Realist make him almost if not quite intuitionalist; while
there is also an idealist reading possible. The threatened
dualism of ideal and material becomes for Aristotle mainly a
contrast of matter and form; the lower stage in development
desires or aims at the higher, matter more and more tending
to pass into form, till God is form without any matter. But
this God of Aristotle's is a cold consciousness, imitated only by
the contemplative virtue of the philosopher, not by the morally
active citizen. And the chief contribution of Aristotle to theism
is a theory, found in his Physics as well as his M eta physics, of
God as first mover of the universe, himself unmoved. This
theory is generally ranked as the earliest appearance in European
thought of the cosmological argument. Free will is shaping
itself towards discussion in Aristotle's Ethics, but is hardly
yet a formulated problem. For anything like personal immortality
the medieval Schoolmen searched him anxiously but
in vain.
Epicureanism need not detain us. It is a system of empiricism and materialism, remarkable only for teaching free will. Atoms swerved as they fell endlessly downwards, and thus introduced an indeterminate or irrational element into the processes of the world. Theism can take but little interest in this peculiar type of free will doctrine, or again in Epicurus’s professed admission of the existence of gods—made of atoms: inhabiting the spaces between the worlds; careless of men. Stoicism is a much more important system, but harder to classify. Perhaps in the department of thought where it is most in earnest—in ethics—it is an idealism. It tells men to “obey reason” and crush passion, or to live “according to nature.” In physics—but in that region of speculation its positions are more perfunctory-it teaches pantheism on a quasi-materialistic basis. God is the soul of the world, although the gods of popular belief are (at least by the later Stoics) respectfully if esoterically acknowledged. Human survival is taught, but not ultimate immortality; and, as against Epicureanism, Stoicism on the whole tends to deny free will. There is perhaps a certain religious enthusiasm in the thought of being passively determined by Fate, the Universe, Zeus. Finally, the Stoic analysis of the process of knowledge is sensationalist and empiricist.
So far as a coherent body of theistic doctrine exists, it did not grow out of the great systems, but out of the lesser men who stood nearer to the apprehension of practical citizens. Perhaps the most important of these popular thinkers was Marcus Tullius Cicero—no great philosopher, but a graceful and effective man of letters. It has been truly observed[1] that the lineaments of intuitionalism are very clear in him. He also gives us “natural law”[2]—a Stoic inheritance, preserving the form of an idealist appeal to systematic requirements of reason, while practically limiting its assumptions to those of intuitionalism. Formally, Cicero adhered to the Academic[3] philosophy during its “middle” or almost sceptical period. (The senses are so far from truth that we must be content with reaching probability.) In Cicero's De Natura Deorum the burden of theism rests mainly on the Stoic interlocutor. The conclusion, “academically” recognizing the cont endings of one disputant as more “probable,” is imitated in D, Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. In the great Roman Stoics—Seneca, Epictetus; less material for theism perhaps in Marcus Aurelius-we see the partial softening and religious deepening of the system, and a doctrine of the wise man's power over passion and circumstance which has all the essentials o Libertarianism. Philo of Alexandria should also be Pham mentioned. He blends the tradition of the Old Testament with Greek philosophy, and, within the latter, exhibits that union of Platonism with Stoicism, especially in the doctrine of the Logos, which became dominant in the Christian apologists and the great theologians of the ancient church. Philo is Greek enough to believe in the eternity of matter; otherwise he preserves the main outlines of Old Testament theism. He teaches free will and immortality; and the design and cosmological arguments are both traceable in him. Augustine of Hippo transmits a type of Platonism as part of his legacy to the Western church. Against Manichaean dualism he had vindicated free will; but as against Pelagianism he taught the bondage of sinful man—a position accepted in the East but never welcome there, and not more than half welcome even in the West. From this theological entanglement the problem of free will did not escape for long centuries. In spite of some wave rings towards what has lately been called “ conditional immortality ” (see Apologetics) the doctrine of “natural immortality " championed by Augustine became dominant in the church; an instalment of what was afterwards to be called Natural Theology; and a postulate or presupposition to-day-like free will—in Roman Catholic apologetics.
