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AN ESSAY

REFUTATION OF ATHEISM

0. A. BROWNSON.

EDITED BY

HENRY F. BHOWN80N

DETROIT:

THORNDIKE NOURSE. 1883.

THE r^SW YC

hf22So^

ASTOR. LENOX AND

TILDEN FOUNDATIONS

R 1931 i-

Entered according to ih^ Act of Contrrass, in the year 18*), by

HENRY F. BROWXSON.

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington, D. C.

CONTENTS.

iNTKOnUCTTON I

TDRISM in l^OSSESSION 4

Th>: Atiikis'l' Cannot Tukn the pKEsuMrTiON 9

No PuHKi.Y Cosine Science 13

TlTEOLOOIANS AND THE SCIENTISTS 84

iHCoxciiUsivR Proofs 33

Analysis ok Thought 40

Analysis of the Object 46

Analysis of the Ideal 5()

Analysis op the RELATIo^ — 62

The Fact of Creation 07

Existences 7fi

God as Final Cause SI

Obligation of Worship S8

Traditiox 94

PREFACE

iN Essii II immm of imEisii,

It is not without some misgiving that I present the following essay to the public; not, indeed, because I have any lack of confidence in the soundness of its principles, or the combined analytical and synthetic pro- cesses by which I attempt to demonstrate the existence of God, the fact of creation, providence, the moral law, and the ground of man's moral obligation to worship God ; but from a consciousness of my inability to do justice to the great thesis I have undertaken to defend, and my dis- trust of the disposition of the public to receive and read with patience what is most likely to be treated as a metaphysical disquisition, and therefore as worthless. Nobody now reads metaphysical works, or any works that pertain to the higher philosophy, and especially such as attempt to vindicate theology as the science of sciences.

All I can say is, that my essay is not metaphysical in the ordinary acceptation of the term, does not attempt to construct a science of abstractions, which are null, and deals only with concretes, with reali- ties. Some of the problems, and the analyses by which I attempt to solve them, may be regarded as abstruse, dithcult, and foreign from the ordinary current of thought, as all such discussions must necessarily be; but I have done my best to make my statements and reasonings clear and distinct, plain and intelligible to men of ordinary understanding and intellectual culture.

The greatest difficulty the reader will find arises from the fact that I liave not followed the more common methods of proving ihe existence of God, and that while I have broached no new system of philosophy, I have adopted an unfamiliar method of demonstration, though in my judgment rendered necessary by the logic of the case. I follow neither the ontological method, nor the psychological method, and adopt neither the argument a priori, nor the argument a posterioH, and while I maintain that the principles of all the real and the knowable are intuitively given I deny that we know that being or God is by intuition.

I have borrowed from Plato and Aristotle, St. Augustine and St. Thomas, from Cousin and Gioberti, heathen and Christian, orthodo.x and heterodox what I found to my purpose, but I follow no one any further than he follows what I hold to be demonstrable or undeniable truth. I have freely criticized and rejected the teachings of eminent authors, for some of whom I have a profound reverence, but I think my criticisms carry their own justification with them. I have adopted the Ideal formula. Ens creai existentias, asserted by Gioberti; but not till I have by my own analysis of thought, the objective element of thought, and the ideal ele- ment of the object, been forced to accept it; and whether I explain and apply it or not in his sense, I certainly take it in none of the senses that, to my knowledge, have been objected to by his critics. I am not a fol- lower of Gioberti; he is not my master; but I cannot reject a truth because he has defended it; and to refuse to name him, and give him credit where credit is honestly his due, because he is in bad odor with a portion of the public, would be an act of meanness and cowardice of which I trust I am incapable.

My essay ought to be acceptable to all who profess to be Christians. What my religion is all the world knows that knows me at all. I am an uncompromising Catholic, and on all proper occasions I glory in avow- ing my adherence to the See of Rome, and in defending the Catholic faith, and the Roman Pontiff now gloriously reigning, the Vicar of Christ, and Supreme Head and infallible teacher of the Universal Church. Such being the fact, there would be a waul of good l;iste as well as

manliness in seeking to disguise or to conceal it. But in this work I have had no occasion to discuss any question on which there are any differences among those who profess to be Christians, and I have only defended, not the faith, but the preamble to faith, as St. Thomas calls it, against the common enemy of God and man.

I have embodied in this comparatively brief essay the results of my reading and reflections during a long life on the grounds of science, religion, and ethics; they may not be worth much, but I give them to the public for what they are worth They do not solve all the questions that the ingenious and the subtile critic may raise, and fairly respond to all the objections that sophists and cavillers may adduce; but I think the work indicates a method which will be useful to many minds, and, if it converts no atheist, will at least tend to confirm Christians in the fundamental article of their faith, and to put them on their guard against the seductions of a satanic philosophy and a false, but arrogant science to which they are everywhere exposed. I have written to save the cause of truth and sound philosophy, and, in all humility, I submit what I have written to the protection of Ilim whose honor and glory I have wished to serve, and to the infallible judgment of his Vicar on earth.

O. A. BROWNSON. Elizabeth, N. J., March, 1873.

ESSAY IN REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

(From Brovrason's Quarterly Review foi- 1873-4.]

I. INTRODUCTION.

TnE a^e of heresy is virtually past. Heresy, in its pro- gressive developments, has successively arraigned and rejected every article in the creed, from " Patremomnlpo- tentem" down to " Vitara seternam." Following its essential nature, that of arbitrary choice among revealed mysteries and dogmas, of what it will rejector retain, it has eliminated one after another, till it has nothing distinctively Christian remaining, or to distinguish it from pure, unmitigated rationalism and downright naturalism. It retains with the men and women of the advanced, or movement party, hardly a dim and fading reminiscence of the supernatural, and may be said to have exhausted itself, and gone so far that it can go no further.

No new heresy is possible. The pressing, the living con- troversy of the day is not between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, which virtually ended with Bossuet's Ilistoire des Varia- tions du Protestant! s me, and the issue is now between Christianity and infidelity, faith and unbelief, religion and no religion, the worsliip of God the Creator, or the idolatry of man and nature — in a word between tiieism and atheism ; for pantheism, so fearfully pi-evalent in modern philosophy, is oidy a form of atheism, and in substance differs not from what the fool says in Jus heart, Non-j^st Deus. Not all on either side, however, have as yet become aware that this is the real issue, or that the old controversy between the orthodox and the heterodox, or the church and the sects, is not still a living controversy ; but all on either side who have looked beneath the surface, and marked the tendencies of modern thought and of modern tlieories widelj' received, in their principles if not in their developments, are well aware tliat the exact question at issue is no longer the church, but back of it in the domain of science and philosophy, and is simply, God or no God ?

The scientific theories in vogue are all atheistic, or have at least an atheistic tendency ; for they all seek to explaia Vol. n.— 1

2 KEFUTATION OF ATHEISM

man and the universe, or the cosmos, witlj,ont the recognition of God as its first or its final cause. Even the philosopliical systems that professedly combat atheism and materialism, fail to recognize the fact of creation from nothing, assume the pi'oduction of the cosmos by way of emanation, forma- tion, or evolution, which is only a form of atheism. Even phih)Sophical theories which profess to demonstrate the existence of God, bind him fast or completely hedge him in by what they call " the laws of nature," deny him per- sonality or tlie last complement of rational nature, and take from liim his liberty or freedom of action, whicli is really to deny him, or, what is the same thing, to absorb him in the cosmos.

The ethical theories of our moral philosophers have equally an atheistical tendency. They all seek a basis for virtue' without the recognition of God, the creative act, or the divine will Some place the ethical principle in self- interest, some in utility, some in instinct, some in what they call a moral sense, amoral sentiment, or Iti a subjective idea; others, in acting according to truth ; others, in acting accord- ing to the fitness of things, or in reference to universal order. Popular literature, written or inspii'ed in no small part by women, places it in what it calls love, and in doing what love dictates. The love, however, is instinctive, car- ries its own reason aiid justification in itself, refuses to be morally bound, and shrinks from the very thought of duty or ol)ligation — a love that moves and operates as one of the great elemental forces of nature, as attraction, gravitation, the wind, the storm, or the lightning. The Christian doc- trine that nudces virtue consist in voluntary obedience to the law of God as our sovereign, our final cause, and finds the basis of moral obligation in our relation to God as his creat- ures, created for him as their last end, is hardly entertained by any class of modern ethical philosophers, even when they profess to \)e Christians.

In politics, the same tendency to eliminate God from society and the state is unmisftdcable. The statesmen and political jihilosophers who base their politics on principles derived fi'om theology are exceptions to the rule, and are regarded as " behind the age." Political atlieism, or the assumption that the secular order is independent of the spir- itual, and can and shoidd exist and act without regard to it, is the popular dot-trine throughout Europe and America, alike with monarchists and republicans, and is at the hot-

INTKODUCTION. 3

torn of all the revolntionaiy movements of the last century and the present. Nothino; can be said that will be received with more general repugnance by the men of the age than the assertion of the supremacy of the spiritual order, or the denial that the secular is independent, — supreme.

If we glance at the various projects of reform, moral, political, or social, which are put forth from day to day in such numbers and with so much confidence, we shall see that they are all pervaded by one and the same atheistic thought. We see it in the late Hobert Owen's scheme of parallelograms, which avowedly assunied that the race had hitherto been afflicted by a trinity of evils of which it is necessary to get rid, namely, property, marriage, and reli- gion ; we see it it in the phalanstery of Charles Fourier, based on passional harmony, or rather on passional indul- gence ; we see it also in the International Association of working men, who would seem to be moved by a personal hatred of God ; finally, we see it in the mystic republic of the late Mazzini, \vho though he accepts, in name, God and religion, yet makes the people God, and popular instincts religion. The Saint-Simonians, with their Nouveau -Chris- tianisme^ are decidedly pantheists, and the Comtists recog- nize and worship no God but the grand collective being, humanity ; Proudhon declared that we must deny God, or not be able to assert liberty.

This rapid sketch is sufiicicnt to bear out the statement that the living controversy of the day is not between ortho- dox and heterodox Christians, but between Christianity and atheism, or, what is the same thing, Christianity and pan- theism. The battle is not even for supernatural revelation, but for God, the Creator and End of man and the universe, for natural reason and natural society, for the very principle of intellectual, moral, and social ^ife. It is all veiy well for those excellent people who never look beyond their own convictions or ])rejudices to tell us that atheism is absurd, and that we need not trouble ourselvos about it, for no man in his senses is, or can be, an atheist. But let no one lay this "flattering unction to his soul." Facts, too painfully certain to be disputed, and too numerous to be unheeded by any one who attends at all to what is going on under his very eyes, prove the contrary. The fools are not all dead, and a new ci'op is born every year.

The Internationals are avowed atheists, and they boast that their association, which is but of yesterday, has already

4 KEFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

(1871) two millions of men in France enrolled in its ranks, and four millions in the rest of Europe. Is this nothing ? What (heir principles are, and wliat their conduct may be expected to be, the murders and incendiarisms of the Pari* Commune, which their chiefs approv^ed, liave sufficiently tanght us. But, under the guise of science and free thought, men of the higliest intellectual, literary, and social standing, like Ralph AValdo Emerson and his disciples, like Charles Darwin, Sir John Lubbock, Professors Huxley and Tjndall, Herbert Spencer, Emile Littre, and the Positivists or wor- shippers of humanitj'. to say nothing of the Hegelians of Germany and the majoritj" of the medical profession, are daily and hourly propagating atheism, open or disguised, in. our higher literary and cultivated classes. The ablest and most approved organs of public opinion in Great Britain and the United States, France and Germany, either defend atheistic science, or treat its advocates with great respect and tenderness, as if the questions they raise were purely speculative, and without any practical bearing on the great and vital interests of man and society. There may be, and we trust there is, much faith, much true piety left in Chris- tendom ; but public opinion, we may say the official opinion, — the opinion that linds expression in nearly all modern, governments and legislation, — is antichi-istian, and between Christianity and atheism there is no middle ground, no legit- imate halting place.

It certainly, then, is not a work uncalled for, to subject the atheistic and false theistic theories of the day to a brief but rigid examination. The proi)lem we have to solve is the gravest problem that can occupy the human intellect or the human heart, the individual or society. It is, whether there is a God who has created the world from nothing, who is our first cause and our last cause, who has made us for himself as our supreme good, who sustains and governs u& by his providence, and has the right to our obedience and worship; or whether we are in the world, coming we know not whence, and going we know not whither, without any rule of life or purpose in our existence.

n. — THEISM EST POSSESSION.

An atheist is one who is not a theist. Atheists may be divided into two classes, positive and negative. Positive atheists are those who deny positively the existence of God,

ATHEISM m I'oStiESSION. ,)

and profess to be able to prove that God is not ; negative atheists are those, who, if they do not deny positively that God is, maintain that he is unknowable, that we have, and can have no proof of his existence, no reason for asserting it, for the hvpothesis of a God explains and accounts for nothing. Of this latter class of atheists are the Comtists and the Cosmists, or those who take Augnste Comte for their master and those who swear by Herbert Spencer.

False theists or pantheists reject the name of atheists, and jet are not essentially distinguishable from them. They are divided into several classes : 1, the emanationists, or those who hold that all things emanate, as the stream from the fountain, from the one only being or substance which they call God, and return at length to him and are reabsorbed in him ; 2, the generationists, or those who hold that the one only being or substance is in itself both male and female, iind generates the world from itself ; 3, the formationists, or those who, like Plato and Aristotle, hold that God produces all tilings by giving form to a preexisting and eternal mat-' ter, as an artificer constructs a liouse or a temple with mate- rials furnished to his hand; 4, the ontologists, or Spinozists, who assert that nothing is or exists, but being or substance, with its attributes or modes ; 5, tlie psychologists or egoists, or those who assert that nothing exists but the soul, the Ego, a]id its productions, modes, or affections, as maintained by Fichte.

There are various other shades of pantheism ; but all pan- theists coalesce and agree in denying the creative act of being producing all things from nothing, and all, except the formationists, represented by Plato and Aristotle, agree in maintaining that there is only one substance, and that the cosmos emanates from it, is generated by it, or is its attri- bute, mode, affection, or phenomenon. The characteristic of pantheism is the denial of creation from nothing and the creation of substantial existences or second causes, that is, existences capable, when sustained by the tirst cause, of act- ing from their own centre and producing clfects of their own. Plato and Aristotle approach nearer to theism than any other class of pantheists, and if tliey had admitted cre- ation they would not be pantheists at all, but theists.

Omitting the philosophers of tiie Academy and the Lyceum, all pantheists admit only one substance, which is the siih- fitance or reality of the ctjsmus, on which all the cosmic phenomena depend for their reality, and of which tlicy ;iro

6 REFUIWJ'IOX OF ATHEISM.

simply appearances or manifestations. Here pautlieisni and atheism coincide, and are one and the same ; for whether you call this one substance God, soul, or nature, makes not the least difference in the world, since you assert nothing above or distinp^uishable frojn.the cosmos. Pantheism may be the more subtle form, but is nojie the less a form of athe- ism, and pantheists are really only atheists ; for they assert no God distinct from nature, above it, and its creator.

Pantheism is the earliest form of atheism, the first depart- ure from theology, and is not regarded by those who accept it as atheism at ail. It undoubtedly retains many theistical conceptions around which the religious sentiments may linger for a time ; 3'et it is no-theism and no-theism is atheism. Pantheism, if one pleases, is inchoate atheism, the first step in the descent from theism, as complete atheism is the last. It is the germ of which atheism is the blossom or the ripe fruit. Pantheism is a misconceptioii of the relation of cause and effect, and the beginning of the corruption of the ideal ; atheism is its total corruption and loss. It is implicit not explicit atheism, as every heresy is implicitly though not explicitly the total denial of Christianity, since Christianity is an indivisible whole. In this sense, and in this sense only^ are pantheism and atheism distinguishable.

Pantheism in some of its forms underlies all the ancient and modern heathen mythologies ; and nothing is more absurd than to suppose that these mythologies were primitive, and that Christianity has been gradually developed from them. Men could not deny God before his existence had been asserted, nor could they identify him with the substance or reality manifested in the cosmic phenomena if they had no notion of his existence. Pantheism and atheism presuppose theism ; for the denial cannot precede tlie aflirmation, and either is unintelligible without it, as Protestantism presup- poses and is unintelligible without the church in commun- ion with the See of Rome against which it protests. The assertion of the papal supremacy necessarily preceded its denial. Dr. Draper, Sir John Lubbock, as well as a host of others, maintain that the more perfect forms of religion have been developed from the less perfect, as Professor Huxley maintains that life is developed from protoplasm, and protoplasm from proteine, and Charles Darwin that the higher species of animals have been developed from the lower, man from the ape or some one of the monkey tribe, by the gradual operation for ages of what he calls " natural selection."

THEISM EST POSSESSION. T

It has almost passed into an axiom that the luiman race began, as to religion, in fetichism, and passed progressively through the various forms and stages of polytheism up to the sublime monotheism of the Jews and Christians; yet the only authority for it is that it chimes in with the general theory of progress lield by a class of antichristian theorists and socialists, but which has itself no basis in science, his- tory. Or philosophy. So far as history goes, the monotheism of the Jews and Christians is older than polytheism, older than fetichism, and in fact, as held by the patriarchs, was the primitive religion of mankind. There is no earlier his- torical record extant than Genesis^ and in that we find the recognition and worship of one only God, Creator of the heavens and the earth, as well established as subsequently with the Jews and Christians. The oldest of the Vedas are the least corrupt and superstitious of the sacred books of the Hindoos, but the theology even of the oldest and purest is decidedly pantheistic, which as we have said, presupposes theism, and never could have preceded the theistical theol- ogy. Pantheism may be developed by way of corruption from theism, but theism can never be developed in any sense from pantheism.

All the Gentile religions or superstitions, if carefully examined and scientifically analyzed, are seen to have their type in the patriarchal religion, — the type, be it under- stood, from which they have receded, but not the ideal which they are approaching and struggling to realize. They all have their ideal in the past, and each points to a perfec- tion once possessed, but now lost. Over them all hovers the memory of a departed glory. The genii, devs, or divi, the good and the bad demons of the heathen mythologies, are evidently travesties of the Biblical doctrine of good and bad angels. The doctrine of the fall, of expiation and repa- ration by the sutf ering and death of a God or Divine Person, which meets us under various forms in c\ll the Indo-Ger- ' manic or Aryan mythologies, and indeed in all the known mythologies of the world, are evidently derived from the teachings or the patriarchal or primitive religion of the race, — not the Christian doctrine of original sin, redemp- tion, and reparation by the passion and death of Our Lord, from them. The heathen doctrines on all these points are mingled with too many silly fables, too many superstitious details and revolting and indecent incidents, to have been primitive, and clearly prove that they are a primitive doc-

8 liEKLTATlON ()]'■ A'l'IlKIsM.

trine corrupted. The purest and simplest forms are always the earliest.

We see, also, in all these heathen mythologjies, traces or reminiscences of an original belief in the unity of God. Above all the Dii Majores an I the Dii Minores there hovers, so to speak, dimly and indistinctly it may be, one supreme and ever-living: God, to whom Saturn, Jupiter, Juno, Venus, Yulcan, Mars, Dis, and all the other g'ods and goddesses to whom temples were erected and sacrifices were offered, were inferior and subject. It is true the heathen regarded him as inaccessible and inexorable; paid him no distinctive wor- ship, and denominated him Fate or Destiny ; yet it is clear that in the to ly of the Alexandrians, the Eternity of the Persians, above both Ormuzd and Ahriman, the heathen retained at least an obscure and fading reminiscence of the unity and supremacy of the one God of tradition. They knew him, but they did not, when they knew him, worship him as God, but gave his glory unto creatures or empty idols.

We denj^, then, that fetichism or any otlier form of heathenism is or can be the primitive or earliest religion of mankind. The primitive or earliest known religion of man- kind was a purely theistical religion. Monotheism is, his- torically as well as logically, older than polytheism; the worship of God preceded the worship of nature, the ele- ments, the sun, moon, and stars of heaven, or the demons swarming in the air. Christian faith is in substance older than pantheism, as pantheism is older than undisguised atheism. Christian theism is the oldest creed, as well as the oldest philosophy of mankind, and has been from the first and still is the creed of the living and progressive portion of the human race.

Christianity claims, as every body knows, to be the prim- itive and universal religion, and to be based on absolutely catholic principles. Always and everywhere held, though not held by all individuals, or even nations, free from all admixture of error and superstition. Yet analyze all the heathen religions, eliminate all their differences, as Mr. Herbert Spencer proposes, take what is positive or affirm- ative, permanent, universal, in them, as distinguished from what in them is negative, limited, lo(.'al, varfable, or tran- sitory, and you will have remaining the principles of Chris- tiauitj' as found in the patriarchal religion, as held in the Synagogue, and taught by the Cliurch of Christ. These

THKISM IN POSSESSION. y

pvmc\])\es are all absolutely catholic or universal, and hence Christianity, in its essential principles at least, is really the universal religion, and in possession as such. The presump- tion, as say the lawyers, is then decidedly in favor of the Christian and against the atheist.

