Matter has extent, solidity, gravity, divisibility. I have all these as well as this stone: but was a stone ever known to feel and think? If I am extended, solid, divisible, I owe it to matter. But I have sensations and thoughts—to what do I owe them? Not to water, not to mire—most likely to something more powerful than myself. Solely to the combination of the elements, you will say. Then prove it to me. Show me plainly that my intelligence cannot have been given to me by an intelligent cause. To this are you reduced.
Our author successively combats the God of the schoolmen—a God composed of discordant qualities; a God to whom, as to those of Homer, is attributed the passions of men; a God capricious, fickle, unreasonable, absurd—but he cannot combat the God of the wise. The wise, contemplating nature, admit an intelligent and supreme power. It is perhaps impossible for human reason, destitute of divine assistance, to go a step further.
Our author asks where this being resides; and, from the impossibility that anyone, without being infinite, should tell where He resides, he concludes that He does not exist. This is not philosophical; for we are not, because we cannot tell where the cause of an effect is, to conclude that there is no cause. If you had never seen a gunner, and you saw the effects of a battery of cannon, you would not say it acts entirely by itself. Shall it, then, only be necessary for you to say there is no God, in order to be believed on your words?
Finally, his great objection is, the woes and crimes of mankind—an objection alike ancient and philosophical; an objection common, but fatal and terrible, and to which we find no answer but in the hope of a better life. Yet what is this hope? We can have no certainty in it but from reason. But I will venture to say, that when it is proved to us that a vast edifice, constructed with the greatest art, is built by an architect, whoever he may be, we ought to believe in that architect, even though the edifice should be stained with our blood, polluted by our crimes, and should crush us in its fall. I inquire not whether the architect is a good one, whether I should be satisfied with his building, whether I should quit it rather than stay in it, nor whether those who are lodged in it for a few days, like myself, are content: I only inquire if it be true that there is an architect, or if this house, containing so many fine apartments and so many wretched garrets, built itself.
SECTION V.
The Necessity of Believing in a Supreme Being.
The great, the interesting object, as it appears to me, is, not to argue metaphysically, but to consider whether, for the common good of us miserable and thinking animals, we should admit a rewarding and avenging God, at once our restraint and consolation, or should reject this idea, and so abandon ourselves to calamity without hope, and crime without remorse.
Hobbes says that if, in a commonwealth, in which no God should be acknowledged, any citizen were to propose one, he would have him hanged.
Apparently, he meant by this strange exaggeration, a citizen who should seek to rule in the name of a god, a charlatan who would make himself a tyrant. We understand citizens, who, feeling the weakness of human nature, its perverseness, and its misery, seek some prop to support it through the languors and horrors of this life.
From Job down to us, a great many men have cursed their existence; we have, therefore, perpetual need of consolation and hope. Of these your philosophy deprives us. The fable of Pandora was better; it left us hope—which you snatch from us! Philosophy, you say, furnishes no proof of happiness to come. No—but you have no demonstration of the contrary. There may be in us an indestructible monad which feels and thinks, without our knowing anything at all of how that monad is made. Reason is not absolutely opposed to this idea, though reason alone does not prove it. Has not this opinion a prodigious advantage over yours? Mine is useful to mankind, yours is baneful; say of it what you will, it may encourage a Nero, an Alexander VI., or a Cartouche. Mine may restrain them.