On his page 260, last referred to, Mr. Spencer remarks,—"that the belief which the moral and religious feelings are said to yield of a personal God, is not one of the beliefs which are unprovable because they underlie all proof"—and adds that works on Natural Theology treat that Belief as inferential.
The view taken of this moral and religious belief in the present Essay, is that it is in its own nature both primary and inferential. The former of these aspects is the one now under discussion.
[154] Compare Fowler's Inductive Logic, p. 29. [Since the reference was made, Mr. Fowler has become Professor of Logic in the University of Oxford.]
[155] Mr. Fowler, in the little volume just referred to, describes another "Theory of the Origin of Universal Beliefs," as follows:—"It would admit that all beliefs alike are ultimately derived from experience, and still it would freely adopt the language that there are some beliefs which are 'native to the human mind.' The word 'experience' as ordinarily employed by psychologists, includes not only the experience of the individual, but the recorded experience of mankind. On the theory, however, of which we are now speaking, it has a still more extended meaning; it includes experience, or to speak more strictly, a peculiar facility for forming certain experiences, transmitted by hereditary descent from generation to generation. While some ideas occur only to particular individuals, at particular times, there are others which, from the frequency and constancy with which they are obtruded upon men's minds at all times and under all circumstances, become, after an accumulated experience of many generations, connatural, as it were, to the human mind. We assume them, often unconsciously, in our special perceptions, and when the propositions, which embody them, are propounded to us, we find it impossible, on reflection, to doubt their truth. It is by personal experience of external objects and their relations that each man recognises them, but the tendency to recognise them is transmitted, like the physical or mental peculiarities of race, from preceding generations, and is anterior to any special experience whatever on the part of the individual. This theory, to which much of modern speculation appears to be converging, is advocated with great ability in the works of Mr. Herbert Spencer." Inductive Logic, p. 31.
This account of our Belief in the Inductive Principle agrees, in effect, with the opinion of those who hold that our acceptance of its truth resembles our acceptance of Mathematical Truths in two very important respects: (1) Its Certitude. To use Dr. Whewell's words; "We are as certain of it as of the truths of arithmetic and geometry. We cannot doubt that it must apply to all events past and future, in every part of the universe, just as truly as to those occurrences which we have ourselves observed. What causes produce what effects;—what is the cause of any particular event;—what will be the effect of any peculiar process;—these are points on which experience may enlighten us. Observation and experience may be requisite, to enable us to judge respecting such matters. But that every event has some cause, Experience cannot prove any more than she can disprove. She can add nothing to the evidence of the truth, however often she may exemplify it. This doctrine, then, cannot have been acquired by her teaching," Whewell's Hist. of Scientific Ideas, B. III. Cap. ii.
(2) In the fact of its being intuitive; that is, as Mr. Fowler says, "connatural," or "native to the human mind."
Whether we can trace the process through which it became one of the mental possessions characteristic of Mankind is a further question, and a very curious one. The subjects of improvement by education, and of the transmission of improvements thus acquired among men and the lower animals, belong in part to our next Chapter;—they are, of course, deeply interesting to every philanthropist, every promoter of true progress and wholesome civilization.
[156] Galen remarks upon the immediate activity of animal instinct prior to example or habituation. Most Naturalists know his experiment of hatching three different sorts of eggs together. He was much struck to see the young aquatic bird, reptile, and eaglet, betake themselves at once, each to his vocation. Some persons referred these instincts to the influence of organs fitted for definite uses, yet, observes Galen, the young calf will butt before he has got horns. A good deal might be added to Galen's rejoinder. Animals seem often to work without fitness of organization,—or one might almost say in defiance of their organs. "There is nothing," says Sir C. Bell, "in the configuration of the black bear, particularly adapted for his catching fish; yet he will sit, on his hinder extremities, by the side of a stream, morning or evening, on the watch, like a practised fisher, and so perfectly motionless as to deceive the eye of the Indian, who mistakes him for the burnt trunk of a tree; when he sees his opportunity favourable, he will thrust out his fore-paw, and seize a fish with incredible celerity. The exterior organ is not, in this instance, the cause of the habit or of the propensity; and if we thus see the instinct bestowed without the appropriate organ, may we not the more readily believe, in other examples, when the two are conjoined, that the habit exists with the instrument, although not through it?" (Bridgewater Treatise, Chap. x. p. 250.)—In Captain Cook's third voyage there is another anecdote of bears equally curious. "The wild deer (barein) are far too swift for those lumbering sportsmen; so the bear perceives them at a distance by the scent; and, as they herd in low grounds, when he approaches them, he gets upon the adjoining eminence, from whence he rolls down pieces of rock; nor does he quit his ambush, and pursue, until he finds that some have been maimed." (Vol. 3, p. 306.)
In such cases as these, there is a manifest want of correspondence between animal organisms and animal instincts, which many naturalists consider essentially interdependent. Yet on their mutual action and reaction some have founded a theory of evolution.
[157] "We have in the Veda the invocation Dyaūs pítar, the Greek Ζεῦ πατερ, the Latin Jupiter; and that means in all the three languages what it meant before these three languages were torn asunder—it means Heaven-Father. These two words are not mere words; they are to my mind the oldest poem, the oldest prayer of mankind, or at least of that pure branch of it to which we belong—and I am as firmly convinced that this prayer was uttered, that this name was given to the unknown God before Sanskrit was Sanskrit, and Greek was Greek, as when I see the Lord's Prayer in the languages of Polynesia and Melanesia, I feel certain that it was first uttered in the language of Jerusalem." Professor Max Müller's Science of Religion. New Ed. p. 172.