Christianity, again, not only asserts God and his provi- dence as its fundamental principle, but claims to be the law of God, supernaturally revealed to man, or the revelation which he has made of himself, of his providence, of his will, and of what he exacts of his rational cre^itures. Then, again, Cliristianity asserts, in principle, only the catholic or universal belief of the race. The belief in God, in provi- dence, natural power, and in supernatural intervention in human affairs in some form, is universal. Even the atheist shudders at a ghost story, and is surprised by sudden danger into a prayer. Men and nations may in tlieir ignorance or superstition misconceive and misrepresent tlie Divinity, but they could not do so, if they had no belief that God is. Prayer to God or the gods, which is universal, is full proof of the universality of the belief in Divine Providence and in supernatural intervention. Hence, again, the presump- tion is in favor of Christian theism and against th^ atheist.

Of course, this universal belief, or this eonsensufi hominum, is not adduced here as full proof of the truth of Christianity, or of the catholic principles on which it rests; but it is adduced as a presumptive proof of Christianity and against atheism, while it undeniably throws the burden of proof on the atheist, or whoever questions it. It is not enough for the atheist to deny God, providence, and the supernatural; be must sustain his denial by proofs strong enough, at least, to turn the presumption against Ciu-istianity, before he can oblige or compel the Christian to plead. Till then, " So I and my fathers have always held," is all the reply he is required to make to any one that would oust him.

ni. — THE ATHEIST CANNOT TURN THE PKESUMPTION

But can the atheist turn the presumption, and turn it against the tlieist? It perhaps will be more difficult to do it than he imagines. It is very easy to say that the universal fact which the Christian adduces originated in ignorance, which the progress of science has dissipated ; but this is not enough : the atheist must prove that it has actually origi- nated in men's ignorance, and not in their knowledge, and

10 KEFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

that the alleged progress of science, so far as it bears on this question, is not itself an illusion; for he must bear in mind that tlie burden of proof rests on him, since theism is in possession and the presumption is against him. Is it certain that Christians have less science than atheists? As far as our observation goes, the atheist may have more of tlieory and be richer in bold denials and in unsupported assertions, but he has somewhat less of science than the Christian theo- logian. The alleged progress of science, be it greater or less, throws no light one way or another on the question ; for it is confessedly confined to a region below that of reli- gion, and does not rise above or extend beyond the cosmos. . The latest and ablest representatives of the atheistical science of the age are the Positivists, or followers of Auguste Comte, and the Cosmists, or admirers of Herbert Spencer, and neither of these pretend that their science has demonstrated or can demonstrate that God is not. Mr. John Fiske, who last year (1S70) was a Comtist, and who is this year (1871) a Cos- mist says, in one of his lectures before Harvard College, very distinctly, that they have not. He says, speaking of God and religion: "We are now in a region where absolute demonstration, in the scientific sense, is impossible. It is beyond the power of science to prove that a personal God either exists or does not existy This is express, and is not affected by tlie interjection of the word personal^ for an impersonal God is no God at all, but is simply nature or the cosmos, and indistinguishable from it. The lecturer, after admitting the inability of science to prove there is no God, proceeds to criticise the arguments usually adduced to prove that God is, and to show that they are all inconclusive. Suppose him successful in this, which, by the way, he is not, he proves nothing to the purpose. The insufficiency of the argume .ts alleged to prove tliatGod is, does not entitle him to conclude that God is not, and creates no presumption that he is not. He cannot conckide from their insufficiency that science is capable of overcoming the great fact the Christian adduces, and which creates presumption against atheism.

It is, no doubt, true, that both the Comtists and Cosmists deny that tlioy are atheists ; but they are evidently what we have called negative atheists; for they do not assert that God is, and maintain that thei'e is no evidence or proof of his existence. If they do not positively denj' it, they cer- tainly do not affirm it. They admit, indeed, an infinite power. Force, or Reality, underlying the cosmic phenomena,

THE ATHEIST CANNOT TURN THE PRESUMPTION. 11

and of which the phenomena are manifestations ; but this does not relieve them of atheism, for it is not independent of the cosmos or distinguishable from it. It is simply the cosmos itself — the substance or reality — that appears in the cosmic phenomena. It, then, is not God, and they do not call it God, and avowedly reject what they call the " theist- ical hypothesis."

Yet both sects agree in this, that they have no science that disproves the " theistical hypothesis," or that does or can prove the falsity of the great catholic principles asserted in the universal beliefs of the race. Mr. Fiske, in his lec- ture, says: "We cannot therefore expect to obtain a result which, like a mathematical theorem, shall stand firm through mere weight of logic, or which, like a theorem in physics, can be subjected to a crucial test. We can only examine the argu- ments on which the theistic hypothesis is founded, and inquire whether they are of such a character as to be con- vincing and satisfactory If it turns out that these

arguments are not .... satisfactory, it will follow that, as the cosmic philosophy becomes more and more widely understood and accepted, the theistical hypothesis Avill gen- erally fall into discredit, not because it will have been dis- proved bat because there will be no sufticient warrant for maintaining it." This is a full and frank confession that science does not and cannot disprove Christian theism, and that the hope of the Cosmists to get it superseded by the cosmic philosophy, does not rest on disproving it, but in per- suading men that there "is no sufficient warrant for main- taining it." But, if science cannot disprove theism, the presumption remains good against atheism, and the Christian theist is not required to produce his title deeds or proofs. Till then, the argument from prescription or possession is all the warrant he needs.

But the confession that science cannot prove that God is not, is the confession that the atheist has no scientific truth to oppose Christian theism, but only a theory, an opinion, a "mental habit," without any scientific support. In the passage last quoted from Mr. Fiske we have marked an omission. The part of the sentence omitted is, " none who rigidly adhere to the doctrine of evolution, who assert the relativity of all knowledge, and who refuse to reason on the subjective method." There can be no doubt that the doc- trine of evolution and the relativity of all knowledge is incompatible, as Mr, Fiske and his master, Herbert Spencer,

12 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

maintain, with Christian theism, or the assertioii that God is. But as science cannot prove tliat God is not, it follows that the doctrine of evolution and the relativity of all knowl- edge, which the Cosinists oppose to the existence of God, is not and cannot be scientifically proved, and is simply a theory or hypothesis, not science, and connts for nothing- in the aro-umoiiL In confessing their inability to deinonstrate what the fool says in hislieart, Non est Deus, God is not,^ they confess their inability to demonstrate their doctrine of evolution, -and the relativity of all knowdedge. They also thus confess that they have no science to oppose theism, and they expect it to perish, in the words of Mr. Fiske, " as other doctrines have perished, through lack of the mental predisposition to accept it." This should dispose of the objection to Christian theism drawn from pretended science, and it leaves the presumption still against atheism, as we have found it.

It is hardly necessary to remark tliat the presumption in favor of theism cannot be overcome, and the burden of proof thrown on the tlieist by any alleged theory or liypothesis which is not itself demonstrated or jiroved. The atheist must prove that his theory or hypothesis is scientifically true, which of course the cosmic philosophers, who assert the theory of evolution and of the relativity of all knowledge, cannot do. If all knowledge is relative, there is then no absolute knowledge ; if no absolute knowledge, the Cosmists can neither absolutely know nor prove that all knowledge is relative. The proof of the tlieory of the relativity of all knowledge would consequently be its refutation ; for then all knowledge would not be relative, to wit, the knowledge that all knowledge is relative. The theory is then self-contradic- tory, or an unprovable and an uncertain opinion ; and an uncertain opinion is insufficient to oust theism from its immemorial possession. The atheist must allege against it positive truth, or facts susceptible of being positively proved, or gain no standing in court.

According to the Cosmists, there is no absolute science, and acience itself is a variable and uncertain thing. Mr. Fiske tells us that in ISTO he was a Conitist or Positivist, and defended, in his course of lectures of that year, the '"Fhilo- «ophie Positive ;" but in this year (lS7i) he holds and defends the cosmic philosophy, which he says " differs from it almost fundamentally." The Conitean philosophy absorbs the cosmos in man and society; the cosmic philosophy

THE ATHEIST CANNOT TURN THE PRESUMPTION. IS

includes man and society in tlie cosmos, as it does minerals, vegetables, animals, apes and tadpoles, and subjects them all alike to one and the same universal law of evolution. This, onr cosmic or Speucerian philosopher assures us, is science to-day. But who can say "what it will be fifty years hence, or wliat modifications of it the unremitted investigations of scientific men into the cosmic phenomena and their laws will necessitate.'' There is and can be no real, invariable, and permanent science, j'et the cosmic philosophers see no absurd- ity in asking the race to give up its universal beliefs on the authorit}^ of their present theory, and nothing wrong in try- ing to spread their ever-shifting, evei'-varying science and make it supersede in men's minds tlie Christian principles of God, creation, and providence, although they confess that it may turn out on inquiry to be false.

^ There is no doubt that, if the cosmic philosophers could get their pretended science generally accepted, they would do much to generate a habit or disposition of mind very unfavorable to the recognition of Christian theism ; but that would be no argument for tlie truth of tlieir science or phi- losophy. The Cosmists — a polite name for atheists — fail to recognize theism, not because thcj' have or pretend to have any scientific evidence of its falsity, but really because it does not lie in the sphere of their investigations. " I have never seen God at the end of my telescope," said the astron- omer, Lalande ; yet perhaps it never occurred to him that if there were no God, there could be no astronomy. L The Cosmists confine their investigations to the cosmic phenom- ena and their laws, and God is neither a cosmic phenomenon nor a cosmic law ; how then should they recognize him ? They do not find God, because he is not in the order of facts with which they are engrossed, though not one of tliose facts docs or could exist without him.

rV. NO PURELY COSMIC SCIENCE.

Theism being in possession, and holding from prescrip- tion, can be ousted onlj- by establishing the title of an adverse claimant. This, we have seen, tlie atheist cannot do. The cosmic philosophers confess that science is unable to prove that God is not. They confess, then, that tliey Lave no scientitic truth to oppose to his being, or that con- tradicts it. It is true, they add, that science is equally unable to prove that God is ; but that is our alfair, and per-

14 KEFDTATION OF ATHEISM.

haps we shall, before we close, prove the contrary. Bnt it is enough for us at present to know that the Cosmists or atheists confess that they have no scientific truth that proves that God is not.

Indeed they do not propose to get rid of Cliristian theism by disproving it, or bj proving their atheism, but bj^ turn- ing away the mind from its contemplation, and generating in' the community habits of mind adverse to its reception-.. Take the following extract from one of Mr. Fiske's lectures in proof :

" It is, indeed, generally true that theories concerning the supernatural perish, not from extraneous violence, but from inanition. The belief in witchcraft, or the physical intervention of the devil in human affairs, is now laughed at; yet two centuries have hardly elapsed since it was held by learned and sensible men, as an essential part of Christianity. It was supported by an immense amount of testimony which no one has ever refuted in detail. No one bas ever disproved witchcraft, as Young dis- proved the corpuscular theory of light. But the belief has died out because scientific cultivation has rendered tlie viental soil unfit for it. The contemporaries of Bodiu were so thoroughly predisposed by their general theory of things to believe in the continual intervention of the devil, that it needed but the slightest evidence to make them credit any particular act of intervention. But to the educated men of to-day such intervention seems too improbable to be admitted on any amount of tes- timony. The hypothesis of diabolic interference is simply ruled out, and will remain ruled out.

"So with Spiritualism (spiritism), the modern form of totemism, or the belief in the physical intervention of the souls of the dead in human affairs. ]\Ien of science decline to waste their time in arguing against it, because they know that the only way in which to destroy it is to educate people in science. Spiritualism (spiritism) is simply one of the weeds which spring up in minds uncultivated by science. There is no use in pulling up ono form of the superstition by the roots, for another form, equally nosiou?. is sure to take root; the only way of iusurmg the dL'Struction ol the pests is to sow the seeds of scientific truth. When, therefore, we arc gravely told what persons of undoubted veracity have seen, we arc affected about as if a friend should come in and assure us upon his honor as a gentleman that heat is not a mode of motion.

" The case is the same with the belief in miracles, or the physical inter- vention of the Deity in human alfairs. To the theologian such interven- tion is a priori so probable that he needs but slight historic testimony to make liim believe in it. To the scientific thinker it is a priori so improb- able, that no amount of historic testimony, such as can be produced, Buffices to make him entertain the hypothesis for an instant. Hence it is that such critics as Strauss and Renan, to the great disgust of thcolo-

NO PUKELT COSMIC SCIENCE. 15

gians, always assume, prior to argument, that miraculous narratives are legendary. Hence it is that when the slowly dying belief in miracles finally perishes, it will not be because any one will ever have refuted it by an array of syllogisms — the syllogisms of the theologian and those of the scientist have no convincing power as against each other, because neither accepts the major premise of the other — but it will be because the belief is discordant with the mental Jiabits induced by the general study of science.

"Hence it is that the cosmic philosopher is averse to prosclytism, and has no sympathy with radicalism or mfidelity. For he knows tliat the theological habits of thought are relatively useful, while scepticism, if permanent, is intellectually and morally pernicious; witness the curious fact that radicals are prone to adopt retrogade social theories. Knowing this, he knows that the only way to destroy theological habits of thought •without detriment is to nurture scientific habits — which stifle the former as surely as clover stifles weeds."

A more apt illustration would have been, "as sure as the weeds stiHe the coi-n." But it is evident from this extract that the cosmic philosophers are aware of their inability to overthrow Christian theism by any direct proof, or by any truth, scientiiically verifiable, opposed to it. They trust to what in military parlance might be called "a flank move- ment." They aim to turn tlie impregnable position of the theist, and defeat liim by taking possession of the back country from which he draws his supplies. They would get rid of theism by generating mental habits that exclude it, as the spirit of the age excludes belief in miracles, in spiritism, and the supernatural in any and every form. This is an old device. It was attempted in the system of education devised for France by the Convention of 1793-'91 ; that devised the new antichristian calendar ; but it did not prove effectual. The Prinve and Princess Gallitzin brought up their oidy son Dmitri after the approved philosophy of the day, in profound ignorance of the doctrines and principles of religion ; but he became a Christian notwithstanding, a priest even, and died a devoted and self-sacriticing mission- ary in wjiat were then the wilds of "Western Pennsylvania. And after a brief saturnalia of atheism and blood, France lierself I'oturned to her Christian calendar, reopened the churches she had closed, and reconsecrated the altars she had profaned.

The belief in miracles may have perished among the Cos- mists, but it is still living and vigorous in the minds of men who yield nothing, to say the least, in scientitic culture and

16 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM

attainments, to the cbsniic philosophers themselves. The belief in a personal devil, who tempts men throngli their lusts, and works in the children of disobedience, has not perished, and is still firmly held by the better educated and the more enlightened portion of mankind ; and scientific men in no sense inferior to Mr. Fiske, Plerbert Spencer, or Auguste Comte, have investigated the facts alleged by the spiritists — not sjmntualists, for spiritualists they are not — and found no difficulty in recognizing among them facts of a superhuman and diabolical origin. The first believers in spiritism we ever encountered were persons we had previously known as avowed atheists or cosmic philosophers. The men who can accept tlie Cosmic philosophy may deny God, may deny or accept any thing, but they should never speak of science.

That miracles are iinprobalile a priori to the Cosmists may be true enough ; that they are so to men of genuine science is not yet proven. Before they can be pronounced improbable or incapable of being proved, it must be proved that the supernatural or supercosmic does not exist; but this the Cosmists admit cannot be proved. They own they cannot prove that God does not exist, and if he does exist, lie is necessarily snpercosmic or supernatural ; and the cos- mos itself is a miracle, and a standing miracle, before the eyes of ail men from the beginning. A miracle is what God does by himself immediately, as the natural is what he does mediately, through the agency of second or created causes, or does as causa causanun^ tliat is, as causa eminens. A miracle, then, is no more improbable than the fact of creation, and no more incapable of pi-oof than the existence of the cosmos itself. Hume's assertion that no amount of testimony is sufficient to prove a miracle, for it is always more in accordance with experience to' believe the witnesses lie, than it is to believe that nature goes out of iier way to work a miracle, is founded on a total misapprehension of what is meant by a miracle. Nature does not work the miracle; but God, the author of nature, works it; nor does nature in the miracle go out of her way, or deviate from her course. Her course and her laws remain unchanged. Tlie miracle is the introduction or creation of a new fact by the power that creates nature herself, and is as provable by ade- quate testimony as is any natural fact whatever.

The Cosmists should bear in mind that when they rele- gate principles and causes, all except the cosmic phenomena and the law of their evolution, to the unknowable, the

NO PURELY COSlVnC SCIENCE. 17

unknowable is not necessarily non-existent, and should remember also that what is unknowable to them may be not only knowable but actually known to others. Onr own ignorance is not a safe rule by which to determine the knowledge of others, or the line between the knowable and the unknowable.

" There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

For aught the Cosmist can say, there may be in the unknowable, principles and causes which render miracles not only possible but probable, and the supernatural as rea- sonable, to say the least, as the natural.

Indeed, the cosmic philosophers tliemselves, when it suits their purpose, distinguish between the unknowable and the non-existent, and contend that they are not atheists, because, though they exile God to the dark region of tlie unknow- able, they do not deny that he exists. They deny what they call the "Christian theory of a personal or anthropo- morphous God," but not the existence of an infinite Being, Power, Force, or Reality, that underlies the cosmic phe- nomena, and which appears or is manifested in them. They actually assert the existence of such Being, and concede that the cosmic plienomenaare "unthinkable" without it, though it is itself absohitely unknowable. Here is the admission at least that the unknowable exists, and that without it there would and could be no knowable.

But the theory they deny is not Christian theism. The Christian theist undoubtedly asserts the pc'-sonality of God,, but not that God is anthropomorphous, God is not made in the image of man, but man is made in the image and like- ness of God. Man is not the tyjie of God, l)ut in God is the prototype of man; that is to say, man has his type in- God, in the idea exemplaris in the divine miiul^ and as th& idea in the divine mind is nothing else than the essence of God, the schoolmen say DeusshnlUtudo <;st. rertnn mnyi iuvi. Personality is the last comj)lement of rational nature, or supjjositiua inteliigens. An impersonal God is vio God ac all, for he lacks the complement of his nature, is incomplete, and falls into the category of nature. So m denying the personality of God, the Cosniists do really deny God, and are literally atheists. ;'t '■^'■'l, '■ ^ " '

The unknowable Infinite Bcing'^Power, Force, or Iloal- ity, the Spenccrian philosoplxcrs a.ssert, is not God, and they

18 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

neitlier call nor regard it as God. In the lirst place^f absolutely unknowable, it is not, in any sense, thinkable, or assertable, but must be to our intelligence precisely as if it were not. /In the next place, if these philosophers mean by the unknowable tlie incomprehensible, not simply the inap- prehensible, wliich we charitably suppose is the fact, they still do not escape atheism ; for the power or force they assert is not distinct from the cosmos, but is the reality, being, or substance of the cosmos, or the real cosmos of which the knowable or phenomenal cosmos is the appear- ance or manifestation. It is the assertion of nothing super- cosmic or independent of the cosmos. Nothing is asserted but the real in addition to the phenomenal cosmos. Cer- tainly the cosmic philosophers are themselves deplorably ignorant of Christian theolog3% or else they count largely on the ignorance of the public they address. Perhaps both suppositions are admissible.

The Cosmists, who present us the latest form of atheism, divide all things into knowable and unknowable. The unknowable they must concede is at least unknown, and con- sequently all their knowledge or science is confined to the knowable ; and according to them the knowable is restricted to the phenomenal. Ilence their science is simply the science of the phenomenal, and this is wherefore they assert the relativity of all knowledge. But there is no science of phenomena alone. Science, strictly taken, is the reduction of facts or phenomena to the principle or cause on which tliey depend, and which explains them. Science, properly speaking, is the science of principles or causes, as delined by Aristotle, and where there are no known causes or prin- ciples there is no science. The Cosmists, and even the Posi- tivists, place all principles and causes in the unknowable, and consequently neither have nor can have any science. They therefore have not, and cannot have any scientific truth or principle, as we have already shown, to oppose to Ciiristian theism.

The Cosmists restrict all knowledge to the knowledge of the cosmic phenomena, and their laws, which are then)selves phenomenal ; but phenomena are not knowable in thein- selves, for they do not exist in themselves. Regarded as pure phenomena, detached from the being or substance which appears in them, they are simply nothing. They are cognizable only in the cognition of that which they mani- fest, or of whicli they are appearances. But Herbert

NO PURELY COSMIC SCIENCE. 19

Spencer places that, whatever it is, in the category of the unknowable, and consequently denies not only all science, but all knowledge of any sort or degree whatever.

