§ III.—CHAPTER IV.

REASON—INFINITY.

(À PRIORI ARGUMENT.)

MIND begins in faith, in holding for true the objective, presented to it in sensible perception. Thus intuitive in its lowest energy, it is equally so in its highest. If, looking outward, it has no further explanation to render of the reality of the visible world than that it is present in apprehension, and therefore must be conceived as existent; so, looking upward from the sphere of finite reality, it perceives a higher world of truth, which equally makes itself good in apprehension.

Such a higher power of intuition, by which we apprehend realities beyond the region of the sensible, is one which is admitted by every school of philosophy, save that which, from the extremely unphilosophical assumption lying at its basis, is bound to ignore everything beyond the sensible.¹⁴⁵¹⁴⁵   Even empiricism may be said to give us, under the form of generalisations, a mimicry of the truths which it yet denies. At the same time, there have been endless disputes as to the special name and character of this transcendant 278intuition. For our purpose it matters not at all how it may be specially designated, or even understood, so that its reality is confessed; whether, for example, it be identified more with the intellectual or moral side of our being. According to the only genuine conception of the human mind, this is indeed a very irrelevant question, as there are none of the sides of mental activity which can be strictly demarcated from the others, all blending as they do endlessly into one another. Whether, therefore, this loftiest energy of the soul—which relates it to a sphere of unconditioned objectivity, as the lower intuitional power relates it to the sphere of the conditioned—be conceived of as intelligence in the highest sense (the Νοῦς), or as faith, it is for us of no consequence. As forming the highest expression of our mental activity, it seems eminently to deserve the special name of reason, which has often been applied to it.¹⁴⁶¹⁴⁶   This employment of the term reason, to denote the special faculty of the supersensible or unconditioned, is very old, although it may be true, according to Sir W. Hamilton (Ed. Reid, note A, p. 769), that it has only been generally used in this sense since the time of Kant. Its justification seems to be simply this, that the highest energy or expression of the human mind may very well receive pre-eminently the name which is characteristic of its general nature. Certainly, if the name is to be appropriated to any special power or faculty, it ought to be appropriated to this highest and most aspiring faculty, which brings us into communion with the spiritual and the infinite. If such an interpretation of reason were kept steadily in view, the supposed conflicts between it and faith, which have been so long the bane and opprobrium of Theology, would speedily disappear. For thus they would be clearly seen to form a unity of power, in which the whole soul, intellectually and practically, goes forth towards the truth. In our older and best theology this is the view under which reason is presented.—Vide HOOKER’S Eccles. Polit., book i. chap. vii. et seq.

The infinite is the peculiar object of this higher intuition. 279It is the revelation of reason as the finite is the revelation of sense. There is no reality, apprehended under a diversity of forms, which holds a more living possession of the human mind. The various notions of substance, space, duration, which constitute the necessary truths logically presupposed in all phenomena of sense and reflection, and which reappear in all metaphysic as its essential data, are merely different modes under which the infinite makes itself known. The very variety of these, its expressions, and the obstinacy with which, under whatever denial, they cling to the mind, only serve to display the richness of the generic truth in which they all inhere, and of which they are merely manifestations.

The mode in which we have approached this subject seems to dissipate many of the controversies which have incumbered it. It serves to show the reality of the infinite as an element or constituent of human knowledge, without in any degree aiming to bring the infinite as an idea within our reach. So far as we try to seize or compass it in thought—or, in other words, hold it before us as an idea—it can, in the nature of the case, only present itself as a negation. It evades us in the very attempt to contain or comprehend it. But while the infinite is thus incomprehensible as a subject of thought, it is directly apprehensible as a reality of reason. Negative as an idea, it is positive as a fact. While we cannot think it, yet we cannot want it. It reveals itself as an implicate of all our more special mental conceptions, and it may therefore be said to guarantee itself in the very hold which it thus keeps of the soul, under 280all the baffling attempts of the understanding to compass it. And this is admitted by Sir W. Hamilton, in language than which we could desire nothing more plain as a confession of all that we really contend for. “We are thus taught,” he says, “the salutary lesson that the capacity of thought is not to be constituted into the measure of existence, and are warned from recognising the domain of our knowledge as necessarily coextensive with the horizon of our faith. And by a wonderful revelation we are thus, in the very consciousness of our inability to conceive aught above the relative and finite, inspired with a belief in the existence of something unconditioned beyond the sphere of all comprehensible reality.”¹⁴⁷¹⁴⁷   Philosophical Discussions, p. 15.

