; if being, it must be real and necessary being; and real and necessary being is God. So of all the other necessary ideas. As the intuition is of both the ideal or necessary and the contingent in its principle, and in their real relation, it gives the principles of a complete demonstration of the being of God as creator, and of the universe as the effect of his creative act, and therefore of the complete refutation of pantheism. The vice of Dr. McCosh’s argument is that it proceeds on the denial of ideal intuition, and the assumption that being, God, is obtainable by generalization and abstraction from the individual things given in empirical intuition. It is not obtained by reflection from them, but from the ideal intuition, never separable from the empirical.
This process of proving that God is may be called the ideal process, or the argument from universal and necessary ideas intuitively given. It is not a priori, because the ideal is held by intuition; nor is it an argument from innate ideas, as Descartes held; nor—since really objective, and present to the mind—is it an argument from the primitive beliefs or constituent principles of human nature, as Dr. Reid and the Scottish school maintained, and which is only another form of the Cartesian doctrine of innate ideas; or an argument drawn from
our own fonds, as Leibnitz imagined, or from the a priori cognitions or necessary forms of the intellect, as Kant held, and which is only the doctrine of the Scottish school of Reid and Stewart differently stated; but from principles or data really presented in intuition, and along with the empirical intuition of things. It places, therefore, the being of God on as firm a basis and renders it as certain to the understanding as our own existence, or as any fact whatever of which the human mind has cognizance; indeed, renders it absolutely certain and undeniable. But while we say this, and while we maintain that the ideal intuition is given along with the empirical intuition, with which our author confounds it, and from which philosophy or natural theology disengages it, we by no means believe that the race is indebted to this ideal or metaphysical process—which is too difficult not only for the Positivists, but for their great opponent, Dr. McCosh—for the origin of their belief in God. All ages and nations, even the most barbarous and savage tribes, have some sort of belief in God, some religious notions which imply his existence; and, hovering above the various Eastern and Western mythologies, we find the belief in one God or the divine unity, though neglected or rejected for the worship of inferior gods or demons, or the elements—that is, the worship of creatures, which is idolatry, since worshipped as God. The ignorant savage, but a grade above the beasts, has never risen to the conception of God or of the Great Spirit from the contemplation of nature, nor has he attained to religious conceptions by a law of his nature or by instinct, as the bee constructs its cell or the beaver its dam.
It is very true, nothing more true than that “the heavens show forth
the glory of God, and the firmament declareth the work of his hands,” but to him only who has the idea of God or already believes that he is. Nothing more true than God can be traced in all his works, or that “the invisible things of him, even his eternal power and divinity, are clearly seen from the creation of the world, being understood by the things that are made,” but only by those who have already learned that he is, are intent on answering the question, Quid est Deus? not the question, An sit Deus? Hence we so far agree with the traditionalist, not indeed that the existence of God cannot be proved by reason prior to faith, but that, as a fact, God revealed himself to man before his expulsion from the garden; and the belief, clear and distinct or dim and confused, in the divine being, universally diffused among all races and conditions of men, originated in revelation and is due to the tradition, pure or impure, in its integrity or mutilated and corrupted, of the primitive revelation made by God himself to man. In this way the fact of the universality of the belief in some form is a valid argument for the truth of the belief, and we thus obtain a historical argument to corroborate the already conclusive ideal or metaphysical argument, the principles of which we have given.
We bear willing testimony to the good-will and laudable intention of our author, but we cannot regard him as able, with his mutilated theology and his imperfect and rather superficial philosophy—though less superficial than the philosophy generally in vogue among British and American Protestants—to carry on a successful war against the Positivists. We are almost tempted to say to him:
Non tali auxilio nec defensoribus istis
Tempus eget.
He is too near of kin to the Positivists