It is a cardinal principle with the Spencerian school that iill knowledge is relative, that is, knowledge of the relative only. But the assumption of the relativity of all knowledge is incompatible with the assertion of any knowledge at all. Sir William Hamilton indeed maintains the relativity of all knowledge, but he had the grace to admit that all philosophy ends in nescience. The relativity of knowledge means cither that we know things not as they really are, a i^nrte rei^ but only as they exist to us, as aifections of our own con- sciousness ; or that we know not the reality, but only phe- nomena or appearances.* The Cosmists take it in botli senses ; but chietly in the latter sense, as they profess to follow the objective method as opposed to the subjective. In either sense they deny all knowledge. Consciousness is the recognitii)n of ourselves as cognitive subject, in the act of knowing what is not ourselves, or what is objective. If no object is cognized, there is no recognition of ourselves or fact of consciousness, And cousecpiently no affection of conscious- ness. The soul does not know itself in itself, for it is not intelligible in itself: since, as St. Thomas says, it is not intelligence in itself, therefore' it can know itself only in acting; and having only a dependent, not an independent, existence, it has need, in order to act, of the counter activity of that which is not itself. Hence every thought is a com- plex act, including, as will be more fully explained further on, simultaneously and inseparably, subject, object, and their relation. If no object, theu no thought; and if no thought then, of course, no knowledge.

In the second sense, they ecpially deny all knowledge. Phenomena are relative to their being or substance, and are knowable only in the intuition of substance or being, and relations are cognizable only in the relata, for apart from the relata they do not exist, and are nothing. The relative is therefore incognizable without the intuition'of the abso- lute, for without the absolute it is nothing, and nothing is not cognizable or cogitable. By placing the absolute, that

* The relativity of knowledge may also mean, and perhaps is some- times taken to mean, that we know thin;,rs not absolutely in themselves, but in their relations. This is true, but. it does not make the knowledge relative, or knowledge of relations only, for relations arc apprehensible only in the apprehension of the reUiki.

20 REFUTAnoN OF ATHEISM.

is, real being or substance, in the unknowable, the Cosmist^ really place the relative or the phenomenal also in the unknowable. If, then, we assert the relativity of all knowl- edge, and restrict the knowable to the relative and phenom- enal, as did Protagoras and other Greek sophists castigated by Socrates or Plato, we necessarily deny all knowledge and even the possibility of knowledge.

Plato maintained that the science is not in knowing the phenomenal, but in knowing by means of the phenomenal the idea, substance, or reality it manifests, or of which it is the appearance, or image. He held that the idea is im- pressed on matter as the seal on wax, but that the science consists in knowing, by means of the impression, the idea or reality impressed, not in simply knowing the impression or phenomenal. Hence he held that all science kper ideam, or per imagmer/i. using the word idea to express alike the reality impressed, and the impression or image. He teaches that there is science only in rising, by means of the image impressed on matter — the mimesis in his language, the phe- nomenal in the language of our scientists — to the methexis,. or participation of the divine idea, or the essence of the thing itself, which the phenomenal or the sensible copies, mimics, or imitates. Aristotle denies that all knowledge is relative, and teaches that all knowledge is per speciem or per for mam, substantially Plato's doctrine, that all knowledge is per ideam I but he never held that science consisted in knowing the species, whether intelligible or sensible. Tiie science consisted in knowing by it the substantial form repre- sented, presented, as we should say, by the species to the mind.

Certain it is that there is no knowledge where there is nothing known, or where there is nothing to be known. The phenomenon is not the thing any more than the image is the thing imaged, and apprehension of the image is sci- ence only in so far as it serves as a medium of knowing the thing it represents. We know nothing in knowing the sign, if we know not that which it signifies. A sign signifying nothing to the mind is nothing, not even a sign. So of phe- nomena. They are nothing save in the reality they mani- fest, or of which they are the appearaTices, and if they mani- fest or signify nothing to the understanding, they are not even appearances. If, then, the reality, the nomaenon, as Xant calls it, is relegated to the unknowable, there is no phenomenon, manifestation, or appearance in the region of

NO PUKELY COSiUC SCIENCE. 21

the knowable, and consequently nothing knowable, and therefore no actual or possible knowledge.

Either the phenomenal is the appearance or manifestation of some real existence, or it is not. If it is, then it is a grave mistake to relegate the real being or substance to the category of the unknowable ; for what appears, or is mani- fest, is neither unknowable nor unknowui. If it is not, if the cosmic phenomena are the appearance or manifestation of no reality, then in knowing them, nothing is known, and there is no knowledge at all.

The Positivists differ from the Cosraists, unless their name is ill chosen, in asserting that, as far as it goes, knowledge is positive, and not simply relative ; but then they have no ground for the unity of science, which they assert, or for the coordination of all the sciences under one superior science which embraces and unifies them all, and which they profess to have discovered, and on which they insist as their pe- culiar merit. They reject all metaphysical principles, and among them the relation of cause and effect, and then must, if consistent, reject genera and species, and regard each object apprehended as an independent and self-existent being, or as an absolute existence ; that is to say, they must assert as many gods as there are distinct objects or unit in- dividualities intellectually apprehensible, for no existence dependent on another is apprehensible except under the re- lation of dependence. The contingent is apprehensible only under the relation of contingency, and that relation is ap- prehensible only in the apprehension of its correlative; therefore the contingent is not apprehensible without intui- tion of the necessary and independent. Things can be pos- itively known by themselves alone, only on condition that they exist by themselves alone. This, applied to the cosmos, would deny in it, or any of its parts, all change, all move- ment, all progress of man and society, which the Positivists i30 strenuously assert. The Positivists, by rejecting the re- lation of cause and effect, and all metaphysical relations which are real not abstract relations, really deny, as do the Oosmists, all red knowledge, for all knowledge, every affir- mation, every empirical judgment, presupposes the relation of cause and effect.

The Cosmists are so well aware that there is no science of the phenomenal alone, that they abandon their own prin- ciples, admit that the relative is unthinkable without the ab- solute, and concede that we are compelled, in order to think

22 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

le

the plienomenal, to think an infinite reality on which tl phenomenal depends. What is thinkable is knowable, and therefore they assume that their unknowable is knowable, and deny their cardinal principle that all knowledge is rela- tive. An extract from another lecture by Mr. Fiske bears out this assertion.

" Upon what grounds did we assert of the Deity that it is unknow- able? We were driven to the conchision that the Deity is unknowable because that which exists independently of intelligence and out of rela- tion to it, which presents neither likeness, difference, nor relation, cannot be cognized. Now, by precisely the same process, we were driven to the conclusion that the cosmos is unknowable only in so far as it is abso- lute. It is only as existing independently of our intelligence and out of relation to it, that we predicate unknowableness of the cosmos. As man- ifested to our intelligence, the cosmos is the universe of phenomena — the realm of the knowable. We know stars and planets, we know the sur- face of our earth, we know life and mind in their various manifestations, individual and social ; and while we apply to this vast aggregate of phe- nomena the name universe, we can bj'nom.'ans predicate identitj^ of the imiverse and the Deity. To do so would be to confound phenomena with noumena, the relative with the absolute, the knowable with the unknowable. It would be, in short, to commit the error of pantheism.

■ ' But underlying this aggi'egate of phenomena, to whose; extension we know no limit in space or time, we are compelled to postulate an absolute Reality, a Something whose existence does not depend on the presence of a percipient mind — which existed before the genesis of intelligence and will continue to exist even though intelligence vanish from the scene. In other words, there is a synthesis of phenomena which we know as- affections of our consciousness. Instead of regarding these phenomena as generated within our consciousness, and referable solely to it for their existence, we are compelled to regard them as the manife.stations of some absolute reality, which, as knowable only through its phenomenal mani- festations, is in itself unknowable. This is the whole story; and whether we call this absolute reality the Deity or the objective world of noumena, seems to me to depend solely upon the attitude, religious or scientific, which we assume in dealing with the subject."

The cosmic philosopher in order to know phenomena, i» compelled to postulate an absolute reality ffs the g-round or substance of the phenomena, and which is knowable through their manifestation ; consequently, to restrict the knowable to the phenomenal and relative is only declaring that all knowledge is impossi])le. The Cosmists concede it, autl therefore make what they declare to be absolutely unknow- able, in a certain degree at least, knowable, concede that we

NO PURELY COSMIC SCIENCE. 23

maj and do know that it is, and what it is in relation to the cosmic phenomena, thouo-li not what it is in itself. But wlij are we compelled to postulate the absolute reality, but because the phenomena are not knowable without intuition of the reality which they manifest ? or because in appre- liending the phenomenal we really have intuition of the absolute or the reality manifested ?

Mr, Fiske, however, even after abandoning the doctrine that th/3 absolute or real is unknowable, by no means escapes atheism. The absolute reality, Force, or Something- which he asserts as underlying the aggregate of the cosmic phe- nomena, which aggregate of phenomena he calls universe, is not God, as he would have us admit, but is merely the cos- mic reality of which the cosmic phenomena are the appear- ance, and distinguishable from it only as the appearance is distinguishable from that which appears. It is, as we have already shown, only the real cosmos, the being or substance of which the cosmic phenomena are the manifestation. It makes the "Deity'' it assei'ts identically the. substance of the cosmic phenomena, which is either pure pantheism or pure atheism, as yoii call it either God or cosmos, that is, nature, since it is indistinguishable from the real cosmos, and distinguishable only from the cosmic phenomena. The cosmic philosophy does not, then, as it pretends, solve the religious problem and reconcile atheism and theism in a ' iglier generalization than either, as Herbert Spencer main- tains.

Plerbert Spencer, in his First Principles of a New System of Philosophy,^ says, "that with regard to the origin of the universe or cosmos, three verbally intelligible suppositions may be made : 1, the universe is self-existent ; 2, the uni- verse is self-created ; and 3, the universe is created by an external" — or, as we should express it, a supercosmic — "agency." He rejects all three as absolutely inconceiv- able. If the cosmos is neither self-existent nor self-created, nor yet created I>y an external agency, that is, by a power above it and independent of it, it cannot exist at all, and Mr. Spencer simply asserts universal nihilism and of course universal nescience ; for where nothing is or exists, there can be no knowledge or science. Negation is intelligible only by virtue of the affirmation it denies.

The author refutes the iirst two of the three suppositions con-

* Part T. Xo. 11, 2d edition.

24 KEFDTATION OF ATHEISM.

cliisively enough, and we grant liim that the cosmos is neither self-existent nor self-created. Then either it does not exist, and then no cosmic science ; or it is created by an independ- ent, supereosmic agency or power, and then it is contingent, and dependent on its canse, or the power that creates it. If so, there can be no purely cosmic science ; for the depend- ent is not cognizable without intuition of the independent, nor the contingent without intuition of the necessary, as we shall prove at length, when we come to the positive proofs of Christian theism.

This is sufhcient to prove that there is and can be no purely cosmic science, even by the confession of the latest atheistic school we are acquainted with. It is idle then to pretend to controvert Christian theism in the name of science ; for if it be denied, all science, all knowledge is denied. The Spencerian pliilosophy is therefore simply elaborated ignor- ance, and pure emptiness.

V. THKOLOGIANS AND THE SCIENTISTS.

It is not pretended that atheists, Cosmists, or Comtists, have, as a matter of fact, no science ; that they have made no successful cosmic investigations, or hit upon no impor- tant discoveries and inventions in the material or sensible ordej\ It is readily admitted that the patient labors and unwearied researches and explorations of the scientists, both tlieists and non-theists, in the lields of physical science, have enlarged the boundaries of our knowledge, and given to man a mastery over the forces of nature on which no little of what is called modern civilization depends. What is denied is, that the scientists, Comtists, or Cosmists, have discovered or attained to any scientific truth that coniiicts with Christian theology, and that on their own principles they have or can have any science at all.

The Cosmists and Comtists have senses and intellect as well as others ; and there is no reason in the world, while they confine themselves to the observation and classihcation of physical facts, and so long as they allow free scope to their intellectual faculties and do not attempt to force their action to conform to their preconceived theories, why they should not arrive at sound inductions. The human mind is truer than their theories, and broader than their so-called science ; and when suffered to act according to its own laws proves its natural object is truth. So long as they confine

THEOLOGIANS AJ^TD SCIENTISTS. 25

their investisjations within the respective fields of the special sciences, and use the natural faculties with which they are endowed, they can and often do lal>or successfully. Lalande was a respectable astronomer ; the Ilecanique Celeste of the atheist, La Place is more than respectable for the mathe- matical genius and knowledge it displays; Alexander von Humboldt's Cosmos is an encyclopaedia of physical sciences, as they stood in his day ; but in all these and otiier instances the human mind holds intuitively pi'inciples which transcend the finite and the phenomenal, and without which there could have been no science ; but principles which both the cosmic and Comtean theories- exclude from the realm of the knowable. It is not the facts alleged that are objected to, but the false theories advanced in explanation of them, the conclusion's drawn from them, and the application of these conclusions to an order that transcends the order to which the facts belong, and which, if valid, would exclude the facts themselves.

The atheistic scientists exclude theology and metapliysics from the knowable simply because they are too ignorant of those sciences to be aware that without the principles whicli they supply there could be no physical science ; or to know that in asserting physical science they really assert the very principles they theoretically deny. Professor Huxley asserts protoplasm as the physical basis of life ; yet he denies that there is any cognition or even intuition of the relation of cause and effect. How then can he assert any nexus or causative relation between protoplasm and life ? He does not pretend that protoplasm is life ; he only pretends that it is its physical basis. But how can it be its physical basis if there is between it and life no necessary relation of cause iind effect 'I Or if protoplasm is not known to be the prin- ciple or basis of life, how can it be known to produce or support it ? But principles and relations, we are told, are metaphysical, and therefore excluded from the knowable. Protoplasm, the professor owns, is dead matter ; how, then without a cause of some sort vivifying it, can it become livliKj matter ? What is protested against is not the asser- tion of protoplasm as the physical or material basis of life, — though we believe nothing of the sort, for proteine is ag imaginary as the plastic soul dreamed of by Plato ana adopted by Cudworth and Gioberti, — but the denial of the principle of cause and effect, and then assuming it as the

26 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

principle of our conclusions, or asserting as scientific, con- clusions which can have no validity without it.

Professor Huxley follows Hume, who denies that we have any knowledge, by experience, of causative force, or tliat the antecedent produces the consequence. Dr.^ Thomas Brown, who succeeded Dugald Stewart in the chair of phi- losophy in tlie Edinburgh University, maintains the same, and resolves the relation of cause and effect into the relation of invariable antecedence and consequence, or simply a relation of time. Yet if the antecedent only goes before the consequent, without producing or placing it, no con- clusion is possible. Induction is reasoning as much as deduction, and all reasoning is syllogistic in principle, if not in form; and there is no syllogism witUout a middle term, and there is no middle term without the principle of cause and effect, which connects necessarily the conclusion with the premises, the antecedent with the consequent, as cause and effect. Deny causality and you deny all reason- ing, all logical relations, and can assert no real relation between protoplasm, or any thing else, and life.

The atheist and Sir William Hamilton exclude the infinite from the cognizable and declare it incogitable ; and yet either in his geometry will talk of lines that may be infin- itely extended, which cannot be done without thinking the infinite. If there is no infinitely real, how can there be the infinitely possible ? If there is no infinite being, there can be no infinite ability ; if no infinite ability, there is no infi- nitely possible, and then no infinitely possible geometrical lines" Truly, then, has it been said, " an atheist may be a geometrician, but if there were no God, there could be no geometry." In mathematics, which is a mixed science, there is an ideal and apodictic element on which the empiri- cal element depends, and the apodictic is not cogitable without intuition of infinite being and its creative act, any more than is the empirical itself ; yet both Cosmists and Comtists hold mathematics to be a positive science.

Herbert Spencer asserts the relativity of all knowledge, and he. Sir AV^illiam Hamilton, and Dr. Mansel deny that the absolute can be known. Butiboth relative and absolute are metaphysical conceptions, and'^onnote one another, and neither can be known by itself alone, or without cognition or intuition of the other.J Other instances might be adduced, and will be soon, in which the Cosmists use, so to speak, principles which they either deny or declare to be unknow-

THEOLOGIANS AND SCIENTISTS. 27

able, and which are really theological or metaphysical prin- ciples, and it is by those principles tliat they are able to know any thing at all beyond the intelligence they have in common with the beasts that perish. Not heeding these, they fall, in the constrnction of their theories, systematically into errors, which when they trust their own minds and fol- low their common sense, they avoid as do other men.

As Cousin somewhere remarks, there may be less in phi- losophy than in common sense, in reflection than in intuition, but there can never be more. The intuitions, or what Cousin calls the primitive or spontaneous beliefs of mankind, are the same in all men ; and the differences among men begin the moment they begin to reflect on the data furnished by intuition, and attempt to explain them, to render an account of them to themselves, or, in other words, to philosophize. The scientists have the same intuitions, though atheists, that other men have, and in the field of the special sciences they are equally trustworthy ; it is only when they leave the field of the sciences and enter that of philosophy, which with us is the name for what is commonly called natural theology, and which is the science of principles, that they err. Habit- uated to the study of physical facts alone, they overlook or deny an order of facts as real, as evident, as certain, as any of the physical facts they have observed and classified according to their real or supposed physical laws, and even ulterior, and without which the physical facts and laws would not and could not exist. \Jt is not as scientists they specially err, but as philosophers and theologians, that is, in the account they render of the origin, principles, and meaning of the cosmic facts they observe and classify.

It is not with science or the cultivation of the sciences that philosophers and theologians quarrel, and it is very possible that philosophers and tiieologians have at times been too indifferent to the study of physical facts or the cultivation of the so-called natural sciences, and have, in consequence, lost with the phj'sicists much of the influence they might other- wise have retained. Yet it is a great mistake, not to say a calumny, to accuse them of holding that the facts of the physical order can be determined, a priori, by a knowledge of metaphysical or theological principles. The scholastics of the middle ages held this no more than did my Lord Bacon himself. Observation and induction were as much their method as they were his. Bacon invented or discov- ered no new method, as is conceded by Lord Macaulay him-

28 KEFUTATJON OF ATUKISM,

self; all he did was to give an additioual impulse to the study of material nature, towards which the age in which he lived was already turning its attention, as a necessary couse- Cjuence of Luther's movement in an nntlieological direction. Yet Bacon maintained strenuously that the method which he recommended to be followed in the study of the physical sciences is wholly inapplicable to the study of metaphysical science or philosophy. His pretended followers have over- looked what he had the good sense to say on this point ; have assumed that his method is as applicable in the study of principles as in the study of facts, and, consequently, have made shipwreck of both philosopliy and science. The result of their error may be seen in Herbert Spencer's theory of evolution, which is only the revival of the doc- trine of the Greek sopliists, refuted by Plato and Aristotle, especially by Plato in his Theaatetus.

The quarrel with the scientists is with them, hot as scien- tists or physicists, but with them as philosophers and the- ologians ; and as philosophers and theologians, because they give us philosoph}^ or theology only as an induction from physicial facts. If their induction were strictly logical it could not be accepted, because the physical facts do not in- clude all the elements of thought, and, in fact, constitute only a part, and that the lowest part, either of the real or the knowable. Their theories are too low and too narrow for the real, and exclude the more elevated and universal intuitions of the race. Induction is drawing a general con- clusion from particular facts. To its validity the enumeration of particulars must be complete, and it is only by virtue of a principal that is universal and necessary that the conclu- sion can be drawn, otherwise it is a mere abstraction. The induction from physical facts may be perfectly valid in the order of physical facts, as applied to the special class of physical facts generalized, and yet be of no validity when apphed beyond that class and to a different order of facts. Tlie inductions of the chemist, the mechanic, the electrician, may be perfectly just when applied to dead matter, and yet be wholly inadmissible when applied to the living subject. This is the mistake into which Professor Huxley falls in regard to his physical basis of life. His analysis of pro- toplasm may be very just, but it is operated on a dead subr ject, and no conclusion from it, applied to the living subject, is valid; for in the living subject it is an element or a fact that no chemical analysis can detect, and hence no chemical

THEOLOGIANS AND SCIENTISTS. 29

synthesis can recombine the several components the analysis detects so as to reproduce living protoplasm. Tlie induction is not valid, for it does not enumerate all the facts, and also because it exceeds the order of facts analyzed. So when Herbert Spencer tells us in his Biology tliut '' life is the result of the mechanical, cliemical, and electrical arrangement of the particles of matter," he di-aws a conclusion which goes beyond the facts he has analyzed, and assumes it to be valid even when applied to a diti'erent order of facts. The physiologist commits the same error when he infers the qualities of the living blood from the analysis of dead blood, — the only blood which, from the nature of the case, he can analyze. Hence, chemical physiology is far from being scientific, and the pathology founded on morbid anatomy, or the dissection' of the dead subject, is far from being uniformly trustworthy.