In the same point of view we see the fallacy of the Kantian doctrine of the infinite. Admitting it as a regulating idea of human knowledge, Kant yet denied to it any objective validity. The idea, according to him, might be necessary to us, and yet not represent a reality. And so it might, were the ideal or notional the mode in which the infinite is alone present to us. But this is so far from being the case, that the idea, as present in the understanding, is only the dim reflection of the fact present in reason. The infinite comes to us intuitively, and not notionally; and in this the very mode of its apprehension affirms its reality. The soul looks upward, and the light of the infinite dawns upon it. It presents itself as an objective presence—a self-revealing vision—and is not wrought out as a mere ideal projection from our mental restlessness. It is felt to 281be a reality containing and conditioning the soul, which, with all its power, it cannot think away; and this it could not be, were it a mere self-created form of the soul. The declaration of consciousness here, no less than in sensible perception, gives, as its indisputable contents, subject and object, in immediate and inseparable relation. In the one case as in the other, the mind “gazes upon its object with an immediacy which suffers no error or doubt to intervene, and gives in this way a guarantee for its legitimacy which it is impossible to resist.” It is now, in fact, admitted on all hands, that Kant’s denial of objectivity to the ideas of pure reason, and his virtual readmission of their reality as postulates of the practical reason, is the most inconsequent and feeble portion of his whole philosophy—and on the special ground, already so often stated by us, that we cannot legitimately disjoin the intellectual and the moral—the pure and the practical—and hold their deliverances asunder. Certainly we cannot leave out of that highest spiritual faculty we call reason, the element of faith, without destroying its essential character, and making it merely a higher form of the logical understanding. It is of the very essence of reason—regarded by us as the apex of the soul’s activity—its consummate energy,—to be at once pure and practical, cognitive and moral. We have, in the last case, no higher name for knowledge everywhere than belief. And this belief, as Sir W. Hamilton says, is mistaken by Kant when recognised as “a mere spiritual craving.” It is rather “an immediate manifestation to intelligence—not as a postulate, but as a datum—not as an 282interest in certain truths, but as the fact, the principle, the warrant of their cognition and reality.”¹⁴⁸¹⁴⁸   Ed. Reid, Note A, p. 793.

No one has dwelt more fully upon the function of reason, and its use and value in natural theology, than M. Cousin. But while others have erred in undervaluing it, he has erred in unduly magnifying it, or rather in losing sight of the human in the Divine reality. It is not with him, in any distinctive sense, a human power through which we merely apprehend God as the one ultimate and absolute Substance and Cause; but it is, even in its human appearance, a sort of divinity—“not, indeed, the absolute God, but His manifestation in spirit and in truth—not the Being of beings, but the God of the human race.”¹⁴⁹¹⁴⁹   Fragmens Philosophiques, preface de la première edit., p. 36-37. Paris: 1849.

The characteristic error of Cousin seems to consist in a too extreme recoil from the subjectivity of Kant. Looking at the great constitutive idea of the infinite, in the various phases in which it is found to underlie all our mental operations—as, for example, the universal in space, the eternal in time—Kant concluded that these were the mere forms or categories which the mind, the ego cogitative, imposes upon itself. He thus denuded them of objectivity, and thereby, as we have seen, contradicted the testimony of consciousness in reason, which embraces not only a subject, but an object—which declares the soul not only to be conversant with such notions, as regulative forms of its own activity, but to be directly and primarily conversant with the reality 283in which they all inhere. Looking at these same notions, Cousin, on the other hand, is not content to accept them as intuitively made known to the human reason, but he insists upon them as realities apart from the human ego, and, indeed, any ego whatever. They were only the forms of the human ego with Kant: the ego has nothing to do with them, says Cousin; for reason, which expresses or contains them, is impersonal.¹⁵⁰¹⁵⁰   Fragmens Philosophiques, preface de la première edit., vol. iv. p. 21. See also preface de la deuxième edit., p. 56. But this is to talk in a language which is to us wholly unintelligible; for we can have no conception of reason which is unrelated to personality. Apart from the latter element it is a mere abstraction, equally unmeaning with the materialistic abstraction of law, and equally calculated to play the same pantheistic or atheistic part of exalting itself in the place of God. The contents of reason are, no doubt, realities altogether apart from the human ego; but how they can be known or manifested to us, save as apprehended by that ego, seems a puzzle of peculiar hopelessness. The fact appears to be, that personality, or the ego, is understood by M. Cousin as something subordinate and inferior, with the action of which it is degrading to associate reason; and here again he is found somewhat strangely meeting the views of the materialistic school most opposed to him.

