27. (Recapitulation.)—This, then, is the argument to which we have been led by the survey of the sciences in which we have been engaged:—That the human mind can and does put forth, out of its natural stores, duly unfolded, certain Ideas as the bases of scientific truths: These Ideas are universally and constantly verified in the universe: And the reason of this is, that they agree with the Ideas of the Divine Mind according to which the universe is constituted and sustained: The human mind has thus in it an element of resemblance to the Divine Mind: To a certain extent it looks upon the universe as the Divine Mind does; and therefore it is that it can see a portion of the truth: And not only can the human mind thus see a portion of the truth, as the Divine Mind sees it: but this portion, though at present immeasurably small, and certain to be always immeasurably small compared with the whole extent of truth which with greater intellectual powers, he might discern, nevertheless may increase from age to age.
This is then, I conceive, one of the results of the progress of scientific discovery—the Theological Result of the Philosophy of Discovery, as it may, I think, not unfitly be called:—That by every step in such discovery by which external facts assume the aspect of necessary consequences of our Ideas, we obtain a fresh proof of the Divine nature of the human mind: And though these steps, however far we may go in this path, can carry us only a very little way in the knowledge of the universe, yet that such knowledge, so far as we do obtain it, is Divine in its kind, and shows that the human mind has something Divine in its nature.
The progress by which external facts assume the aspect of necessary consequences of our Ideas, we have termed the idealization of facts; and in this sense we have said, that the progress of science consists in the Idealization of Facts. But there is another way in which the operation of man's mind may be considered—an opposite view of the identification of Ideas with Facts; which we must consider, in order to complete our view of the bearing of the progress of human thought upon the nature of man.
CHAPTER XXXI.
Man's Knowledge of God.
1. MAN'S powers and means of knowledge are so limited and imperfect that he can know little concerning God. It is well that men in their theological speculations should recollect that it is so, and should pursue all such speculations in a modest and humble spirit.
But this humility and modesty defeat their own ends, when they lead us to think that we can know nothing concerning God: for to be modest and humble in dealing with this subject, implies that we know this, at least, that God is a proper object of modest and humble thought.
2. Some philosophers have been led, however, by an examination of man's faculties and of the nature of being, to the conclusion that man can know nothing concerning God. But we may very reasonably doubt the truth of this conclusion. We may ask, How can we know that we can know nothing? If we can know nothing, we cannot even know that.
It is much more reasonable to begin with things that we really do know, and to examine how far such knowledge can carry us, respecting God, as well as anything else. This is the course which we have been following, and its results are very far from being trifling or unimportant.
In thus beginning from what we know, we start from two points, on each of which we have, we conceive, some real and sure knowledge:—namely, mathematical and physical knowledge of the universe without us; and a knowledge of our own moral and personal nature within us.