Many theologians fall into an analogous error, and seek to infer God by way of induction from the physical facts observed in nature, — the very facts from which the atheist concludes there is no God, The late Pcre Gratry, in his Connaissance de Dieu, contends with rare earnestness and eloquence that the existence of God is proved by induction. Dr. McCosh, resting the whole argument against the atheist on murks of design, which is an induction from particular facts, does the same. 1 Induction is really only an abstraction or generalization, antlat best the God obtainable by induc- tion can be only a generalization, and God as a generali- zation or an abstraction is simply no God at all ; for he would be nothing distinct from or independent of the facts generalized. Pere Gratry was a mathematician, and arrived at God in the same way that the mathematician in the calculus arrives at infinitesimals, that is, by eliminating the finite. But supposing there is intuition of the finite only, the elimination of the finite would give us simply zero, not the infinite.

Then there is another difficulty; the finite and infinite arc correlatives, and coiTelatives connote each other, the one cannot be known without the other, nor can either be logi- cally inferred from the other. The principle of induction, when it means any thing more than elassitication or abstrac- tion, is the relation of cause and effect. But cause and effect, again, are correlatives, — though not, as Sir William Hnmilton asserts, reciprocal, — and therefore connote each other, and cannot be known se]:)arately. The argument from desiirn. otherwise called the teleoloirical argument or

30 BEFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

argument from the end or final cause, is open to a similar objection. The final cause presupposes a first cause, and if wo know not that there is a first cause, we cannot assert a final cause, and therefore are unable to infer design. The argument from design has its value when once it is deter- mined that the universe has a first cause, or has been created, and the question is not as to the existence, but as to the attributes of that cause. Till then it simply begs the ques- tion.J

The inductions of the physicists within the order of facts observed, and when strictly logical, are valid enough, as every day proves, by bringing them to the test of experi- ment ; but in making them the physicist actually avails him- self of the principle or the relation of cause and effect, which he is able to do, because, as a matter of fact, he holds it from intuition rejDresented by language, though it is only the metaphysician or philosopher that takes note of it, or is able to verify it. The inductions of the Cosmists drawn professedly from physical facts alone, are invalid on their own principles, because the Cosmists reject, at least as cog- nizable, the relation of cause and effect, the principle of all induction or synthetic reasoning; and are invalid also on any principle when opposed to tiie metaphysician or theolo- gian, because they are drawn from physical facts alone, and do not include the facts of the intelligible and moral order, in Avhich are the principle and cause of the physical facts themselves.

This is still more the case, wlien we add to philosophy or natural theology, the supernatural order, made known to us by supernatural revelation. The Cosmists recognize and study only the facts, or phenomena as they improperly call them, of "the physical universe, and from these only physical inductions are possible. They have only a physical world, and their reasonings and conclusions, even when true within that M'orld, are inapplicable to any thing beyond and above it, and therefore can never prove any thing against theology, natural or supernatural, and on their own principles, as we have seen, their inductions are of no value beyond the limits of the physical world itself. They err in taking a part of the real or a part of the knowable for the whole. They may say that they do not deny the reality of what they call the unknowable, that is, being, principles, causes, &c. ; but they have no right to say that all that transcends the order of physical facts and their laws, the special subject of their

THEOLOGIANS AND SCIENTISTS. 31

study, is unlcnowable. It may be unknown to them, but it may be both knowable and known to otliers. Also, bj' not knowing what lies beyond the range of their own studies, they may and do give a false account of their own science. This is, in fact, really the case with them. Many of their inductions are valid in the physical order, as experiment proves; but without the intuition of the metaphysical rela- tion of cause and etfect the mind could make no induction, consequently they are wrong, and the ver^^ truth of their inductions proves that they are wrong, in declaring that the relation pertains to the unknowable.

The Cosmists do not err chiefly as physicists, but as phi- losophers and theologians, and as long as they are contented to be scientists and report simply the result of their scien- tific researches and explorations there can be no quarrel with them on the part either of theologians or philosophers ; but the quarrel, as has been shown, begins when they attempt to theorize, or to construct with their physical facts alone a cosmic philosophy, and to saj' it cannot embrace, because no philosophy based on physical facts alone can embrace, the principle of all the real and all the knowable, since the pliysical is neither the whole nor the principle of the whole ; nor is it commensurate with the reality presented intuitively to every mind.

Undoubtedly, neither the philosophy nor the theology can be true that contradicts any physical fact, if fact it be, but no explanation or theory of physical facts is admissible that contradicts or denies any metaphysical or theological prin- ciple.

There are no physical facts that contradict or in the slight- est degree impugn Christian theism, as we hope to show in this or a future essay. In point of fact, atheists, pantheists, Cosmists, or Positivists, do not oppose or pretend to oppose any facts to what they call "the theistical hypothesis," they only oppose to it their inductions, their theories and hypoth- eses, or their explanation of the class of facts that have come under their observation. These, we have seen, are untenable, for without the principles they are intended to deny they cannot even be constructed. Kow, theories that contradict their own principle can make nothing against Christian theism, cannot disprove it, or cause in any mind that understands the question, the slightest doubt of it, and the theist has a perfect right to treat them with sovereign contempt. At least, they assign no reason why Cliristian

32 KEFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

theism should be ousted from its possession. They cannot overcome the argument from prescription, and phice Cliris- tian theism on its defence, or compel it to produce its title- deeds.

Here onr refutation of atheism properly ends, and no more need be said ; but wliile Ave deny that we are bound to do any thing more, we are disposed to produce onr title- deeds and prove positively, by unanswerable arguments, the falsity of atheism, or to demonstrate, as fully as logic can demonstrate, Clu-istian theism.

VI. INCONCLUSIVE PEOOFS.

PniLOSOPnKRS and theologians do not necessarily adduce the best possible arguments to prove their tlieses, and may sometimes use very weak and even inconclusive arguments. An argument for the existence of God may also seem to one mind conclusive, and the reverse to another. Men usually argue from their own point of view, and take as ultimate the principles which tiiey have never doubted, or heard questioned, although far from being in reality ultimate, and thus take for granted what for others needs to be proved. "Men also may hold the truth, be as well assured of it as they are of their own existence, even possess great good sense and sound judgment, and yet be very unskilful in defending it, — utterly unable to assign good and valid reasons for it. They know they are right, but know not how to prove it.

St. Thomas, the Doctor Angelicus, maintains'^ that the existence of God is demonstrable, not from i)rinciples really a _^^r/orf or universal, — fornotliinij;can be more universal or more nltiniate than God from which his existence can be concluded, since lie is the first principle alike in being and in knowing, — but as the cause from the effect; and this he proves by five different arguments : The first is drawn from the empi- rical fact of motion and the necessity of a first mover, not itself movable ; the second is drawn from the empirical fact of particular etiicicnt causes and the necessity of a first effi- cient cause, itself uncaused ; the third is taken from the fact that some things are possible and some are not, and as all things cannot be merely possible, therefore there must be something which is per se, necessary, and m acta. The

* Sum. theol., part I, quacst. 1, art. 2 et 3.

EN^CONCLUSIVE PKOOFS. 33

fourth proof is drawn from tlie fact tliat there are different degrees in things, some being more and others less good^ tnie, noble, peifect, and therefore demand the perfect alike in the order of the true and the good, — a being in M'hom all diversities are identitied and all degrees are included, and which is their source and c omplement. The fifth is drawn from the fact of order and government, and the necessity of a supreme governor. These all conclnde God, if we may so speak, from a fact of sensible experience, and arc empirical proofs.

Dr. McCosli, president of Princeton College, T'J'ew Jersey^ a man of no mean philosopliical repute, relies wholly on the principle of cause and effect, as does St. Tliomas, and dis- misses all arguments but Paley's argument, or the argument from design. Pere Gratry (now dead), of the New Oratory,, relies, in his Connaissance de Dleu^ on induction from^ intellectual and ethical facts; the late Dr. Potter, Episcopa- lian bishop of Pennsylvania, in his Philosophy of Relig- ion^ does virtually the same. A writer in the British Qnarterly Revieio for July, 1871, in a very able article on Theism., examines and rejects all the arguments usually adduced to prove that God is, except that drawn from intu- ition, or, as we understand him, that which asserts the dii'ect and immediate empirical intuition, of God, or the Divine Being. Dr. Hodge, an eminent Presbyterian divine, in his Sij^tematiG Theology, accepts all the arguments usually adduced, some as proving one thing, and others as prov- ing another pertaining to theism, and holds that no one argument alone suffices to prove the whole. Dr. John Henry Newman, in his Aj)ologia pro Vita svxi, says he has never been able to prove to his own satisfaction the existence of God by reason ; he can only prove it is probable that there is a God, and appears to have writ- ten his Grammxir of Assent to prove that probai)ility is enough for all practical purposes, since we are obliged in nearly all the ordinary affairs of life to act on probabilities alone. Jlis belief in Ged he seems to derive from conscience. The Holy See has decided against the Traditionalists that the existence of God can be proved with certainty by rea- soning pi-ior to faith, and the Holy See has also iniprobated the doctrine of the Louvain professors, that we have imme- diate cognition of God, — a doctrine improbated by reason itself;, for if man had immediate cognition of God, no proofs of his existence would bo necessary, since no man,

Vol. U.-3

34 KEFUTATIO.N OF ATHEISM.

could doubt his existence any more than his own, or than that tlie sun shines at noonday in the heavens when his eyes behold it.

The general tendency in our day is to conclude tlie cause from tlie effect, and to conclnde God as designer, from the marks of design, or the adaptation of msans to ends discov- erable, or assumed to be discovei-able. in ourselves and the external world. LTlie objection to all arguments of this sort, that is to say, to all psychological, cosmological, and teleo- logical arguments, which depend on the principle of cause and effec't, is, that they all beg the question, or take for granted what requires to be proved. They all assume that the soul and cosmos are effects. Grant them to be effects, it follows necessarily that they have had a cause, and a cause adequate to the effect. As to that there can be no doubt. Cause and effect are correlatives, and correlatives connote 0!ie another, and neither is knowable alone. Whan we know any thing is an effect, we know it has a cause, whether we know what that cause is or not. But how prove that the soul or the cosmos is an effect? This the atheist denies, and this is the point to be proved against him, and how is it to be proved from the facts of experience tl

St. Thomas assumes, in his second proof, that we have experience of particular efficient causes. This is denied by Hume, Kant, Dr. Thomas Brown, Sir William Hamilton, Dr. Mansel, and by all the Comtists, Cosmists, and atheists of every species. "^Even Dr. Reid, the founder of the Scot- tish school, denies that we know by experience any power in the so-called cause that produces the effect, but contends that we are obliged, by the very constitution of our nature or of the human mind, to believe it. Kant agrees with Reid, and makes the irresistible belief a form of the under- standing. Huxley avowedly follows Hume, as do the great body of non-Christian scientists. Dr. Brown says that all we know of cause and effect is invariable antecedence and consequence, and maintains that, so far as experience goes, the relation of cause and effect is a relation of invariable sequence, — simply a relation in the order of time. The question does not stand where it did when St. Thomas wrote, and to meet the speculations of the day we are obliged to go behind him, and establish principles which he could take for granted, or dismiss as inserted in human nature itself, that 'is, as we say, intuitively given.

Even if experience could prove particular effects, and

INCONCLUSIVE PROOFS. 35

therefore particular and contingent efficient causes, we could not conclude from them universal and necessary causes, or the one universal cause, for tlie universal cannot be loo-icallj concluded from the particular, and tiie God that could l)e concluded would be only a generalization or abstraction, and no real God at all. Or if this is denied, which it cannot well be, God could be concluded only under the relation of cause, as causa causaruin, if you please, but still only as effi- cient causae, and therefore only as essentially cause, and sub- stance or being only in that he is cause. This supposes liim necessarily a cause, and obliged to cause in order to be or exist. Tliis would make creation necessary, and God obliged from the intrinsic necessity of his own nature to create, — the error of Cousin, our old master, to wiiom we owe the best part of our philosophical discipline. But this is only one of the raanv forms of pantheism, itself only a form of atheism.

Dr. McCosh rests the whole question on the marks of design in man and the cosmos. Design and designer are correlatives, and connote each other; and consequently the one cannot be proved as the condition of proving the other: for the proof of the one is ipso facto the proof of both. Prove design and you prove, of course, a designer. But how prove design, if you know not as yet that the world has been made or created? The most you can do is to prove that there are in nature things analogous to what in the works of man are the product of art or design ; but analogy is not identity, and how do you prove that what you call design is not nature, or natura naturans? Does the bee construct its cell, the beaver its dam, or the swallow her nest by intelligent design, as man builds his house? or by instinct, the simple force of nature ? Paley's illustration of the watch found by the traveller in a desert place is illusory: for the Indian who saw a watch for the first time took it to be a living thing, not a piece of mechanism or art.

But even granting the marks of design are proved, all that can be concluded, is not a supercosmic God or Creator, but simply that the world is ordered and governed by an intelli- gent mind ; it does not necessarily carry us beyond the Anima, mundi of Aristotle, or the Supreme Artificer of Plato, operating with preexisting materials and doing the best he can witii them. Tiiey do not authorize us to con- clude the really supramundane God, by the sole energy of liis word creating the heavens and the earth and all tilings therein trum nothing, as asserted bj' Christian theism. They

36 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM

can be explained as well by supposing the causa immanent with Spinoza, as by supposing a causa ejficiens.

The cosmologists niidei'take to conclude the existence of God from the facts or plicnoinena of the universe. Th& universe is contingent, dependent, insufficient for itself, and therefore it must have had a creator and upholder, who is himself necessar^^ not contingent, and is independent, self- subsisting, self-sufficing. Nothing more true. But whence- learn we that the universe is contingent, dependent, and insufficient for itself? "\Ve know not this fact by experience or empirical intuition. Besides, necessary and contingent are correlatives, and there is no intuition of the one without intuition of the other.

The psychologists profess to conclude God by way of induction from the facts of the soul. Thus Descartes says, Coyito, ergo sitm, and professes to deduce, after the manner of the geometricians, God and the universe from his own undeniable pei'sonal existence. Certainlj^ if God were not, Descartes could not exist, but from the soul alone, only the soul can be deduced, and from purely psychological facts induction can give us only psychological generalizations or laws. Take the several facts, attributes, or perfections of the soul, and suppose them carried up to infinity, it would still be only a generalization, for their substance would still be the soul, distinct and diti'erent by nature from the divine substance or being. God is not man com})leted ; nor is man,. as Giuberti says, "an incipient God, or God who begins.'* Man is indeed made in the image and likeness of God, not God in the image and likeness of man. lie is not anthro- ponu)rphous; though his likeness in which we are ci'cated enables us to understand, by way of analogy, something of Ills infinite attributes, and to hold, when not prevented by sin and when elevated by grace, a more or less intimate- conmumion with him. Christianity, indeed, teaches that man is destined to union with God as his beatitude, but the liuman personality remains ever distinct from the divine.

We arc not certain in what sense Bcj'e Gratry understands induction. Bi'ubably our inability arises from our compara- tive ignorance of mathematics, lie says the soul by induc- tion darts at once to G(jd and seizes him, so to speak, by intelligence and love, whatever all that may mean. We can undei'stand the clan of the soul to God whom it knows and loves, but we cannot understand how a soul ignorant of (xod can, by an interior and sudden spring, jump to a knowledge-

mCONCLUSIVE PROOFS. 37

of him. Perc Gratry says the sonl arrives at the knowledge of God as the mathematician in the calcuhis arrives at infini- tesimals, namely, by eliminating the finite. Eliminate the finite, he says, and yon have the infinite. Not at all, raon Pore. Eliminate the finite, and you have, as we have already said, simply zero. The infinite is not the negation of the iinite. Infinitesimals again, are nothing, for there is and can be no infinitely little./ The error comes right in the end, so far as mathematics is concerned, for it is equal on both sides, and the error on one side neutralizes the error on the other side.

The late Dr. Potter, Protestant bishop of Pennsylvania, relies on induction, and chiefly on induction from the ethical facts of the soul. But the ethical argument to prove the oxistence of God does not avail, for, till his existence is proved, there is no basis for ethics. The soul has a capacity to receive and obev a moral law, but that law is not founded in its nature or imposed by it. The moral law pi'oceeds from God as final cause of creation, as the physical laws proceed from him as first cause, and is the law of our per- fection, necessary to be obeyed in order to fulfil our des- tiny, or to obtain our supreme good or beatitude. If there is no God, there is and can be no moral law, and then no morality. Till you know God is, and is the final cause of the universe, you cannot call any facts of 'the soul ethical.

The argument of St. Anselm in his Monoloyium is the fourth of" St. Thomas, and concludes God as the perfect from the imperfect, of which we are conscious, or which we know b}^ experience in ourselves, or as the complement of man, an argument which contains a germ of truth, but errs by overlooking the fact that the perfect and imperfect are correlatives, and that the one cannot be inferred from the other because the one is not cognizable or cogitable without the other. St, Anselm himself seems not to have been satisfied with the argument of his Monologium, and gave fiiibsequently in his Proslogium, what he regarded as a briefer and more conclusive ai-gument. We have in our minds the idea of the most perfect being, a greater than which cannot be thought. But greater is a being in re, than a being in inteUeotu,. If then there is not in re a most per- fect being, than which a greater cannot be thought or con- ceived, then we can think a greater and more perfect being than we can, which is a contradiction. Therefore the most perfect being, a greater than which cannot be thought, does

38 REFUTATION <.)F ATHEISM.

and must exist in re, as well as in intellectu, since we cer- tainl}'^ have the idea in our minds.

This argument would be conclusive if it were shown that the idea is objective and an intuition, as we shall endeavor, further on, to prove that it is. Leibnitz somewhere remarks that it would be conclusive, if it were lirst proved that God is |)Ossible, which shows tliat Leibnitz, with his universal genius and erudition, could be as weak as ordinary mortals. It was his weakness, in which he anticipated Hegel, to place the possible prior to and independent of the real. If we could suppose God not to exist in actu, we could not sup- pose him to be possible; for possibility cannot actualize itself and thei-e would be no real to reduce it to act. The error of Hegel is in supposing the possible, for his reine Seyn is merely possible being, precedes das Wesen, or the real, and has in itself the tendency or aptness to become real — das Wesen — the old Gnostic doctrine that makes all things originate in the Byssus or Void.

There is no possible without the real, for possibility is the ability of the i-eal. The possible in relation to God is what God is able to do, and in i-elation to man is what man is able to- do with the faculties God has given him. There is nothing, we may add on which philosophers have, it seems to us, been more puzzled, or more bewildered others, than on this very question of possibility. If there were no actual, there would and could be no possible, for possibility, prescinded from the reality of the actual, is simply nothing. The excellent Father Tongiorgi hnagines that possibility is not nothing, but even something prescinded from the ability of the actual, and indeed something which, like theya^!w?>^ of the Stoics, limits or binds the power of God himself. Some things he holds are possible, and others are impossible, even to God. He forgets that nothing is impossible to God but to contradict, that is, annihilate his own eternal and necessary being. He is hi& own possibility, and the measui'eof the possible. It is hi& being that founds the nature of things, about which philos- ophers talk so much.

As to the argument of the Proslogium, its validity depends on the sense in which the word idea is taken. If we take it in a psychological sense, as a mere mental concep- tion, the ai'gument may be a logical puzzle, but concludes nothing.

If we suppose idea can exist in intellectu without existing in re, the argument concludes at best only a psychological

INCONCLUSIVE PROOFS. 39

abstraction ; l)ut if we suj^pose tlie mental idea to be the intuition of the real and objective, as we have jnst said, it is valid and conclusive. St. Anselm seems to us to take idea in a subjective sense and to conclude tlie objective from the subjective ; if so, his argument is pjscholoo-ical, and, like all psj'chological arguments, inconclusive. Yet he seems to maintain that it is also objective, and that it could not exist in mente, if it did not exist in re, and therefore conclusive.

Descartes deduces the existence of God from the soul, in which the idea of God he holds, is innate. But what is innate, that is, born in the soul and with it, is the soul, or at least psychical ; consequently, the argument is psychological, and proves nothing. Besides, Descartes, as is not seldom the case with him, falls into a paralogism, and reasons in a vicious circle ; he takes the idea in intellectit to prove that God is, and the veracity of God to prove the objective truth of the idea. He also tells us, elsewhere, when hard pressed by his opponents, that he means by the innate idea of God only that the soul has the innate faculty of thinking God, and therefore concludes God is because man thinks him ; but this is only asserting, in other words, that the soul lias the faculty of knowing God by immediate cognition — recently improl)ated by the Holy See — and rests on the principle that thought can never be erroneous, which is not true, otherwise evej-y man would be infallible, incapable of error.

The ontological arguments, so-called, founded on the alleged immediate cognition of being, are in nearly all cases, not ontological, but really psychological, as cZas reine Seyn of Hegel, which is simply an abstraction, therefore worthless; for the soul has no power in itself alone of immediately ap- prehending being. The psychological arguments are all in- conclusive because the}' all assume the point to be proved. Yet it is not denied that the argument from design, and others that rest on the principle of cause and effect, as well as those drawn from the ethical wants and aspirations of the soul, are all valuable, not indeed in proving that God is, l)ut in proving what he is. St. Paul tells us that " the invisible things of God, even his eternal power and divinity, are clearly seen from the beginning of the world, being under- stood by the things that are made," Rom. i. 20, but the Apostle does not tell us that the existence of God is a logi- cal conclusion from cosniological or psychological facts or from "the thinjj^s that arc> in;ide." Indeed. St. Thomas cites

40 UEFDTATION OF ATHKISM.

this text to prove what God is, rather than to prove that he is, for he throughout is replying to the question Quid est Deus^ rather than to the question. An sit Deus, as maj be seen by referring to the tirst article of the question cited above, in which he answers the question, TJtruin Deum esse ■sit per se notum.