Our position is equally opposed to both these extremes. The infinite is apprehended by us as a reality in the strongest manner, but then the evidence of this reality is directly found in the intuitive apprehension of the ego. It is revealed 284in the rational consciousness, and in its revelation sufficiently attests its existence. Our reason relates us to the infinite, and lifts us into communion with it. It is thus to us the ever-sufficient evidence of the Divine reality; but it is itself only a feeble and broken shadow of that reality. It looks forth into the invisible, and finds there its living Author; yet it is deeply conscious of its own weakness, while conscious of its affinity with the Divine Presence which there meets it, and from which it comes.

This infinite Presence in space and in time is the complement of man’s spiritual being at all points. It asserts its power in the human mind in manifold ways, that can only be accounted for by its truth. Apart from its shadow in the intellect, science could not exist: knowledge would be a mere perplexed and confused accumulation. This, however, brings a unity into all our mental operations. Reason descries an infinite meaning everywhere, and science is the creation of such a gift. Apart from this reality in the heart life would be vanity. The higher glory of eternity could not encompass and strengthen it. It is only the truth of the Infinite that gives significance to speculation or perseverance to well-doing.

In natural theology this predicate of the Infinite is at once the most consummate and comprehensive that rewards our inquiry, without which every induction must come short of the proof of a Divine Existence. It gives, as its essential contents, not only all those special attributes of eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, of which it is simply the generic 285expression; but, moreover, the unity of these attributes, in which the idea of God alone completes itself. For unity is plainly a logical condition of infinity; and, manifold as are the indications of unity in nature, it may be doubted whether these could give us more than a unity of Divine purpose, whereas our conclusion requires a unity of Divine Essence. It attains to its full meaning only in the admission of one “all-powerful, wise, and good Being, by whom everything exists.”

The special question of the validity of the a priori argument for the being of a God here comes before us directly; and although our relation to it can scarcely fail to have made itself intelligible to the philosophical reader, it may yet deserve from us a special consideration.

The pretension of the a priori argument is the logical evolution or demonstration of the truth of the Divine existence from some element or datum admitted to be indisputable. In order strictly to maintain its character, this element ought to be one ineradicably given in our modes of thought—an intellectual point of which we cannot get rid, but which we continue to think in the very attempt to think away. Such is our notion of infinity; and all a priori reasoning for the being of a God will be found to rest on some phase or other of this notion. It errs not in its appeal to such fundamental necessities of human thought, but in its attempt to construct out of them a logical demonstration of the Divine Existence. We will confine ourselves, for the sake of illustration, to 286what is commonly known as the Cartesian¹⁵¹¹⁵¹   The name of Des Cartes has been especially associated with the a priori argument, and to him must undoubtedly be allowed the merit of having launched it, as a pregnant problem, into the current of modern speculation. The argument, however, in all that it essentially imports, is as old as the first dawn of scholasticism, of which it is so genuine a product. The germ of it is to be found in the writings of the great father of the Scholastic Philosophy (Augustine, 2d chap. De Lib. Arbit. ) and in the writings of Anselm and Aquinas. In those of the former it is even set forth in a strictly formal and scientific manner, which the student may consult as presented in Hagenbach’s History of Doctrines, vol. i. p. 443 et seq.
   It is a somewhat curious fact to find Des Cartes, who so emphatically stands at the head of our modern free inquiry, the patriarch of that speculative spirit which has born such strange fruits of intellectual daring, and who himself manifests in his Meditations a tone of such intense originality, reverting to a familiar doctrine of the expiring scholasticism as one of the most fundamental principles of the new philosophical certitude which he aimed to establish. argument. The argument of Dr Clarke, in so far as it is a priori, lies open to the same criticism. This argument, however, as already observed in the Introduction, is not strictly a priori, setting out as it does from an express fact of observation or of sensible experience. The remarkable argument of Mr Gillespie,¹⁵²¹⁵²   The Necessary Existence of Deity. By WILLIAM GILLESPIE. Edin. 1836. which, as a specimen of a priori speculation, certainly claims to be ranked along with anything in British philosophical literature, comes still more directly within the scope of our objection.