The middle ages, in the person of Anselm of Canterbury, contribute the first clear form of the Ontological argument for theism. If our grouping of philosophies, as given above, is sound, every idealist scheme contains potentially an ontological argument. In other words; whenever philosophy teaches a doctrine of the Absolute, and regards such doctrine as valid and certain, we have the essence of an ontological or a priori argument. Of course it remains debatable whether this philosophical Absolute is necessarily interpreted as a personal God, or perhaps even whether logically it can be. But the Christian bias is sure to make theologians, who borrow a doctrine of the Absolute, interpret it in a Christian sense; hence we may consider it something of an accident that even an Augustine fails exactly to put the argument in form. Anselm tells us that a most perfect being must exist, since the perfection which includes existence is manifestly greater than a perfection confined to an object of thought. Some of the impression of paradox here is due to Anselm's treating the Absolute simply as one among many other beings, and to his treating existence simply as one element in the quantitative sum of perfections. At least, idealist philosophy will hold that the substance if not the form of the argument is sound[4] though the question of its interpretation remains. In Anselm's case we have the further sanguine hope of justifying not theism merely but all Christian doctrine to the scientific reason. Thomas Aquinas, following Albertus Magnus, but with greater' power and greater influence, occupies substantially intuitionalist ground. He will not have the Ontological argument; but he asserts Natural Law, and relies upon the cosmological and design arguments—with various refinements and distinctions, differently stated in his two Summae. In declaring the supreme doctrines of Christianity to be mysteries above reason, he marks off a lower region where reason is to reign; the study of that lower region may well be called, as later centuries have called it, Natural Theology; and as such it presents strong intuitionalist affinities. The critics of Aquinas-Duns Scotus and the later Nominalists-show some tendency towards rational scepticism. They exercise their acumen in multiplying difficulties; but all such questionable doctrines are presently re-established from a different point of view as truths of faith or findings of church authority. The Church of Rome has discouraged these daring tactics in favour of the more cautious and probably more defensible positions of Aquinas. In Raymond of Sabundes form of moral argument-there must be a God to reward and' punish, if human life is not to be “ vain "—we see the kinship of that argument to the argument from design.
René Descartes, a faithful though not an' unsuspected Roman Catholic, founded modern philosophy by his starting-point of universal doubt and by his arguments in reply. One may regard him as an idealist, though Scottish intuitionalism-especially in the writings of Professor John Veitch—has claimed him for its own; and indeed Descartes's two substances of active mind and passive extended matter are very much akin to “Natural Dualism.” Still, Descartes has marked idealist traits, as when he refurbishes the ontological argument with clearer emphasis on the perfect being as “necessarily” existent[5]—reasoning a shade less quantitative or a shade more subtle than Anselm's. Descartes's preliminary statement of the argument in somewhat popular form brings it very near the lines of the cosmological proof.[6] There must be a cause for nature, but particularly for the idea of perfection in us—that cause must be God. The radical side of Descartes appears again in his offering his own type of theism as a substitute for the old proofs—not a supplement. Design especially was under suspicion with him. He was even more definitely opposed to “final causes” than Francis Bacon, who excluded them from science but admitted them to theology. All this was connected with zeal for physical and mathematical science. Descartes was an expert; Bacon was the prophet of a great, if half comprehended, future; and the science they loved was struggling for its infant life against a mass of traditional prejudices, which sought to foreclose every question by confident assertions about the purposes of God and Nature. A difficult question arose for Descartes's philosophy, when it had to explain the union in man of the absolutely opposite substances,
- ↑ D. G. Ritchie. Natural Rights, p. 36.
- ↑ See above (ad init).
- ↑ Platonic.
- ↑ Cf. J. E. MacTaggart in regard to Hegel, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, chap. iii.
- ↑ So Meditation 5, at least in the French version. Again: “ Existence cannot be separated from the essence of God "; compare Spinoza's ethics, definition 1; “ By causa sui I understand that the essence of which involves existence, or that-which by its own nature can only be conceived as existing."
- ↑ Meditation 3.