The great question the Apostles and the Fathers had to argue against the Gentiles was not precisely the existence of God, but that of the Divine Unity and the fact of cre- ation and providence. In fact, the distinguishing and es- sential feature of the Mosaic doctrine was less that God is one than that God is the one Ahnigiity Creator of all things. The existence of one God, as has been seen, was not denied by the Gentiles, except by a few philosophers. The mother error of Gentilism was the loss of the tradition of creation, which paved the way for- divinizing the forces of nature, and at length for the worship of demons, always held inferior to a Supreme Divinity, of Avliich some dim reminiscence was alwavs retained.

VII. ANALYSIS OF THOUGHT.

Atheism is not natural to mankind, and is always, where- ever found, the fruit of a false or defective philosophy and eiToneous theories mistaken for science. The philosophy which has been generally cultivated since Descartes made Lis attempt to divorce philosophy from theology, of which it is simply the rational element, and to erect it into a sepa- rate and independent science, complete in itself, and embrac- ing the entire natural order, has hardly recognized and set forth with much clearness or distinctness the principles of a conclusive demonstration of theism, or a scientific refutation of atheism. If there is atheism pretending to found itself on science, we may charge it to the false philosophy which has generally obtained, except when connected with Catholic theology, and kept from going astray by tradition and com- mon sense. From the philosophers and false scientists atheism has descended to the people through jiopular liter- ature, and dilfused itself among tiie half-learned, chiefly by modern lectures and journalism, till literature, art, science, ethics, and especially politics, have become infected, and the very air we breathe saturated with it.

In order to refute atheism and to check the atheistic tend- ency of modern society, it is necessary to revise the generally

ANALYSIS OF THOUGHT. 41

received philosopliy, to correct its faulty principles and method, to supply its defects, to harmonize it with common sense and the traditions of the race, and to establish, what it is far from doinoj, the identity of the principles of science and the principles of things, or the identity of the knowable and the real, that is, to show that the order of science follows the order of being, and in their principles they are identical. To do this in a manner as intelligible as possible to the gen- eral reader, it is necessary to set forth the real principles on which philosophy is founded. Philosophj^ itself is the science of principles, and the principles must be real, that is, the principles of things, not simply mental conceptions or concepts, or the science will want reality and be no science at all. Real principles are the principles, not of science alone, Avithout which nothing can be known, but principles of things, on which all things depend, and without which nothing is or exists.

Obviously then the principles of philosophy and of reality are a 2:>riori^ and precede both the science and the reality that depends on them, or of which they are the principles. They must, then, be given, and neither created nor obtained by the inind's own activity, for without them the mind can neither operate nor even exist. The great error of the dominant philosophy of our times is in tlie assumption that the nn'nd starts without principles, and finds, them or obtains them by its own activity or its own painful exertions. Hence it places method before principles, which is no less absurd than to suppose that the mind, the soul, generates or creates itself. Principles are given, not found by the mind oper- ating without principles. They are given in the fact which we call thought, and we ascertain what they are only by a diligent and careful analysis of thought.

In order to correct the errors of the prevailing philoso- phy, to ascertain the principles of a true philosophy, and of real science that refutes the atheist by demonstratino- that God is, and is the creator of the heavens and the earth and all things visible and invisible, we must begin, as Descartes did, with thought {cog'Uo\ who was so far right, and ascer- tain what are the real and necessary elements of thought. This is no light labor, and it is a labor rendered necessary only by prevailing errors in order to refute them, otherwise there would be no necessity for it, and little utility in it; for the human mind remains and operates the same with or without the knowledge the analysis affords.

42 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

We therefore adopt the metliod of the psychologists so far as to begin with the analysis of thoviglit. This is imposed on us by the necessity of the case, as it is only in thought that we find onrselv^es or are placed in intellectual relation with any thing not ourselves. It is ouly in thouglit that the principles either of science or reality can be ascertained. The atheist must assert thought as well as the tlieist, and so also must the sceptic ; for he who denies or he who doubts, thinks, and can neither doubt nor deny without thinking. Hence universal denial or universal doubt, or scepticism, is simply impossible; for he who denies, or he who doubts, knows that he denies or doubts, as he who thinks knows that he thinks. ,' The error of Descartes, or the Psychologues, is not in beginning with thought, but in their assumption that all thought is the act of the soul or subject alone, or that thought is a purely psychological fact.

Cousin, though erring on many capital points, gives some- where a very clear and just analysis of thouglit, which he defines to be a complex fact, composed of three inseparable elements, subject, object, and form. lie asserts that the subject is always the soul, or ourselves thinking ; the object is always distinct from the soul, and standing over against it; and the form is always the relation of the subject and object. Every thought, therefore, is the synthesis of three elements : subject, object, and their relation, as we main- tained and proved in some chapters of an unfinished work on Synthetic Philosophy published in the years 1842-43.

Thought is either intuitive or reflective. The careful analysis of intuitive thought, intuition, what Cousin calls spontaneity or spontaneous thought, though erroneously, and wjiich he very propei'ly distinguishes from reflection or thought returning on itself, and so to speak, actively rethink- ing itself, discloses these three elements : subject, object, and their relation, always distinct, always inseparable, given simultaneously in one and the same complex fact. Deny one or another of these elements and there is and can be no thought. Remove the subject, and there is no thought, for there evidently can be no thought where there i,s no thinker ; remove the object, and there is equally no thought, for to think nothing is simply not to think; and finally, deny the relation of subject and object, and you also deny all thought, for certainly the soul cannot apprehend an object or an object be presented to the soul with no relation between them ; hence the assei'tion by the peripatetics of the necessity to

ANALYSIS OF THOUGHT, 43

the fact of intuition as well as of cognition of what they call phantasmata and species inteUlgibiles^ which is simply their way of expressing the relation in thought of subject and object.

The three elements of thought being given simultaneously and synthetically in one and the same fact, they all three rest on the same authority and are equally certain both sub- jectively and objectively. Here we escape the interminable debates of philosophers as to the passage from the subject- ive to the objective, and, in military phrase, flank the ques- tion of the certaiiity of human knowledge, and thus render all arguments against eitlier subjectivism or scepticism super- fluous. There is no pass^ige from the subjective to the objective, if the activity of the subject alone suflices for the production of thought, and no possible means of a logical refutation of scepticism. If the soul alone could suffice for thought, nothing else would be necessary to its production, and thought would and could afiirm no reality beyond the soul itself ; no objective reality could ever be proved, and no real science would be possible. All objective certainty would vanish, for we have and can have only thought with which to prove the o1\]ective validity of thought. Hence it is that those philosophers who regard thought as the product of the soul's activity alone, have never been able to refute the sceptic or to get beyond the sphere of the subject.

The soul's activit}^ alone does not, and, unless it were God, who is the adequate object of his own intellect, could not, suftiee for thought. Tlie object is as necessary to the production of thought as is the subject. The soul cannot act without it, and tlierefore cannot seek and And its object. The presence and activity of the object is necessary to the activity of the subject. The object nnist then present itself or be presented to the soul, or there is no thought actual or possible. This is the fact which Cousin undertakes to explain by what he calls spontaneity, and which he distin- guislies from reflection. Intuition, he says, is spontaneous, impersonal ; but reflection is personal, in which the soul acts voluntarily. But unhappily he loses all the advantage of this distinction, for he makes the intuition the product of the spontaneous activity of the soul, or, as he says, the spon- taneous or impersonal reason, therefore as much a psychical product as reflection itself; and therefore again, gets, even in intuition, no o])ject, no reality, extra animam^ and with all his endeavors he never really gets out of the subjectivism

44 REFUTATION OF ATHKISM.

of Kaiit, or even tlie egoism of Fichte, The distinction he makes between the personal reason and the impersonal is by no means a distinction between subject and object, but simply a distinction in the soul itself, or a distinction between its spontaneous and reflective modes of acting, and is, as Pierre Leroux has well said, a contradiction of his own assertion that the subject is always the soul, and the ol)ject is always distinguishable from it, standing over against it, and acting from the opposite direction; for the impersonal and personal reason are in his view psychical, simply a facnlty of the soul

If the object were purely passive, or did not actively con- cur in the production of thought, it would be as if it were not, and the soul could no more think with it than without it. It is the fact that the object actively concurs in the pro- duction of thought that establishes its reality, since what is not, or has no real existence, cannot act, cannot present or affirm itself. So far Pierre Leroux, to whom we are much indebted for this analysis of thought, is right, and proves himself, let Gioberti speak as contemptuously of him as he will, a true philosophical observer; but he vitiates all that follows in his philosophy by maintaining that the soul creates or supplies the form of the thought, or the relation between subject and object, as we have shown in The Convert. Tlie soul cannot act without the object, nor unless the object is placed in relation with it ; consequently the soul can no more create the relation tdan it can create the object or itself. The object with the relation, or the correlation of subject and object, then, is presented to the soul or given it, not created or furnished by it.

The soul, unable to think by itself alone, or in and of itself, can think even itself, find itself, or become aware of its own existence only in conjunction with the object intui- tively presented ; each of the three elements of thought therefore not only rests on the same authority, but each is as certain as is the fact of consciousness or the fact that we think. The object is affirmed or affii-ms itself objectively, and is real with all the certainty we have or can have of our own existence. Further than this, thouo-ht itself cannot go. we cannot from principles more ultimate than thought, demon- strate thought ; but it is not necessary, for he who thinks knows that he thinks, and cannot deny that he thinks with- out thiukinsT, and therefore not without affirmino: what he

A.NALYSIS OF TnOUGHT. 45

denies. This is all that can be asked, for a denial that denies itself is equivalent to an affirmation.

This analj'sis of thou^'ht not only refutes scepticism and subjectivism, or what is called in English philosophy, ideal- ism, and diows the objective validity of intuition to be as indisputable as our consciousness of our own existence, but it refutes at the same time and by the same blow both the ontologists and psychologists ; not indeed by denying either the ontological or the psychological principle, but by show- ing that both are given in one and the same thought, and therefore that neither is obtained by any process of reason- ing from the other. The psychologist assumes that the soul is given, and that it by its own psychical action obtains the non-psychical or ontological ; the ontologist assumes that being is given, and from the notion of being alone the soul deduces both the psychical and the cosnn'c. Neither is the fact. Being must be intuitively presented or we cannot have the notion of being, and the intuitive presentation of being to the subject gives the subject simultaneously the consciousness of itself as the subject of the intuition. Being can be presented in thought, only under the relation of object, and in every thouglit is given simultaneously with ithe other two inseparable elements, subject and rela- tion. The psychologist fails in his analysis of thought to detect as an original and indestructible element of thought a non-psychical element, the object which stands over agninst it, distinct from it, and except in conjunction with which there is and can be no psycliical activity or action. What the psychologist overlooks is tiie fact that the psychical and the non-psychical, as the condition of tiie soul's aetivity and consciousness of itself, are both given together in one and the same intuitive fact, and tlierefore that neither is obtained as an element of thought or science from the other. The objective validity of our knowledge resrs on the non-psychi- cal element of thought, not on the psychical. The ontolo- gist fails to detect the psychical element as a primitive ele- ment of thought; the psychologist fails to detect the onto- logical element as equally primitive and underived ; and neither notes the fact that both are given in one and the same original intuition. Cousin asserts it indeed, but ;is we have seen, forgets it or destroys its value, by resolving tho distinction of subject and object into a distinction between tiie personal and impersonal reason, or between the spon- taneous and reflective modes of the soul's activity, which

46 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

makes both roallj psychical, and allows nothmg extra ani- mam to be affirmed in thoiic^ht or presented in intuition.

Vin. ANALYSIS OF THE OBJECT.

The analysis of tlionglit, as we have just seen, discloses a non-psychical or an ontological element, and shows that in every thoaght there is an object distinct from and independ- ent of the subject, and thai in every intuitive thought the object affirms or presents itself by its own activity. This at one stroke establishes the reality of the object and the valid- itv of our science or knowledge. Having done this, we may proceed to analyze, not the subject, as do the psychologists, but the object, in order to determine, not how we know, but what we know.

Modern philosopliers, for the most part, especially since Descartes, proceed to analyze the subject before having either ascertained or analyzed the object, and are engrossed with the method and instrument of philosophy before hav- ing determined its principles. All philosophers do and must begin with a more or less perfect analysis of thought. Even Gioberti, who insists on the ontological method, concedes tliat in learning or teaching philosophy, we must begin with psychology, the analysis of thought, or as Cousin says, with the analysis of " the fact of consciousness." But the psy- chologists proceed immediately from the analysis of thought to tlie analysis of the subject, that is, of the soul, and give us simply the philosophy, as it may be called, of the Human Understanding, as do Locke and Hume ; of the Active powers of the soul as do Reid and Stewart ; or of the Iluman Intellect as does Dr. Porter, president of Yale College. This at best can give us, except by an inconse- quence, only a science of abstractions, or the subjective forms of thought without any objective reality, or barely the Wissenschaftdehre^ or the science of knowing, of Fichte, the science of the instrument and method of science, not science itself, the science of empty forms, not the science of things.

It is no wonder, therefore, that philosophy is very gener- ally regarded as dealing only with abstractions and empty formulas, or that it is very generally despissd and rejected by men of clear insight and strong practical sense, as an aJjstract science, and therefore worthless. Mere ]osychology,

ANALYSIS OF THE OBJECT. 47

which can be only tlie science of abstractions or empty forms, is even worse than wortliless, and the popular estimate of it is only too favorable. There is no class of men more contemptible or mischievous than psj'choloo'ers endeavoring to pass themselves oil' for philosophers, and very few others are to be met with in the heterodox world, or even in the orthodox world, when not guided and restrained by the principles and dogmas of Christian theology.

This comes from proceeding to the analysis of the subject before having analyzed the object. The object, if given simultaneously with the subject in the fact of thought, pre- cedes it in the order of being or real order; for it presents or affirms itself as the necessary condition of the soul's activity, and of her apprehension of her own existence even. It is tlrst in order, and its analysis should precede that of the soul ; for as the subject is given only in conjunction with the object, or as reflected or mirrored in it, it is only as reflected or mirrored in the object that it can know or recognize its own powers or faculties. The object determines the faculty, not the faculty the object. Man, St. Thomas says, somewhere, as cited by l>almes, "is not intelligible in himself, because he is not intelligence in himself" If he could know himself in liiinself, or be the direct object of his own intellect, he would be God, at least independent of God. The soul knows itself only under the relation of subject, as it knows what is not itself only under the relation of object, and is conscious of its own existence only in the intuition of the object. We ascertain the powers of the soul from the object she appre- hends, not the reality of the object from the powers or faculties of the soul. The analysis of the object is, then, the necessary condit'on of the analysis of the subject.

The analysis of the object, like that of thought, if we mistake not, gives us, or discloses as essential in it, three elements, the ideal, the empirical, and the relation between them. The ideal is the a 2yriorl and apodictic element, with- out which there is and can be no intelligible object, and consequently no thought; the empirical is the fact of experience, or the object, wliether appertaining to the sen- sible order or to the intelligible, as intellectually apprehended by the soul ; the relation is the nexus of the ideal and the empirical, and is given by the ideal itself.

Kant has jiroved in his Crltik der rehien Vernunft, or Analysis of Pure Reason, that the empirical is not possible without the ideal, or as he says, without cognitions a priori^

48 REFUTA'nON OF ATHEISM.

wliich are necessary to every synthetic judgment, or cognition a posteriori. The cognitions «j9?'/r?W Kant calls categories after the peripatetics, or certain forms nnder which we neces- sarily apprehend all things. lie makes these forms or catego- ries forms of the human understanding, and therefore makes them subjective, not objective, or places them on the side of the subject, not on the side of the object. Aristotle makes them, apparently, forms neither of the subject nor of the object, but of t\ie mundus logicus, or a world intermediary between the subject and the object, or the soul and the mundus jyhysicus, or real world. Kant's doctrine, that the categories ai'e forms of the subject, is refuted in our analy- sis of thought. It implies that the subject can exist and operate without the object, and that we see the object as we do, not because it is such as we see it, but because such is the constitution or law of the human mind, — which denies the objective validity of our knowledge already established.

The peripatetic categories are admissible or not, as the intermediary world is or is not taken as the representation of the real world. If we take the phantasms and intelligible species as the representations of the object to the mind, not by the mind, and thus make the categories real, not simply formal, the peripatetic doctrine, as will be seen further on, is not inadmissible. But if we distinguish the categories from tlie inund us pli ijsicus or real world, and make them forms of an intermediary world, or something which is neither subject nor object, we deny them all reality, for no such world does or can exist. AV^hat is neither subject nor object is nothing. St. Thomas, as we understand him, makes, as we shall by and by show, the phantasms and species proceed from tiie object, and holds them to be in the retiective order, in which the soul is active, representative of the object; Avhich permits us to hold that in the intuitive order they are simply prcsentative or the object ])i-esenting or afhi-ming itself to the passive intellect, lie holds them to be, in scho- lastic language, ohjeetum, quo not ohjectiim (juod or that in which the intellect tenninates, but that by which it attains to the idea, or the intelligible, as will be nn^re fully explained, further on. The modei'n peripatetics, for the most pai't, make the categories purely formal, and gravely tell us that a proposition may be logically time and yet really false!

Cousin identities the categories of Aristotle and Kant, with what he calls necessary and absolute ideas, and reduces their number to being and phenomenon, or substance

AJS^ALYSIS OF THE OBJECT. 49

and cause, but loses their objective reality by making them constituent elements of the impersonal reason, which is sub- ■jective, as purely so as is tlie reflective reason itself. The impersonal reason differs, in his philosophy, from the pei-sonal reason only as to the mode of its activity, and is, as the personal, a faculty of the soul, by wliich the soul knows all that it does or can know, whatever the degree or region of its knowledge.

Dr. AVard, of the DuUin Review, places or intends to plac e the categories or, as he sa^-s, necessarj' and and eternal ideas, on the side of the object, and liolds that they are intuitive or self-evident ; yet he makes intuition the act of the soul, therefore, empirical, and really places the ideal on the side of the subject. He fails to integrate them in real and neces- sary being, and says, after Father Kleutgen, that though founded on God, they are not God. But what is founded on God, and yet is not God, is creature, and creatures Dr. Ward cannot hold them to be, for he holds them to be necessary and eternal, and necessary and eternal creature is a contradiction in terms. AVhat is neither God nor creature is nothing, and Dr. AVard cannot say ideas are nothing, for he holds them to be intuitive or self-evident, and nothing cannot evidence itself, or be an object of intuition. There is, also, a further dithculty. Dr. Ward, as do Drs. McCosh Porter, Hopkins, and others of the same school, by making intuition an act of the soul makes it a fact of experience, and the point to be met is, that without intuition of tho ideal, there is and can be no fact of experience, or empirical intuition. It must be borne in mind that Kant has proved that without the cognitions a priori^ or what we call the ideal, no cognition a posteriori is possible.

Dr. Newman, of whom we would always speak with pro- found reverence, in his Essay in ai'l of a Grammar of Assent, appaiently at least, not only denies ideal intuition, but the objecti'/e reality of the ideal itself, and resolves the categories or ideas into pure mental abstractions created by the mind itself. '' All things of the exterior [objective ?] world," he says, section second of his opening chapter, " are unit and individual, and nothing else ; but the mind not only contemplates these unit realities as they exist, but has the gift, by an act of creation, to bring before it abstrac- tions and generalizations which have no existence, no coun- terpart out of it." It would be dithcult to express more distinctly the Nominalism of Rosceline, or at least the Con Vou n.— 4

50 EEFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

ceptucalisni of Abelard, censured by the theologians of the twelfth century as incompatible with the assertion of the inefiable mystery of the Ever-Blessed Trinity. It need not surprise us, therefore, that Dr. Xewman confesses in his Apologia pro Vita sua, that he has never been able by rea- soning to prove satisfactorily to his own mind the existence of God, for on his philosophy, if we do not misapprehend it, he can adduce no argument against the atheist. If we are to take the passage cited as a key to his philosophy, there can be for him no object in thought but these unit realities, for the abstractions and generalizations, being men- tal creations, are all on the side of the subject, and no place is left for God in tlie knowable.