We select our statement of the Cartesian argument from the replies to the Objections to the Meditations,¹⁵³¹⁵³   Objections aux Meditations, p. 460-461; Œuvres de Des Cartes. Par COUSIN. Vol. i. Paris: 1824. where it is found in a form the most rigidly demonstrative, and which may very well stand as the type of all possible a priori argumentation on the subject. The following is the proposition to be proved, and the mode of demonstration:—

Proposition.—“The existence of God is known from the consideration of His nature alone.”

Demonstration.—“To say that an attribute is contained in the nature, or in the concept of a thing, is the same as to say that this attribute is true of this thing, and that it may be affirmed to be in it. “

“But necessary existence is contained in the nature, or in the concept of God.”

“Hence it may with truth be said that necessary existence is in God, or that God exists.”

This argument, be it observed, sets out from the conception of God, and infers, simply on the ground of this conception, the fact of His existence. More particularly, it infers this fact, because necessary existence is an essential element of the conception of God; that is to say, our conception of God, as the all-perfect or the infinite, includes this special phase of the infinite, necessary existence;—and therefore God exists. The character of the conception is made the proof of the fact. This seems to us a fair explication of the argument. We do not now dwell upon the paralogism which it may be said to involve in starting from the conception of God, which is yet the very thing to be found. We would only fix attention upon the inference by which it passes from the concept to the reality from the idea to the fact. Instead of uniting the soul to objectivity by the very character of its affirmation in reason, the Cartesian sets out with the subjective and reasons to the objective. The infinite real is with him a logical inference from the infinite ideal (apprehended separately)—the concrete 288from the abstract. A purely intellectual necessity is regarded as demonstrative of an actual existence. According to our representation, on the other hand, the infinite is not apprehended as in the mind at all apart from reality, but as a revelation of reality from the first—as, in short, not logically but intuitively given. The postulate of reason is a reality, and the logical necessity of the Cartesian is the mere reflection in the understanding of this encompassing reality, which stands face to face with us in reason. In the one case, the infinite is apprehended as a fact in the truthful mirror of intuition; in the other case, the mind is merely busy with a set of abstract ideas, which are nothing else than the shadow (reflection) in thought or logical form of the intuitive fact.

If, with the Cartesian, we take our stand among these abstract ideas, we believe that we can never, by any process of proof, reach the conclusion at which he aims. The infinite ideal can never logically yield the infinite real. Kant’s famous criticism of the Cartesian argument has, we think, established so much beyond all dispute. He has shown, with an acuteness and power of reasoning which it is impossible to resist, that this argument, in passing from the abstract to the concrete, confounds a logical with a real predicate,—or, in other words, stealthily translates a mere relation of thought into a fact of existence, which it does not and cannot contain. The following illustration, used by Des Cartes, will make this clear. The quotation is from his statement in the Principles of the same argument which we have already given in the more precise form in which it is found in his 289answers to Objections: “Just as because, for example, the equality of its three angles to two right angles is necessarily comprised in the idea of a triangle, the mind is firmly persuaded that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles; so, from its perceiving necessary and eternal existence to be comprised in the idea which it has of an all-perfect Being, it ought manifestly to conclude that this all-perfect Being exists.”

