the religious element itself; it is expressed by the spontaneous intuition of Reason.
Now men come to this Idea early. It is the logical condition of all other ideas; without this as an element of our consciousness, or lying latent, as it were, and unrecognized in us, we could have no ideas at all. The senses reveal to us something external to the body, and independent thereof, on which it depends; they tell not what it is. Consciousness reveals something in like manner, not the human spirit, in me, but its absolute ground, on which the spirit depends.[1] Outward circumstances furnish the occasion by which we approach and discover the Idea of God; but they do not furnish the Idea itself. That is a fact given by the nature of Man. Hence some philosophers have called it an innate idea; others, a reminiscence of what the spirit knew in a higher state of life before it took the body. Both opinions may be regarded as rhetorical statements of the truth that the Idea of God is a fact given by Man's nature, and not an invention or device of ours. The belief in God's existence therefore is natural, not against nature. It comes unavoidably from the legitimate action of the intellectual and the religious faculties, just as the belief in light comes from using the eyes, and belief in our existence from mere existing. The knowledge of God's existence, therefore, may be called in the language of Philosophy, an intuition of Reason; or in the mythological language of the elder Theology,[2] a Revelation from God.
If the above statement be correct, then our belief in God's existence does not depend on the à posteriori argument,
- ↑ I use the word Spirit to denote all the faculties not material—as distinguished from Body.
- ↑ English writers have rarely attempted to account philosophically for the origin of the Idea of God. They have usually assumed this, and then defended it by the various arguments. See Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, Book I. ch. IV.; and Cousin's Psychology, Henry's Translation, Hartford, 1834, p. 46, et seq., and 181, et seq. See some valuable remarks in Cudworth's Intellectual System, &c., Vol. II. p. 143, et seq. See the Christian Examiner for January, 1840, p. 309, et seq., and the works there cited. See also the article of President Hopkins in American Quarterly Observer, No. II., Boston, 1833; and Ripley's Philosophical Miscellanies, Vol. I. p. 40, et seq., and 203, et seq. Some valuable thoughts on this subject may also be found in De Wette, Das Wesen des Christlichen Glaubens, vom Standpunkte des Glaubens dargestellt, Basel, 1846, § 4, et ant. See too Wirth, die speculative Idee Gottes, Stuttgart, 1845; and Sengler, die Idee Gottes, Heidelberg, 1845.