But, unhappily, these "unit realities" are not cognizable by themselves aloiie. To suffice of themselves as objects of thought they must suffice for their own existence. "What cannot exist alone, cannot be known alone. Then every one of these unit realities, to be cognizable alone, must be an independent, self-existent, and self-sufficing being, that is to say, God, and there must be as many Gods as there are unit realities or distinct objects of thought or intuition, which we need not say is inadmissible. These unit realities can be objects of thought or intuition only on condition of presenting or affirming themselves to the mind, and they can present or affirm themselves in intuition only as they are i7i r<3, not as they are not, as is sufficiently proved in our analysis of thought. If they are not real and necessary being they cannot affirm themselves as such ; if they are not such they can affirm themselves only as contingent and dependent existences that have their being in another, not in themselves, and then only under the relation of contingency or dependence, or in relation to that on which they depend ; consequently they are not cognizable without intuition of real and necessary or independent being which creates them. Contingency or dependence expresses a relation, but rela- tions are cogitable only in the related, and only when both terms of the relation are given. Neither term can be infer- red from the other, for neither can be thought without the otlier. Hence there is no intuition of the contingent with- out intuition of the necessary, or empirical intuition without ideal intuition.

The categories are all correlatives, and are presented in two lines, as one and many, the same and the diverse, the universal and the particular, the infinite and the finite, the

A.NALYSIS OF THE OBJECT. 51

immutable and the mutable, the permanent and the transi- tory, tlie perfect and the imperfect, the necessary and the contingent, substance and phenomena, being and existences, cause and effect, 6ce. These severally connote each other, and we cannor think the one line without thinking or hav- ing intuition of the other. When we think a thing as par- ticular, we distinguish it from the universal, or think it as not universal ; but evidently we cannot do this unless the universal is intuitively present to the mind. The same is equally true of every one of the other categories. The contingent is not cogitable without intuition of the neces- sary ; nor is it possible to think the contingent without intuition of its contingency, for, as we have shown in the foregoing analysis, the object presents itself by its own activity, and therefore must present itself as it is, not as it is not. Notliiug is more certain than that the relation of the categories is no fact of experience, nor than that neither correlative is inferred from the other. Yet it is no less cer- tain tliat men, all men, even very young children, regard Dr. ISTewman's " Unit realities " as contingent, as dej)endent, or as not having the cause of their existence in themselves. Hence the questions of the child to its mother : " Who made the flowers 'i who made the trees ? who made the birds ? who made the stars? who made father? who made God?" Hence, too, those anxious questionings of the soul tliat we mark in the ancient heathen and in the modei*n Protestant world : Whence came we ? why are we here ? whither do we go? It is only scientists, Comtists or Cosmists, who are satisfied with Topsy's theory, "I didn't come, I grow'd." But if tlie soul had no intuition of the relation of contingent and necessary, or of cause and effect, it would and could ask no such questions.

It is certain, as a matter of 'fact, that the soul has present to it both the contingent and necessary, as the condition a priori of all experience or empirical intuition. So much Kant has proved. The object of thought always presents itself either as contingent or as necessary. The categories •of necessity and contingency, not being empirical, since they are the forms under wliich we necessarily apprehend every object we do appreliend, we call them ideas, or the ideal. The question to be settled is. Is the ideal, without wliich no fact of experience is possible, on the side of the object, or -on the side of the subject ? Kant places it on the side of the subject, and subjects the object to the laws of the soul ;

52 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

we place it on the side of the object, and hold that it is that withont which the object is not intelligible, and therefore no object at all. Hence we maintain that the object of thought is not a simple nnit, but consists of three inseparable elements, the ideal, the empirical, and their relation. The proof that we are riglit is furnished in onr analysis of thought, and rests on the principle that what is not is not intelligible, and that no object is intelligible save as it really exists. This follows necessarily from the fact we have established that the object presents or affirtns itself by its own activity. Contingent existences are active only in their relation to the necessary ; consequently are intelligible or cognizable only in their relation of contingency. Then, as certain as it is that we think, so certain is it that the ideal is on the side of the object, not on the side of the subject. This will appear still more evident wlien we recollect that the contingent is not apprehensible without the intuition of the necessary on which it depends, and the necessary is and can be no predicate of the subject, which is contingent exist- ence, not necessary being, since it depends on the object for its power to act.

It follows from this that the ideal is given intuitively in every thought, as an essential, element of the object, and therefore that it is objective and real. But while this agrees with Plato in asserting the objective reality of the ideal, in opposition to Kant, it agrees also with Aristotle and St. Tliomas in denying tliat it is given separately. We assert the ideal as a necessary elen]ent of the object, but we deny that, separated from tlie empirical element, it is or can be an object of thought; for man in this life is not pure spirit or soul, but spirit or soul united to body, and cannot directly perceive, as maintained, by Plato, the 'old Gnostics or PrieainaticU the modern Transcendental ists, Pierre Leroux, and the disciples of the English School founded by the opium-eater Coleridge, such as Drs. McCosli and Ward, Presidents Marsh, Porter, and Hopkins, to mention no others. Hence we deny the proposition of the Louvain professoi'S, improbated by the Holy See, that the mind " has immediate cognition, at least habitual, of God." Cognition or perception is an act of the soul in concurrence with the object, and the soul, though the forma corporis, or inform- ing principle of the body,"never in tiiis life acts without the body, and consequently can perceive the ideal only as sen- sibly represented. The ideal is really given in intuition^

ANALYSIS OF THE OBJECT. 53

but not by itself alone ; it is given in the empirical fact as its a priori condition, and is distinctly held only as sepa- rated from it, by reflection, the intellectus agens, or active intellect, as maintained by St. Thomas and the whole peri- patetic school, as well as by the official teaching in our Catholic schools and colleges generally.

Ideal intuition is not perception or cognition. Per- ception is empirical, whether mediate or immediate, and whatever its object or its sphere, and in it the soul is always .the percipient agent. Intuition of the ideal is solely the act of the object, and in relation to it the intellect is passive. It corresponds to the intelligible species of the peripatetics, or rather to what they call species impressa. Dr. Reid, founder of the Scottish school, finished by Sir William Hamilton, thought he did a great thing when he vehemently attacked, and as he flattered himself made away "svith, the phantasms and intelligible species of the peripatetics, which he supposed were held to be certain ideas or immaterial images interposed between the mind and the real object, and when he asserted that we perceive things themselves, not their ideas or images. But Dr. Reid mistook a wind- mill for a giant. The peripatetics never held, as he supposed, iuiXQi p>hanias7ricda and the species inteUigihiles to be either ideas or images, nor denied the doctrine of the Scottish school, that we perceive things themselves ; and one is a little surprised to find so able and so learned a philosopher as Gioberti virtually conceding that they did, and giving Reid and Sir William Hamilton credit for establishing the fact that we perceive directly and immediately external things themselves. We ourselves have studied the peripa- tetic school chiefly in the writings of St. Thomas, the great- est of the Schoolmen, and we accept the doctrine of sensible and intelligible species as he repi'esents them, that is, sup- posing we ourselves understand him. Both the sensible and the intelligible species proceed from the object, and in relation to them the intellect is passive, that is, simply in potentia ad actum. Now, as we have shown that the intel- lect cannot act prior to the presentation of the object or till the object is placed in relation with it, it cannot then, either in the sensible or the intelligible order, place itself in relation with the object, but the object, by an objective act inde- pendent of the intellect, must place itself in relation with the subject. This is the fact that underlies the doctrine of the peripatetic phantasms and intelligible species, and trans-

r4 "REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

lated into modern tliouglit means all simply what we call ideal intuition, or the presentation or affirmation of the object by itseK or its placing itself by its own act in relation to the intellect as the a priori condition of perception.

But as the soul cannot act without the body, the intelligi- ble cannot be presented save as sensibly represented, and therefore only in the phantasmata or sensible species, from which the active intellect abstracts, divides, disengages, or separates — not infers — them. Yet the intelligible, the ideal, as we say, is really presented, and is the object in which the intellect terminates or which it attains, the very doctrine we are endeavoring by our analysis of the object to bring out. Reid never understood it, and psychologists either do not distinguish the ideal from the empirical, or profess to infer it by way of deduction or induction from the sensible.. St. Thomas does neither, for he holds that the intelligible enters the mind with or in the sensible, and is simply disengaged, not concluded, from it.

It is necessary to be on our guard against confounding the question of the reality of the ideal or universal and necessary ideas, which correspond to the cognitions a priori of Kant, with the scholastic question as to the reality of universals, as do the Louvain professors, in the proposition improbated by the Holy See, that universals, a 'parte rei considerata, are indistinguishable from God, wliich confounds universale with idea exemj)laris, or the type in the divine mind after which God creates, and which St. Thomas says is nothing else than the essence of God. Idea in Deo nihil est aliud quam essentia Dei. The universals of the Schoolmen are di^^sible into classes: 1, Whiteness, roundness, and the like, to which some think Plato gave reality, as he did to justice, the beautiful, &c., and which are manifestly abstractions, with no reality save in their concretes from which the mind abstracts them; 3, Genera and species, as hmnanitas. The Scholastics, as far as our study of them goes, do not sharply distinguish between these two classes, but treat them both under the general head of universals.

Rosceline and the xS^ominalists, who fell under ecclesiasti- cal censure, held universals to be simply general terms, or empty words; Abelard and the Conceptualists held tliem to be not empty words, but mental conceptions existing in the mind but with no existence a parte rei; Guillaume de Champeaux of St. Victor, and afterwards bishop of Paris, and the mediseval Realists, are said to have held them to be real or

ANALYSIS OF THE OBJECT. 55

to exist a parte rei, or as they said then, as separate entities ; St. Thomas and the Thomists, as is well known, held them to exist ill ■mente or in conceptu otim fundamento in re. But Cousin, in his PhilosopMe Scholastique, originally pub- lished as a Report to the French Academy on tlie unpub- lished works of Abelard, thinks, not without reason, that he finds in a passage cited by Abelard from William de Cham- peaux, that the medifeval realists did not assert the separate entity of all universals, but only the reality of genera and species, though of course, not either as ideas in the divine mind, or as existing apart from their individualization.

The reahty of genera and species is very plainly taught in Genesis, for it is there asserted that God created all living creatures each after its kind ; and if we were to deny it, generation as the production of like by like could not be asserted ; the dogma of Original Sin, or that all men or the race sinned in Adam, would be something more than an inexplicable mystery, and we have observed that those theo- logians who deny the reality of the species, iiave a strong tendency to deny original sin, or to explain it away so as to make it not sin, but the j^unishment of sin. Certainly, if the race were not one and I'eal in Adam, it would be some- what difficult to explain how original sin could be propa- gated by natural generation. It would be equally difficult to explain the mystery of Redemption through the assump- tion of human nature by the Word, unless we suppose, what is not admissible, that the Word assumed each individual man, for to suppose a real human nature common to all men, is to assert the reality of the genus or species. The denial of the reality of genera and species not only denies the unity of the race and thus denies Original Sin, the Incarnation, Redemption, and Regeneration, l)ut also impugns, it seems to us, tlie Mystery of the Blessed Trinity, by denying the unity of the nature or- essence of the three persons of the Godhead, and certain it is that both Roscehne and Abelard were accused of denying or misrepresenting that ineffable Mystery.

We are not aware of the views of St. Thomas on this pre- cise question, or that he has treated specially of the question of genera and species. As to the other class of universals, he is unquestionably right. They are conceptions, existing m mente cum fundamento in re, that is, mental abstractions, formed hy the mind operating on the concretes given in intuition. They have their foundation in reality. There

56 KEFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

is a basis of reality in all our mental conceptions, even in our wildest imaginations and our most whimsical fancies, for we neither think nor imagine what is absolutely unreal.

But however this may be, St. Thomas* does not class what we call the ideal intuitively given, with the universals or conceptions, with simply a basis in reality. He asserts self- evident principles, the first principles of science or of demon- stration, which are neither formed by the mind, nor obtained from experience, but precede experience and all reasoning, and which must be given by ideal intuition. In its sub- stance, its principles and method, the real philosopher will find that the philosophy of St. Thomas cannot be safely rejected, although, as we have already intimated, he may find it necessary, in order to meet errors which have arisen since his time, to explain some questions more fully than St. Thomas has done and to prove some points which he could take for granted.

IX. ANALYSTS OF THE IDEAL.

The analysis of Thought gives us three inseparable ele- ments, all equally real : subject, object, and their relation ; the analysis of the Object gives us also three inse])arable ele- ments, all objectively real, namely, the ideal, the empirical, and their relation. The analysis of the Ideal, we shall see, gives us again three inseparable elements, all also objectively real, namely, the necessary, the contingent, and their rela- tion, or being, -existences, and the relation between them.

We have found what logicians call the categories and what we call the ideal or objective ideas, and without which no thought or fact of experience, as Kant has proved, is possible, are identical. Aristotle makes the categories ten and two predicaments; Kant makes them fifteen, two of the sensi- bility, twelve of the understanding ( Verstand), and one of the reason, {Vernunft) ; but whatever their number, they are, contrary to Kant, intuitive, and therefore objectively real. They are intuitive because they are the necessary con- ditions a priori of experience or the souPs intellectual action ; and they are objective, since otherwise the}' could not be intuitive, for intuition is the act of the object, not of the subject.

* See Sinnma, p. 1, Q. 3, a. 1.

ANALYSIS OF THE IDEAL, 57

All philosophers agree that whatever exists is arranged under some one or all of these categories, and is either neces- sary or contingent, independent or dependent, one or many, tiie same or the diverse, universal or particular, invariahle or variable, immutable or mutable, permanent or transitory, infinite or finite, eternal or temporary, being or existences, «ause or effect, creator or creature. They are, as we have seen, in two lines, and go, so to speak, in pairs, and are cor- relatives, and each connotes the other.

But these categories may be reduced to a smaller num- ber. Cousin contends that all tlie categories of the upper line may be reduced to the single category of being, and those of the lower line to the single category of phenome- non, or the two lines to substance and cause. Rosmini reduces the categories of the upper line to being in general ; Eather Eothenflue reduces them all to the single category of ens reale, or real being, in contradistinction from the ens in genere of Rosmini ; tiie Lou vain professors, as all exclu- sive ontologists, do the same. The exclusive psj^cliologists reduce them all to the category of the soul or our personal existence ; Gioberti reduces the categories of the upper line to that of real and necessary being, ens necessarmm et reale^ and all the categories of the lower line to that of contin- gent existences, or briefly, both lines to Being and Exist- ences.

Cousin's reduction is inadmissible, for it omits the second line, or denies its reality. Phenomenon, in so far as real or any thing, is identical with being, and does not constitute a distinct category. Cousin makes being and substance iden- tical, a pantheistic error ; for thougli all being is substance, all substances are not real and necessary being. He also places cause in the lower line, which is a mistake. The effect is in the second line, but not the cause. It is true, cause is not in the upper line, for it is not eternal and neces- sary. The causative power is in being, and therefore in the upper line, but actual cause is the nexus between the two lines, and is included in the relation between them, or between the necessary and the contingent. This shows that the ideal or the categories cannot be reduced to two, for that would deny all relation between them, and make them sub- ject and predicate without the copula. Gioberti is more philosophical in reducing them to three, in his terminology, Being, existences, and their relation.

Cousin, Father Rothenflue, Professor Ubaghs, and all the

58 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

ontologists, as we shall soon show, are right in their reduc- tion of the categories of the upper line to the single category of real and necessary being, though Cousin and Spinoza, as do all pantheists, err in making being and substance identi- cal, and in asserting one only substance, as do the Cosmists, for this restricts the ideal to the upper line, and excludes entirely the lower line. Hence they resolve all reality into being, or substance and phenomenon, the last real only in being or substance.

Real and necessary being is independent, and can sMnd alone, but we found in our analysis of the object, another line of categories, the contingent, the particular, the depend- ent, &G., equally necessary as the a ])^'iori condition of experience or empirical intuition, and therefore included in the ideal element of the object, and therefore given or pre- sented in ideal intuition. The relation between the two lines of categories, and which is really the relation, not yet considered, between the ideal and the empirical, and also given by ideal intuition, will be treated further on. Here we are considering only the two lines of categories, given together in ideal intuition. For the present we shall consider them simply as reduced to two categories, namely, the necessary and the contingent, which will soon appear to be necessary being and contingent existences. These categories are, as included either in the ideal or in the object of thought, correlatives, and neither can be inferred or concluded from the other. They do not imply one the other, but each connotes [ponnotai] the other, that is to say, neither is cognizable ^\dthout the other. They who take the necessary as their principium can conclude from it only the necessary, not the contin- gent, and hence the pure ontologists, who attempt by logi- cal deduction from real and necessary being alone to obtain the contingent, inevitaWy fall into pantheism. It is equally impossible to conclude, by logical induction, real and necessary being from the contingent. Deduction from the contingent can give only the contingent, and induction can give only a generalization, which remains always in the order of the particulars generalized. Hence those who make the contingent their principium, if consequent, inevitably fall into atheism. The error of each class arises from their incomplete analysis of the object and of its ideal element. The complete analysis of the object sliows, as we have seen, that the ideal element is given intuitively, as the a pr^iori condition of the empirical. The analysis of the ideal shows

ANALYSIS OF THE IDEAL. 59

that the necessary and the contingent are both given in the ideal intuition and there is no need of attempting to con- clude either from the other. They are both primitive, and being intuitively given, both are and must be objectively real.

But the necessary and the contingent are abstract terms, and are real only in their concretes. There is and can be no intuition of necessary and contingent as abstractions ; for as abstractions they have no objective existence, and there- fore are incapable of presenting or affirming themselves in intuition, whicli, as we have shown, is the act of the object, not of the subject. The necessary must therefore, since we have proved it ]-eal, be real and necessary being, and intu- ition of it is intuition of real and necessary being. In like manner, intuition of the contingent is not intuition of con- tingent nothing, but of contingent being, that is, exist- ences, the ens secundum quid of the Schoolmen. This is what we have proved in proving the reality of the ideal. Ideas without which no fact of knowledge is possible, and which through objective intuition enter into all our mental operations, are not, as they are too often called, abstract ideas, but real.

We have reduced, provisorily, the ideas or categories to two, necessary and contingent, whicli we find, in tlie fact that they are intuitively given, are real, and if real, then the necessary is real and necessary being, and the contingent is contingent, though real, existence. Then the analysis of the ideal or a priori element of human knowledge gives us being, existences, and their relation. These three terms are really given intuitively, but, as we have seen, in the fact of thought or experience, they are given as an inseparable ele- ment of the object, not as distinct or separate objects of thought, or of empirical apprehension, noetic or sensible.^ They are given in the empirical fact, though its a priori element, and the mind by its own intuitive action does not distinguish them from the empirical element of the object, or perceive them as distinct and separate objects of thought. We distinguish tliem only by reflection, or by the analysis of the object, which is complex, distinguishing what in the object is ideal and a priori from what is empirical and a posteriori. When we assert the necessary and contingent as ideas, the mind, again, does not perceive that the one is being and the other existence or dependent on being ; the mind perceives this only in reflecting that if given they must

€0 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

be objective and real, and if real, being and existence, for what is not being, or by or from being, is not real. The identity of the ideal and the real, and of the real with being and what is from being, is arrived at by reflection, and is, if you insist on it, a conclusion, but, as the logicians say, an explicative, not an illative conclusion.

But we have reduced the categories to the necessary and contingent, and found the necessary identical with real and necessary being, ens necessarium et reale, and the contingent identical with contingent existence, ens secundum quid. Being is independent, and can stand alone, and can be asserted without asserting any thing beside itself ; for who says hehig says being is — a fact misconceived by Sir William Hamilton, when he denies that the unconditioned can be thought, because thought itself conditions it. But a contin- gent existence cannot be thought by itself alone, for contin- gency asserts a relation, and can be thought or asserted only under that relation. It would be a contradiction in terms to assert ideal intuition of the contingent as independent, self -existent, for it would not then be contingent. The con- tingent, as the term itself implies, has not the cause or source of its existence in itself, but is dependent on being. The relation between the two categories is the relation of dependence of the contingent on the necessary, or of contin- gent existences on real and necessary being. This relation we express by the word existences. The ex in the word existence implies relation, and that the existence is derived from being, and, though distinguished from it, depends on it, or has its being in it, and not in itself.

The Scholastics apply the word ens^ being, alike to real and necessaiy being and to contingent existences, to what- ever is real, and also to whatever is unreal, or a mere figment of the in)agiuation, as when they say ens rationis. This comes partly from the fact that the Latin language, as we find it in the Latin classics, is not rich in philosophic terms, but still more from the fact that they treat philosophy chiefly from the point of ^aew of reflection, which is secondary, and is the action of the mind on its intuitions. AVhatevercanbe the object of reflective thought, though the merest abstraction or the purest fiction, they call by the common name of ens : it may be ens reale or ens possihile, ens necessarium or ens contingens^ ens simpliciter or ens secundum qxdd. From the Schoolmen the practice has passed into all modern languages. We think it would be more simple and convenient, and tend

ANALYSIS OF THE IDEAL. 61

to avoid confusion, to restrict as Gioberti does, being to the ens simpliciter of the Schoolmen, and to use the word exist- ence, or rather existences, to avoid all ambiguity, to express whatever is from being and depends on it, and yet is dis- tinguishable from it.

