Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/92

mechanism of the hand, the eye, the movements of the planetary bodies, and other natural objects without us, and not from that which is within us,—who seek to prove the spiritual from the material, and not from the spirituality existing and innate in every man's mind,—are not so immeasurably distant from gross paganism as they suppose. They and the pagan,—the Odin-worshipper, or Jupiter-worshipper, or whatever he may be,—proceed upon the very same material grounds, and the pagan appears the closer and stricter reasoner of the two. An ignorant and barbarous people may be wrong in the grounds from which they reason, but are seldom wrong in the reasoning process itself. Their conclusions are usually very correct, only drawn from false premises. They mark the thunder-bolt, and conclude there is a Supreme Divine Cause—a thunder-maker. They mark the ocean,—now calm and smiling, now shaking the earth with its fury,—and conclude there must be an ocean god. This is precisely the reasoning of the Paley and of the Bridgewater Bequest philosophy. The manifest design, contrivance, adaptation of means to an end in a watch, prove the existence of a watchmaker—of the hand, of a hand-maker—of the eye, of an eye-maker—of the world, of a world-maker. But from these material-world grounds these material philosophers cannot deduce, in strict reasoning, the unity of the Supreme Divine Power; still less the moral perfections of the Supreme Divine Power. The pagan proceeds upon exactly the same grounds in his religious belief; but reasons much more correctly and logically from the same material grounds, when he concludes there is a separate Divine Power for each separate class of material objects—a god of thunder, a Neptune, and so on; and concludes, from the material-world grounds, that the superiority of the intelligence that made it, above his which perceives it, is