It is impossible not to see at once that there is a plain fallacy here. The idea of a triangle includes the equality of its three angles to two right angles; therefore the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles. This is simply to affirm an identical proposition—that proposition being the invariability of the intellectual conception expressed by a triangle. The idea of an all-perfect Being includes necessary existence; therefore this all -perfect Being exists. This, on the contrary, is not simply to affirm, as in the former case, an identical proposition, which would have been only to this effect, that necessary existence is an essential constituent of the idea of an all-perfect Being, but, tacitly and illegitimately, to pass from the relation of an intellectual conception to the reality of the thing conceived; whereas the only reality that can be given, as in the parallel case of the triangle, is the reality of the relations of the intellectual conception.

Kant pursues his argument in the following manner, which may perhaps serve to set it more thoroughly before the reader: “If I do away with the predicate in an identical judgment, and I retain the subject—that is to say, do 290away with the equality of the three angles to two right angles, and yet retain the triangle, or do away with necessary existence, and yet retain the idea of an all-perfect Being—a contradiction arises. But if I annul the subject together with the predicate, then there arises no contradiction, for there is no more anything which could be contradicted. To assume a triangle, and yet to do away with the three angles of the same, is contradictory; but to do away with the triangle together with its three angles is no contradiction. It is just the same with the conception of an absolutely necessary being. If you do away with the existence of this, you thus do away with the thing itself, together with all its predicates (in which case there can be no contradiction. . . . God is omnipotent; this is a necessary judgment. The omnipotence cannot be done away with if you suppose a Divinity—that is, an infinite Being, with the conception of which the fact is identical. But if you say, God is not, neither the omnipotency, nor any other of His predicates, is then given; because they are all annihilated together with the subject, and in this thought there is not manifested the least contradiction.”¹⁵⁴¹⁵⁴   Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 458; Kant’s Werke. Leipzig: 1838.—The matter is perhaps best of all cleared up by Kant’s well-known distinction of analytic and synthetic judgments. The equality of three angles of a triangle to two right angles is what he called an analytic judgment; that is to say, a simple writing out of the conception already given in a triangle. The predicate B is already in the subject A. Again, existence, as a necessary element of the conception, God, is in a similar manner an analytic judgment—a simple writing out of the conception for which God already stands. The predicate B (existence as a conception) is already in the subject A. But to predicate existence as a fact of the subject A, is to pass out of the sphere of the conception altogether, and, however true in itself, can never be given in the mere conception. The judgment, in this case, is no longer analytic, but synthetic; that is to say, something is affirmed, which the mere explication of the conception does not yield.

The Kantian criticism must, we think, be fairly allowed to be destructive of the Cartesian demonstration. However a mere abstract idea may indicate a corresponding reality 291(must in fact do so), it can never, if we merely hold thereby, constitute a valid proof of it. We can never logically pass from the one to the other. Just as in perception, if we endeavour to separate the contents therein given, and hold merely with the ideal factor—the me—we can never argumentatively find the not-me. We can never get out of the subjective circle. But let us only acknowledge the intuitive character of the apprehensive act in either case—in reason as in sense—and we have already as indisputable matter of fact the me and the not-me, the subject and object. The infinite, no longer regarded as a mere subjective reflection in the understanding—a mere logical necessity—but as intuitively given in reason, needs and admits of no further proof of reality than its being thus given. It is there—a living Presence, in which alone the finite soul at once apprehends itself and the ultimate and absolute Being whence it is. So far from depending on demonstration, it is, in this view, a fact anterior to all demonstration, and even the very condition of that logical thought, which in vain seeks to reach it.

And in thus abandoning all claim to demonstration, the evidence for the being of a God, so far from being weakened, is indeed strengthened. For in all our knowledge there is, and can be, no higher warrant for reality than the grasp of intuition. What the soul thus holds by immediate presentation, 292is, and must be, its most living possession—the source of all its own elaborated notions, and in comparison with which these are verily as shadows. And thus, too, it deserves to be added, the great truth of the existence of God is only preserved as a truth of religion, encompassed with a radiance of evidence which only the wilfully blind can fail to see, yet not mathematically demonstrated, that they who devoutly seek the light may have gladness and reward in its discovery.