Making this change in the received terminology of philos- ophy, the analysis of the ideal gives us being, Existences, and the relation between them. The second term, as the lower line in the categories, must be given in the ideal intuition, for we cannot perceive existences, or empirically appreliend contingents, unless we have present to our mind the i<iea of contingency as the correlative of the necessary, as shown in our analysis of the object.

There remains now to be considered the third term, or the relation of the contingent to the necessary, or of existences to Being. Being and existences comprise all that is or exists. What is not real and necessary, self-existent and independent being, is eitlier nothing or it is from being and dependent on being. Existences are, as we have seen, distinguished from being, and j'et are real, for the idea of contingency is given in the objective intuition, or in the ideal element of the object. Existences are then real, not nothing, and yet are not being. Nevertheless they are, as we have seen, related to being and dependent on it. But they cannot l)e distinct from being, and yet dependent on l)eing, uidess pro- duced from nothing b}' the creative act of being. JiJeing alone is eternal, self-existent, and beside being there is and can be only existences created by being. Being nnist either create them from nothing by the sole enei-gy of its will, or it must evolve them from itself. Not the last, for that would deny that they are distinct from being; tlien the first must be accepted as the only alternative. Hence the iinaly- sis of the ideal gives us being, existences, and the creative act of being as the nexus or copula that unites existences to being, or the predicate to the subject.

The ideal then lias, as Gioberti truly remarks, the three terms of a complete judgment, subject, predicate, and copuhi, and as it is formed by the ideal, it is real, objective, formed and presented to us by being itself, presented nut separately, but as the ideal element of the object. It con- tains a foi-mula that excludes alike ontologism and psycholo- gism, and gives the principium of each in its real synthesi--^. The intelligent reader will see, also, we trust, that it excludes alike the exaggerations of both spiritualists and sensists, and

62 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

that nothing is more ridiculous than to charge it, as we iiave set it forth, with atheism or pantheism, as many excellent persons have done, as thej find it stated in the pages of Gioberti. It refutes, as we trust we shall soon see, both atheism and pantheism, and establishes Christian theism. Truth, if truth, is truth, let who will tell it, and it is as law- ful to accept it when told bv Gioberti as when told by Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Cousin, Pierre Leroux, or Sir William Hamilton.

X. ANALYSIS OF THE RELATION.

In the analysis of thought, the analysis of the object, and the analysis of the ideal we have found in each, three ele- ments given simultaneously and inseparably. In thought : subject, object, and their relation ; in the object : the ideal, the empirical, and their relation ; in the ideal : the necessary or being, the contingent or existences, and their relation. But though in the last analysis we have stated the relation is the creative act, the reader will not fail to perceive that we have given only a meagre account of the relation in the analysis of thought, and still less in the analysis of the object. This has been partly because we are not setting forth a coD:iplete system of philosophy embracing all the questions of rational science, and partly because till we had reached the analysis of the ideal, the analysis, or a proper account of the relation in the other two cases, could not be given, since the relation, as we hope to show, is substantially one and the same in each of the three cases.

The analysis of the relation is not practicable in the sense of the other analyses we have made ; for, as relation, it has only a single term, and prescinded from the related is simply nullity. We can analyze it only in the related, in which alone it is real. In the fact of thought we have found that the object is active, not passive as most philosophies teach ; and therefore that it is the object that renders the subject active, reduces it to act, and therefore creates it. St. Thomas and, we believe, all the Scholastics, teach that in the reception of the phantasms and the intelligible species the mind is passive. That which is purely passive is as if it were not, for whatever really is or exists, is or exists in actu, and therefore is necessarily active. Since, then, the phan-

AJ^AI^YSIS OF THE RELATION. 63

tasms and species proceed from the object,* it follows that the object actualizes the subject, and renders it active or intellectus agens. Hence the relation of object and subject in the fact of thought is the relation of cause and effect. The object actualizes or creates the subject, not the subject the object.

The relation we have found of the ideal and empirical is also the relation of cause and effect. The empirical we have found is impossible without the ideal, for it depends on it, and does not and cannot exist without it. That with- out which a thing does not and cannot exist, and on which it depends, is its cause. The ideal then causes, produces, or creates the empirical, and therefore the relation between them is the relation of cause and effect. Ideal space pro- duces empirical space, and ideal time produces empirical time. As the ideal is real and necessary being, ens neces- sarium et reale^ as we have seen, ideal space is and can be only the power of being to externize its own acts, in the order of coexistences, and ideal time can only be the power of being to externize its own acts successively, or pro- gressively. Empirical space is the effect of the exercise of this power producing the relation of coexistence ; empirical time is its effect in producing the relation of succession, oi' progressive actualization. The relations of space and time are therefore resolvable into the relation of cause and effect, the reverse of what is maintained by Hume and our modern scientists.

As all the categories of the upper line are integrated in real and necessary ])eing, and as all the categories of the lower line are integrated in existences, so all relations must be integrated in the relation of being and existences, which is the act of being, producing, or actualizing existences, and therefore the relation of cause and effect. Hence there are

* We think it a capital mistake of some moderns to suppose, as does the very able and learned Father Dalgairns in his admirable treatise on Hol}^ Communion, that the Scholastics held that the phantasms and spe- cies by which the mind seizes the object are furnished by the mind itself. " This would make the Scholastic philosophy a pure psychologism, which it certainly is not, though it becomes so in the hands of many who prof('ss to follow it. St. Thomas expressly makes the mind passive in their reception, and then-fore must hold that they are furnished by the object, and consequently that in them or by means of them the object presents itself to the mind and actualizes it, or constitutes it intellectua ageris. There are more who swear by St. Thomas than understand him, and not a few call themselves Thomists who are really Cartesians.

64 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

and can be no passive relations, or relations of passivity. Whatever is or exists is active, and God, who is being in its plenitude and infinity, is, as say the theologians, actus puris- siinus^ most pure act. Only the active is or exists; the passive is non-existent, is nothing, and can be the subject of no predicate or relation. So virtually reasons St. Thomas in refuting tlie Gentile doctrine of a materia prima or first matter. Aristotle held that matter eternally exists, and that all things consist of this eternally existing matter and form given it by the equally eternally existing Mind or Intelli- gence. St. Thomas modifies this doctrine, and teaches that the reality of things, or the real thing itself, is in the form, or idea as Plato says, and consequently is not a form impressed on a preexisting matter, but a creation from nothing; for matter without form, he maintains, is merely in p)oteiitia ad formam, therefore passive, therefore mere possibilit}', and therefore, prescinded from the creative act, simply non-existent, a ])ure nullity, or nothing. Even Ilegel asserts as much when he makes das reine Se(/?i the equiva- lent of das Nicht-Seyn. To give activity to the passive, to give form to the possible, or to create from nothing, says one and the same thing.

St. Thomas teaches, as we have seen, that the mind in the reception of the phantasms and species is passive, and there- fore must hold, if consistent with himself, that prior to the afiirmation of the object through them the mind does not actually exist ; consequently that the afiirmation or pi-esenta- tion of the object creates the mind, or the intellectual or intelligent subject, which, again, proves that the relation of subject and object is the i-elation of cause and eft'ect. If then we accept the doctrine of St. Thomas, otherwise undeni- able, that the passive and the possible are identical, we must deny — since the possible is non-existent, a pure abstraction, and therefore, simply nothing — that there ai'e or can be any passive relations, and hold that in all relations, ideal or empirical, the one term of the relation is the cause of the other. This is why one term of the relation cannot be knowTi without intuition of the pther, or why, as we say, correlatives connote one another.

Here, too, we may see yet more clearly than we have already seen, the error of Sir William Hamilton in asserting that correlatives are reciprocal, and the still more glaring error of Cousin in asserting the same thing of cause and efliect. Correlatives connote each other, it is true ; but not

ANALYSIS OF THE RELATION. 65

as reciprocal, for in tl^e intuition tliey are affirmed, and in cognition connoted, the one as creating or producing the other, and it would be absurd to assert that tlie effect creates the cause, or that cause and effect produce reciprocally each the other. Sir AVilHam Hamilton is misled by his failure to comprehend that all relations are integrated in tlie relation of being and existences, and are therefore relations of cause and effect, or of the productive or creative power of being producing existences. He, as does Hume, excludes the notion or conception of power, and therefore not only the creative act of being, but of all activity, and conceives all relations as passive. They are all resolvable into relations of coexistence and succession, or relations of space and time, and tlierefore relations of the passive ; for excluding ontol- ogy from the region of science, or the cogitable, Sir W, Hamilton can assert no creative or productive power, and recognize no relation of real cause and effect.

JN^eithcr Cousin nor Sir William Hamilton ever under- stood that tlie object affirmed in thought, and without which there is and can be no thought, actualizes, that is, places or creates the subject, and rendei's it thinking or cognitive sub- ject. The object does not simply furnish the occasion or necessary condition to the subject for the exercise of a power or faculty it already possesses, but creates the mind itself, and gives it its faculty, as we have already proved in proving that in ideal intuition the soul is passive, that is — as St. Thomas implies in resolving the passive into the pos- sible— non-existent, and therefore the subject of no relation or predicate. The ideal or intuitive object must then be real and necessary being, for the contingent is not creative, and hence the intuition of being, which Sir William Ham- ilton denies, is not only necessary to the eliciting of this or that particular thought, but to the veiy existence of the soul as intelligent subject, and therefore must be a persistent fact, as will be more fully explained in the section on Exist- ences.

It follows from this that the relation of subject and object, or rather of object and subject, in eveiw thought is the rela- tion, as we have said, of cause and effect. It is the third term or copula in the ideal judgment, and is in every judg- ment, whether ideal or empirical, that which makes it a judgment or affirmation. Being, Gioberti says, contains a complete judgment in itself, for it is equivalent to heinfj is j but this is nothing to our present purpose. Being and exist- voL. n.— 5

66 - KEFUTATIOiSr OF ATHEISM.

.eiiccs as subject and predicate constitute no jnd,o:ment with- out the copula that joins the predicate to the subject. As the cojMila can proceed only from being, or the sul>ject of the predicate, as its act, the ideal judgment is necessarily Ens createxistentias ; and, as the object creates or produces the predicate, the judgment in its three terms is Divine and apodictic, the necessary and apodictic ground of every liuman or empirical judgment, without intuition of which the human mind can neither judge nor exist.

It is not pretended of course that all judgments are ideal, any more than it is that every cause is tirst cause. There are second causes, and consequently second or secondary, that IS, empirical judo-ments. Tlip second cause depends on the first cause wliich is the cause of all causes ; so the empi- rical judgment depends on the ideal or Divine judgment •which it copies or imitates, as the second cause always copies or imitates in its own manner and degree the first cause. There is no judgment — and every thought is a judgment — M-ithou.t the creative act of being creating the mind and fur- nishing it the light by M'hich it sees and knows ; yet, the iiinucdinte relation in empirical judgments, that is, judg- ments which the soul herself forms, though a relation of cause and effect, is not the relation between being and exist- ences, as we once thought, though perhnp, erroneously, that Gioherti maintained, and which were sheer pantheism, inas- nnich as it would deny the existence of second causes, and make God the sole and universal actor. The relation in the ideal judgirient is on\y eminentlij the cause in the empirical judgment, in the sense in which being is the eminent cause of all actions, in that it is the cause of all causes.

Tlie co]">ula or relation in the ideal judgment is the creative act of being, or suhject creating the predicate, as we shall soon prove, and uniting it to itself. This is true of all relations. The first term of the relation of subject and predicate, is the cause of the second term, and by its own causative act unites the predicate to itself as its subject. Second causes have, in relation to the first cause, the I'elation of dependence, arc ])roduced by it, are its effects or jiredicates ; but in relation to their own ctrects, they are efficient causes, and represent creative i>eing. "We are existences and wholly dependent on real and necessary being, for our existence and our pow- ers are sim])iy the clfect of the divine creative act or activity; but in relation to our own actr n'o are cause; we are the subject, they are the i)redicat( , and our act producing them

ANALYSIS OF THE KELATION. 67

is the copula. In this sense tlie second canse copies the first cause, and the empirical judgment copies the ideal or, as we have called it, the Divine judgment.

We saj this not by way of proof that the relation between being and existence is tlie creative act of being, which fol- lows necessarily from the reduction of the categories to being, existences, and their relation, or subject, predicate, and copula, for the copula can be nothing else than the creative act of being ; but to prevent the mistake of supposing tliat being is the agent that acts in our acts, and that our acts are predicates of the Divine activity ; which is the mistake into which the Duke of Argyll falls in his "Reign of Law," and of all who impugn Free Will, and deny tlie reality of second causes. Plaving done this, and having resolved the relation of being and existences, and all relations into the relation of cause and effect, we may now proceed to consider the Fact of Creation.

XI. — THE FACT OF CREATION.

The great Gentile apostasy from the Patriarchial religion originated in the loss of the primitive tradition of the fact of creation : that in the beginning God created the heaVens and tlie earth, and all things-visible and invisible. No Gen- tile philosophy, known to us, recognizes the fact of creation ; and the mother-error of all Gentilism is pantheism, and pantheism is no vulgar error, originating with the ignorant and unlettered many, but the error of the cultivated few, philosophers and scientists, who, by their refinements and subtile speculations on the relation of cause and effect, first obscure in their own minds and then wholly obhterate from them the fact of creation.

Dr. Dollinger, in his Ueaihenhm, hefore ChristianiPj, assumes that heathenism originated with the ignorant and vulgar, not w^ith the learned and scientific. But this view cannot be accepted by any one who has watched the course of philosophy and the sciences for the last three centuries. Three centuries ago Christian theism was held universally by all ranks and conditions of civilized society, and atheism was regarded with hoi'ror, and hardly dared show its head ; now, the most esteemed, the most distinguished philosophers and scientists, like Emerson, llerl)ert Spencer, Professor IJuxley, Emile Littre, Claude liernard, Voigt, Eachmann,

68 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

Sir John Lnb])ock, and Professor Tjndall, to mention no otliers, are decided pantheists, and nndisgnised atlieists. They are not merely tolerated, but are held to be the great men and shining lights of the age. Pantheism — atheism — • in onr times originates with philosophers and scientists and descends to the people, and, in the absence of all proof to the contrary, it is fair to presume that it was the same in ancient times. The corruption, alike of language and of doctrine, is always the work of philosophers and of the learned or the lialf-learned, never of the people.

The various heathen mythologies never originated, and never could have originated, with the ignorant multitude, or with savage and bai-barous tribes. These mythologies are in great part taken up with the generation or genealogy of the gods, and bear internal evidence that they had for their starting point the ineffable mystery of the Blessed Ti-inity, and have grown out of effoj-ts by philosophers and theolo- gians to symbolize the eternal generation of the Son, and the procession of the Holy Ghost, which they obscured and lost by their inappropriate symbols, figures, and allegories. They all treat the universe as generated by the gods, and for cos- mogony give us theogony.

Generation is simply explication or development, and the generated is of the same nature with the generator, as the Church- maintains in defining the Son to be consubstantial with the Father. Hence the visible universe, as well as the invisible forces of nature, as generated by the gods, was held to be divine, both as a whole and in all its pai-ts. Rivers and brooks, hills and valleys, groves and fountains, the ocean and the earth, mountains and plains, the winds and the W»,v*s, storms and tempests, thunder and lightning, the sun, moon, and stars; the elements, fire, air, water, and earth; ' the generative forces of nature, vegetable, animal, and human, were all counted divine, and held to be proper objects of worship. Hence the fearful and abominable superstitions that oppressed and still oppress heatlien nations and tribes, the horrid, cruel, filthy, and obscene rites which it were a shame even to name. These rites and superstitions follow too logically from the assumed origin of all things visible and invisible in generation or emanation, to have originated with the unlearned and vulgar, or not to have been the work of philosophers and theologers.

Dr. Dollinger holds that polytheism in polytheistic nations and tribes precedes monotheism, or the worship of one God,

THE FACT OF CREATION. 69

and denies tliat pantheism is the primal error of Gentilism. He appeal's to hold that the nations that apostatized, after the confusion of tongues at B;,bjl, fell at once into tlie low- est forms of African fetichism, and from that worked their way up, step by step, to poUshed Greek and Roman poly- theism, and tlience to Jewish and Christian monotheism. 13ut this is contrary to the natural law of deterioration. Men by supernatural grace may be elevated from tlie lowest grade to the highest at a single bound, but no man falls at once from the highest virtue to the lowest depth of vice or crime, or from the sublimest truth to the lowest and most degrading form of error. African fetichism is the last stage, EOt the first, of polytheism. The first error is always that which lies nearest to the truth, and that demands the least apparent departure from orthodoxy, or men's previous beliefs. AYe know, Iiistorically, that the race began in tlie patriarchal religion, in wJiat we call Christian theism, and pantheism is the error that lies nearest, and that which most easily seduces the mind trained in Christian tlieism.

What deceives Dr. Dollinger and others is that they attri- bute the manifest superiority of Greek and Roman polythe- ism over xifrican fetichism to a gradual amelioration of the nations that embraced it; but history presents us no such amelioration. The Homeric religion departs less from the patriarchal religion than the polytheism of any later period in the history of either pagan Greece or Rome. The super- ioi'ity of Greek and Roman polytheism is due primarily to the fact that it retained more of the primitive tradition, and the apparent amelioration was due to the more general initi- ation, as time went on, into the Eleusinian and other myste- ries, in which the earlier traditions were preserved, and, a^t^r Alexander the Great, to more familiar acquaintance with the tradition of the East, especially the Jews. The mysteries were instituted after the great Gentile Apostasy, but from all that is possible now to ascertain of them, tliey preserved, not indeed the prhnitive traditions of the race, but the earliest traditions of the nations that apostatized. Certain it is, if the Unity of God was taught in them, as seems not improb- able, we have no reason to suppose that tiiey preserved the tradition of the one God the creator of the heavens and the earth. Neither in the mysteries nor in the popular myth- ologies, neither with the Greeks nor the Romans, the Syrians nor Assyrians, neither with the Egvptians nor the Indians, neither with the Persians nor the Chinese, neither with the

iU REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

Kelts nor the Teutons do we find any reminiscences of the creative act, or fact of creation from nothing.

The oldest of the Yedas speak of God as spirit, recognize most of liis essential attributes, and ascribe to liim apparently moral qualities, but we find no recognition of him as Creator. Socrates, as does Plato, dwells on the justice of the Divinity, but neither recognizes God the Creator. Pere Gratry con- tends indeed, in his Connaissance de Dieu^ that Moses, Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Bossuet, Fenelon, in fact all philosophers of the first rank of all ages and nations, agree in asserting substantially one and the same theodicaea. Yet Plato asserts no God the Creator, at best, only an intelligent artificer or architect, doing the best he can with preexisting material. His theology is well summed up by Yirgil in his JEneid :

Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus. Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet.

Artistotle asserts God as the anima mundi, or soul of the world, followed by Spinoza in his Natura Naturans^ and which Pope versifies in his shallow Essay on- Man.

All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body nature is, and God the soul ; That, changed through all, and yet in all the same, Great in the earth as in the ethereal frame ; Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze. Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees; Lives through all life, extends through all exteni, Spreads undivided, operates unspent, «fcc.

Here is no creative God ; there is only the anima rmmdi of the Brahmins, and of the best of the pagan philosophers.

Even some Christian philosophers, while they hold the fact of creation certain from revelation, deny its probability by reason. St. Paul says '' hy faith we understand the world was framed by word of God," but St. Thomas, if we are not mistaken, teaches that the same truth may be at once a matter of revelation or faith and a truth cognizable by natural reason and matter of science, and certain it is that our greatest theologians undertake to prove the fact of creation from reason or reasoning, or from data supplied by the natural light of the soul, for they all attempt a rational refutation of pantheism.

THE FACT OF CEEATIOlSr. 71

Tlic analysis of the ideal element of the object in tliono-ht, we liave seen, shows that it is resolvable into being, exist- ences, and their relation, and the analysis of the relation, real only in the related, brings us, so to speak, face to face with the Divine creative act. Heal and necessary being can exist without creating, for it is, as say the theologians, actufi i^urisshmts^ therefore in itself ens perfectissimum, and is not obliged to go out of itself, in order either to be or to perfect or complete itself, in which respect it is the con- trai-y of the 7'ei7ie Seijn of Ilegel. It is in itself inllnite Fulness, Pleroma^ PLenuvi^ while the reine Set/n is the Byssos of the old Gnostics, or the Yoid of the Buddhists, and even Hegel makes it not being, but a Becoming — das Werden. The being given in ideal intuition is real and necessar}'- being, self-existent, self-sufficing, complete in itself, wanting nothing, and incapable of receiving any thing in addition to what it is, and is eternally.

Hence the ontologist, starting with being as his prin- cipium, can never arrive at existences, for being can be under no extrinsic or intrinsic necessity of creating. Bat, may not the psychologist conclude being from the intuition of existences? Not at all, because existences, not existing in and of themselves, are neither cognizable nor concei viable without the intuition of being. Yet, though being is suffi- cient in all respects for itself, it is cognizable by us only irtediante its own act creating us and aftirming itself as the first term or being in the ideal element of the object in thought, and therefore only in its relation to the second term, or existences. This relation under which both being and existences, the necessary and the contingent, are given, is the creative act of being, as we have seen, and therefore, as that 'medlante which both being and existences are given, is necessarily itself given in ideal intuition. It is as neces- sarily given in the object in every thought as either being or existences, the necessary or the contingent, and therefore is ol)jectively as certain as either of the other two terms without which no thought is possible, and is in fact more immediately given, since it is only onedlatite the relation or creative act of being that either being or existences them- selves are given, or are objectively intuitive.

But not therefore, because being is cognizable only in its relation to existences, does it follow that being itself is rela- tion, or that all our cognitions are relative, or, as Gioberti maintains, that all truth is relative ; nay, that the essence

72 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

of God, SLH implied in the inysterj of the Holy Trinity, is in relation, in the relation of the three Persons of the God- head. The relation is given in ideal intuition as the act of real and necessary being. The relation then is extrinsic, not intrinsic, and since being is real, necessary, independent, self -existing, and self-sufficing, the creative act must be not a necessary, but a free, voluntary act on the part of being. Tlie relation, then, is not intrinsic, but freely and voluntarily assumed.

Being is given in ideal intuition mediante its creative act, then as creator or ens creans. But as nothing extrinsic or intrinsic can oblige being, which is independent and self- sufficing, to create or to act ad. extra^ it must be a free crea- tor, free to create or not create, as it cliooses. Then being must possess free-will and intelligence, for without intelli- gence there can be no will, and witliout will no choice, no free action. Being tlien must be in its nature rational, and then it must be personal, for personality is the last comple- ment of rational nature, that is, it must be a suppositum that possesses, hy its nature, intelligence and f i-ee-will. Then being, real and necessary, being in its plenitude, being in itself, is — God, and creator of the heavens and the earth, and all things visible and invisible.

But, it is objected, this assumes that we have immediate intuition of being, and tlierefore of God, which is a propo- sition improbated by the Holy See. ISTot to our knowledge. The Holy See has improbated, if you 'will, the proposition that the intellect has immediate cognition, that is, percep- tion or empirical intuition of God ; but not, so far as we are informed, the proposition that we have, 77ied iante its creative act, intuition of real and necessary being in the ideal element of the object in thought. The Holy See has defined against the Traditionalists, that " the existence of God can be proved with certainty bjM'easoning." But will the objector tell us how we can prove the existence of God by any argument from premises that contain no intuition of the necessary, and therefore, since the necessary, save as con- creted in being, is a nullity, of real and necessary being? We may have been mistaught, but our logic-master taught us that nothing can be in the conclusion, not contained, in principle at least, in the premises. If we had not ideal intu- ition of real and necessary being, there is no possible demon- stration of the existence of God. St. Thomas finds the prin- ciple of his demonstration of the existence of God, precisely

THE FACT or CREATION. 73

as we liave done, in the relation of cause and effect, or as we saj, in the relation of being and existences ; but whence does the mind come into possession of that relation, or of the ideas expressed by tlie terms cause and effect f St. Thomas does not tell us ; he simply takes it for granted that we have them. What have we done but prove, which he does not do, by analyzing, first, thought, then the object, then the ideal, and finally the relation, that we have them, and at the same time prove that being is a free, not a necessary cause, and thus escape pantheism, which we should not do, if we made cause as ultimate as being. Ens creans^ not simply ens in se^ that is : JEns acting is the cause, and existences or creatures are the effect.

The ideal, as we have found it, does not differ, we con- ■cede, from the ideal formula of Gioberti, Ens creat exist- sntias, or Being creates existences. This has been objected to as pantheistic. Xay,^an eminent Jesuit Father charged ns with atheism because we defended it and we answeVed him that to deny it- would be atheism. Even distinguished professors of philosophy and learned and excellent men not unfrequently fall into a sort of routine, let their minds be cast in certain moulds, and fail to recognize their own thoughts when expressed in unfamiliar terms._\ We have no call to defend Gioberti, who, for aught we know, may have understood the ideal formula in a pantheistic sense, but we do not believe he did, and we know that we do not. Gioberti asserts the formula, but declares it incapable of demonstra- tion ; we think we have clearly shown, by the several analyses into which we have entered, that each term of the foi-mula is given intuitively in the ideal element of the object, and is as certain and as undeniable as the fact of thougjit or our own existence, and no demonstration in any case whatever can go fuither. As we have found and pre- sented the formula it is only the first verse of Genesis, or the first article of the Creed. We see not, then, how it can be cliarged either with atheism or pantheism.

Perhaps the suspicion arises from the use of the present tense, creat, or "is creating," as if it was intended to assert being as the immanent cause — the causa esse7itiah's, not as the causa efficlens, of existences ; but this is not the case with us, nor do we believe it was with Gioberti, for he seems to us to take unwearied pains to prove the contrary. We use the present tense of the verb to indicate that the cre- ative act that calls existences from nothing is a permanent

71 EEFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

or continuous act, that it is identically one and the same act that creates and that sustains existences, or that the act of creation and of conservation are identical, as we shall explain in the next section.

The formula is infinitely removed from pantheism, because, though given in intuition mediante the creative act of being, being itself is given as real and necessary, inde- pendent and self-sufficing, and therefore under no extrinsic or intrinsic necessity of creating. The creative act is, as we liave seen, a free act, and it is distinguished, on tlie one liand, from being as the act from the actor, and on the other, from existences as the effect from the cause. There is here no place for pantheism, less indeed than in the principle of cause and effect which St. Thomas adopts as the principle of liis demonstration of the existence of God. The relation of cause and effect is necessary, and if cause is placed in the category of being, creation is necessary, which is pantheism. Yet St. Thomas, the greatest of the Schoolmen, was no pan- theist. AVe have avoided the possibility of mistake by plac- ing the causative power in the cateirory of being, but the exercise of the power in the category of relation, at once distinguishing and connecting being and existences.

The objector forgets, moreover, tiiat while we have by our analysis of thought established the reality of the object, or its existence a iKirte rei, and asserted the objectivity and therefore the reality of the ideal, we have nowhere found or asserted the ideal alone as the object in thought. We have found and asserted it only as the ideal element of the object, which must in principle precede the empirical element, but it is never given separately from it, and it takes both the ideal and the empirical in their relation to constitute the object in any actual thought. The ideal and the empirical elements of the complex object are distin- guished by the inteUectus agens^ or reflection, in which the soul acts, never by intuition, ideal or empirical, in either of which the action originates with the object. Most men never do distinguish them during their whole lives ; even the mass of philosophers do not distinguish them, or distin- guish between intuition and reflection. The peripatetics, in fact, l)egin with the reflective activity, and hardly touch upon the question of intuition, save in what they have to say of phantasms and species. Their principles they t-ake from reflection, not from the analysis of thought or its object. We do not dissent from their principles or their

THE FACT OF CKEATION. 75

method, but we do not regard their principles as ultimate, and we think the field of intuition, back of reflection, needs a culture which it does not receive from them, not even from St. Thomas, still less from those routinists who profess to follow him. We do not dissent from the Thomist philos- ophy ; we accept it fully and fi'ankly, but not as in all respects complete. There are, in our judgment, questions that lie back of the starting-point of that philosophy, which, in order to meet the snbtilties and refinements of modern pantheists or atheists, the philosopher of to-day must raise and discuss.

These questions relate to what in principle precedes the reflective action of the soul, and are solved by the distinc- tion between intuition and reflection, and between ideal intuition and empirical intuition or perception, that is, cog- nition. What we explain by ideal intuition, the ancients called the dictates of reason, the dictates of nature, and assumed them to be principles inserted in the very constitu- tion of the human mind ; Descartes called them innate ideas ; Keid regarded them as constituent principles of man's intellectual and moral nature ; Kant, as the laws or forms of the human understanding. All these make them more or less subjective, and overlook their objectivity, and consequently, cast doubts on the reality of our knowledge. " It may be real to us, but how prove that it is not very

v*

unreal to other minds constituted differently from ours We have endeavored to show that these are the ideal ele- ments of the fact of experience, and are given in objective or ideal intuition, which is the assertion to the mind l)y its own action of real and necessary being itself, and therefore our knowledge, as far as it goes, is universally true and apo- dictic, not true to our minds only.

The objection commonly raised to the ideal formula. Ens creat exis'tentias. is, not that it is not true, but that it is not the principle from which philosophy starts, but the end at which philosophy arrives. This, in one sense, if we speak of the reflective order, is true, and the philosophy most in vo^ue does not reach it even as its end at all. Yet by using reflection we shall And that it is given in the object of every thought, as we have shown, the first as well as the last. Ideal intuition is a real affirmation to the mind by the act of the ideal itself, but it is not perception or distinct cognition, because, as we have said, it is not given separately, but only as the ideal or a irriorl element of the object, and is never

76 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

intuitively distinguished or distinguishable from it. This is, we tliink, a sufficient answer to the objection, which is founded on a misapprehension of what is really meant by the assertion that the ideal formula is the principle of science and intuitively given. It is so given, but, it is only by reflection that the mind distinguishes it, and is aware of possessing it.

Xn. EXISTENCES.

Having found the first term of the ideal formula to be real and necessary being, and that real and necessary being is God the creator of all things distinguishable from him- self, we may henceforth drop the term beino- or ens and use that of Deiis or God, and proceed to consider the second term, existences or creatures. God and creatures include all that is or exists. What is not creature and yet is, is God ; what is not God and yet exists, is creature, the product of the act of God. What is neither God nor creature is nothing. There is nothing and can be nothing that is not either the one or the other. Abstractions, prescinded from their con- cretes, and possibilities prescinded from the power or ability of the real, we cannot too often repeat, are nullities, and no object of intuition, either ideal or empirical. This excludes the ens in genere, or being in general, of Rosmini, and the 7'eine Seyn of Hegel, wliich is also an abstraction, or merely possible being. An abstract or possible being has no power or tendency, as Hegel pretends, to become by self-evolution eitlier a concrete or actual being. Evolution of nothing gives nothing. Hence whatever truth there may be in the details of the respective pliilosophies of Rosmini and Hegel, they are in their principles unreal and worthless, proceeding on the assumption that nothing can make itself something. Existences are distinguishable from being and are nothing without the creative act of God. Only that act stands between them and absolute nullity. God then does not form them from a preexisting matter, but creates tliem from nothing. He does not evolve them from himself, for then they would be the Divine Being itself, and indistin- guishable from it, contrary to what has already been estab- lished, namely, that they are distinguished from God as well as joined to him laediante his creative act. God is not a necessary but a free creator ; creatures are not then evolved

EXISTENCES. 77

from his own being, but himself, a free creator, is necessarily distinct from and independent of them; and as without creation there is nothing- but himself, it follows necessarily that he must, if he creates existences at all, create them from nothing, by the word of his power, as Christian theology teaches.

But the fact that they are creatures and distinct from the Creator proves, also, that they are snbstances, or snbstantial existences, and therefore, as philosophers say, second causes. If creatures had no substantial existence, they w^ould be mere phenomena or appearances of the divine being or sub- stance, and therefore could not be really distinguishable from God himself; which would be a virtual denial of the creative act and the reality of existences, and therefore of .God himself; for it has been shown that there is no intu- ition of being save mediante the creative act of being, or without the intuition of existences, that is, of both terms of the relation. It would deny, what has been amply proved, that the object of intuition, whether ideal or empirical, is and must be i-eal, because it does and must present or afhrm itself, which, if unreal or mere appearance, it could not do, since the unreal has no activity and can be no object of thought, as the Cosmists themselves concede, for they hold the phenomena without the substance that appears in them are unthinkable. Moreover, the object in intuition presents or aftirms itself as it is, and existences all jjresent or affirm themselves- as real, as things, as substances, as second causes, and really distinguishable from Dr. Newman's "Notional" propositions, which propose nothing, and in which nothing real is noted.

It is here where Cousin and the pantheists, who do not expressly deny creation, commit their fatal mistake. Spinoza, Cousin, and others assert one onlj'^ substance, which they call God, and which the Cosmists call Nature. Hence the creative act, if recognized at all, produces only phenomena, not substantial existences, and what they call creation is only the manifestation or apparition of the one only sub- stance. It is possible that this error comes from the defini- tion of substance adopted by Descartes, and by Spinoza after him, namely, that which exists or can be conceived in itself, without another. This definition was intended by the Schoolmen, and possibly by Descartes also, as simply to mark the distinction between substance and mo'de, attribute, or accident ; but, taken rigidly as it is by Spinoza, it war-

78 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

rants his doctrine, tliat God is the one only substance, as he is the one only being, for he alone exists in se. The uni- vei-se and all it contains are therefore only modes or attri- butes of God, the only substance. The error, also, may have arisen in part from using being and suhstance as per- fectly synonymous terms. JEns is substantia, but every substantia is not ens. Substance is any thing that can sup- port accidents or produce effects ; Lns is that which is, and in strictness is applicable to God alone, who gives his name to Moses as I am ; I am that am, — SUM QUI SUM. There may be, medlante the creative act of God, many substances or existences, but there is and can be only one being, God, All existences have their being, not in themselves, but in God mediante the creative act, according to what St. Paul says, " in him we live, and move, and are," in ipso vivi7nus, et mooemnr, et sumus. Acts xvii, 28.

Existences are substantial, that is, active or causative in their own sphere or degree. The definition of substance by Leibnitz — though we think we have found it in some of the mediaeval Doctors, as vis activa, corresponding to the Ger- man h-oft and the English and French force, is a proper definition so far, whatever may be thought of what he adds, that it always involves effort or endeavor. In this sense existences must be substances or else they could not be given intuitively, as in our analysis of the object we have seen they are, for in intuition the object is active and presents or afKrms itself. Strictly speaking, as we have seen in the analysis of relation, nothing that exists is or can be passive, for passivity is simply in potentia ad <2C^!^^7?^ /' whatever exists at all exists inactuund so far is necessarily vis activa. Existences in their principle are given intuitively, and their principle cannot be substantial and they unsubstantial. But it is necessarj^ here to distinguish between the suhstans and the substantia, between that which stands under and upholds or supports existences or created substances, and the exist- ences themselves. The sabstans is the creative act of God, and the substantia or existence is that which it stands under and upholds. This enables us to correct the error of the deists, who regard the cosmos, though created in the first instance and set a-going, now that it is created and constituted with its laws and forces as able to go of itself without any Bupercosmic support, propulsion, or direction, as a clock or watch, when once wound up and set a-going, goes of itself — till it runs down. It has now no need of God, it is suffi-

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cient for itself, and God has notliino^ to do with it, but, if he chooses, to contemplate its operation from his supramundane lieight. But this old deistical race, now nearly extinct, except with onr scientists, forgot that the w\atcli or clock does not run by its own inherent force, and that it is pro- pelled by a force in accordance with which it is constructed indeed, but which is exterior to it and independent of it. The cosmos, not having its being in itself and existing only mediante the creative act of being, can subsist and operate only by virtue of that act. It is only that act that draws it from nothing and that stands between all existences or creatures and nothing. Let that act cease and we should instantly sink into the nothingness we were before we were created. This proves that the act of creation and that of con- servation are one and the same act, and hence it is that intui- tion of existences is, ijjso facto^ intuition of the creative act, without which they are nothing, and of which they are only the external terminus or product. Tliis explains the dis- tinction between siihsfans and substantia^ and shows why the suhstnns is and must be tlie creative act of God. Sub- stances rest or depend on the creative act for their very existence ; it is their foundation, and they must fall through without it, though they stand under and su^jport their own effects or productions as second causes.

The creative act, it follows, is a permanent not a transient act, and God is, so to speak, a continuous creator, and creation is a fact not merely in the past but in the present, constantly going on before our eyes. AVe would call God the immanent, not the transitory cause of creation, as the deist supposes, were it not that theologians have appropriated the term immanent cause in their explanation of the relation of the Father to the Son and of both Father and Son to the Holy Ghost in the ever-blessed Trinity, and if it had not been abused by Spinoza and others. Spinoza says God is the immanent not the transitory cause of the universe ; but he meant by this that God is immanent in the universe as the essence or substance is the cause of the mode or atti-ibute, that is, the causa esseyitlalis, not causa efflciens, which is really to deny that God creates substantial existences, and to imi)ly that he is the subject acting or causing in phenomena. God is immanent cause oidj- in the seuoc that he is manent meiliante his creative act in the effect or existences produced from nothing by the omnipotent energy of his word, creat- ing and sustaining them as second causes or the subject of

80 EEFUTATIOX OF ATHEISM.

tlieir own acts, not as the subject acting in them. It is what theologians call the " efficacious presence" of God in all his works. He is the eminent cause of the acts of all his creatures, inasmuch as he is the cause of their causality, causa causar am • as we explained in our analj'sis of Tiela- tion, but he is not the subject that acts in tlieir acts. This shows the nearness of God to all the works of his hands, and their absolute dependence on him for all they are, all they can be, all they can do, all they have or can have. It shows simply that they are nothing, and therefore can know nothing, but by his creative act. The grossest and most palpable of all sophisms is that which makes man and nature God, or God identically man and nature. Either error originates in the failure to recognize the act of creation and the relation of existences to being as given in the ideal intuition.

The cosmists make God the substance or reality of the Cosmos, and deny that he is supercosmic ; but their error is manifest now that we have shown that God is the Creator of the cosmos, and all things visible and invisible. The cosmic plienomena are not phenomena of the Divine Being, but are phenomena or manifestations of created nature, and of God only mediante his creative act. The cosmos, with its constitution and laws or nature, is his crea- ture; produced from nothing and sustained by his creative act, without which it is still nothing. God then, as the creator of nature, is independent of nature, and necessarily super- natural, supercosmic, or supramundane. as the theologians teach, and as all the world, save a few philosophers, scien- tists, and their dupes, believe and always have believed.

God being supernatural, and the creative act by which he creates and sustains nature being a free act on his part, the theory of the rationalists and naturalists that holds him bound, hedged in, by what they call the laws of nature, is manifestly false and absurd. These laws do not bind the Creator, because he is their author. The age talks much of freedom, and is universally agitating for liberty of all sorts, but there is one liberty, without which no liberty is possible, it forgets — the liberty of God. To deny it, is to deny his existence. God is not the Fate, or inexorable Destiny, of the pagan classics, especially of the Greek dramatists. Above nature, independent of it, subject to no extrinsic or intrinsic necessity, except that of being, and of being what he is, God is free to do any thing but contradict, that is.

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annihilate himself, Tvhicli is the real sio-nificance of the Scho- lastic "principle of contradiction." He cannot be and not be ; he cannot choose to be or not to be what he is, for he is real and necessary being, and being in its plenitude. He can do nothing that contradicts his own being or attributes, for they are all necessary and eternal, and hence St. Paul says, " it is impossible for God to lie." That wonld be to act contrary to his nature, and the Di^ane nature and the Divine Being are identical, and indistinguishable m r^. It would be to contradict his very being, his own eternal, immutable, and indestructible essence, and what is called the nature of things.

Saving this, God is free to do whatever he will, for extrin- sic to him and his act nothing is possible or impossible ; since extrinsic to him there is simplj nothing. His liberty is as universal and as indestructible as his own necessary and eternal being. He is free to create or not as he chooses, and as in his own wisdom he chooses. The creative act is there- fore a free act, and as nature itself, with all its laws, is only that act considered in its eifects, it is absurd to suppose that nature or its laws, which it founds and upholds, can bind him, restrict him, or in any way interfere with his absolute freedom. God cannot act contrary to his own most perfect nature or being, but nothing except his own perfection can determine his actions or his providence. Following out the ideal judg- ment, or considering the principles intuitively given, they are alike the principles of the natural and of the supernatu- ral. They assert the supernatural in asserting God as crea- tor ; they assert his providence by asserting that creation and conservation are only one and the same act, and the free act, or the act of the free, uncontrolled, and unnecessitated will of God. Hence also it follows that God is free, if he chooses, to makes us a supernatural revelation of his will, and to intervene supernatu rally or by miracles in human or cosmic affairs. Miracles are in the same order with the fact of creation itself, and if facts, are as provable as any other facts.

XIII.— GOD AS FINAL CAUSE.

We have in the foregoing sections proved with all the certainty we have that we think or exist, the existence of God as real and necessary being, and as the free, intelligent. Vol. n.— 6

82 REFDTATIOiNr OF ATHEISM.

voluntary, anl therefore personal Creator and Upholder of the universe and all thinscs therein visible and invisible, in accordance with the teaching's of Christian theism, and the primitive and universal tradition of the j-ace, especially of the more enlightened and progressive portion of the race. This would seem to suffice to complete our task, and to redeem our promis3 to refute Atheism and to prove Theism.

But Ave have only proved the existence of God as First Cause, and that all existences proceed from him by way of creation, in opposition to generation, emanation, evolution, or formation. We have established indeed, that the physi- cal laws of the universe, the natural laws treated by our scientists, are from God, created by him, and subject to his will, or existing and operative only through his free creativ^e act.