Theism

Kant has expounded his argument, and discussed its bearings fully and minutely, in his 'Kritik der Urtheilskraft,' sec. 86-90, and 'Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft, Zweites Buch, Zweites Hauptstück,' v. – viii. M. Renouvier, in an article entitled "De la Contradiction reprochée à la doctrine de Kant" (La Critique Philosophique, 3ieme. Année, No. 29), has exposed some errors on the subject which are common in France, and equally common in England.

Note XXVI., page 217Dr Schenkel's View of Conscience as the Organ of Religion

Dr Schenkel has fully set forth his reasons for holding that conscience is the religious organ of the soul, in the ninth chapter of the first volume of his 'Christliche Dogmatik.' He endeavours to meet the objection urged in the text by representing what is truly the primary and distinctive function of conscience as a secondary and derivative function. Its primary activity is, according to him, religious; it unites with God – it is conscious communion with Him. Its ethical activity is only elicited when this communion is disturbed and broken; its source is the religious want occasioned by the rupture of communion. That is felt to be a something abnormal and unsatisfactory, and awakens a desire after the restoration of the lost communion with God. The conscience is cognisant of a moral law only when, its communion with God being disturbed, it seeks its re-establishment Dr Schenkel thus, as he thinks, accounts for conscience having an ethical function as well as a religious function. But clearly the result at which he arrives is in direct contradiction to the position from which he starts. The affirmation of conscience as religious is represented as being that man is in direct communion with God; and the affirmation of conscience as ethical is represented as being that man is not in direct communion with God, but desires to be so. These are, however, contrary declarations; and to describe conscience in the way Schenkel does, as "a synthesis of the ethical and religious factor," is to represent it as a synthesis of self-contradictory elements – a compound of yes and no. We cannot be conscious both of communion with God and of non-communion with Him. And, on Dr Schenkel's own showing, the evidence for immediate communion with Him is but small. The consciousness of moral law he affirms to be consciousness of the want or need of communion with God, not the consciousness of enjoying it. But is conscience ever independent of the consciousness of moral law? If not, it can never, according to the hypothesis, be a consciousness of God. If it be independent thereof, the fact would require to be better proved than by the misinterpretation of a few texts of Scripture. Solidly proved it never, I believe, can be. A conscience not conscious of a moral law is simply no conscience at all.

Note XXVII., page 221Chalmers and Erskine on the Argument from Conscience

The moral argument was, as was to be expected, a very favourite one with Dr Chalmers, and his way of stating it was as remarkable for its simplicity and directness as for its eloquence. "Had God," he asks, "been an unrighteous Being Himself, would He have given to the obviously superior faculty in man so distinct and authoritative a voice on the side of righteousness? Would He have so constructed the creatures of our species as to have planted in every breast a reclaiming witness against Himself? Would He have thus inscribed on the tablet of every heart the sentence of His own condemnation; and is this not just as likely, as that He should have inscribed it in written characters on the forehead of each individual? Would He so have fashioned the workmanship of His own hands; or, if a God of cruelty, injustice, and falsehood, would He have placed in the station of master and judge that faculty which, felt to be the highest in our nature, would prompt a generous and high-minded revolt of all our sentiments against the Being who formed us? From a God possessed of such characteristics, we should surely have expected a differently-moulded humanity; or, in other words, from the actual constitution of man, from the testimonies on the side of all righteousness, given by the vicegerent within the heart, do we infer the righteousness of the Sovereign who placed it there." – Natural Theology, vol. i. pp. 323, 324. This argument of Dr Chalmers, like all other arguments from conscience, implies the soundness of the reasoning by which God has been attempted to be shown to be the intelligent cause or author of the universe; and, on that perfectly legitimate presupposition, it seems to me as irresistible as it is simple. An intelligent but unrighteous God would never have made a creature better than himself and endowed with admiration of what is most opposite to himself, the reverse and counterpart of his own character.

The argument as stated by the late Mr Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, is no less simple and direct: "When I attentively consider what is going on in my conscience, the chief thing forced on my notice is, that I find myself face to face with a purpose – not my own, for I am often conscious of resisting it – but which dominates me and makes itself felt as ever present, as the very root and reason of my being… This consciousness of a purpose concerning me that I should be a good man – right, true, and unselfish – is the first firm footing I have in the region of religious thought: for I cannot dissociate the idea of a purpose from that of a Purposer, and I cannot but identify this Purposer with the Author of my being and the Being of all beings; and further, I cannot but regard His purpose towards me as the unmistakable indication of His own character." – 'The Spiritual Order, and other Papers,' pp. 47, 48.

Note XXVIII., page 225Associationist Theory of the Origin of Conscience

I have indicated to some extent my reasons for regarding this theory as unsatisfactory in an article entitled "Associationism and the Origin of Moral Ideas," in 'Mind,' No. III. (July 1876). In the treatise of M. Carrau, 'La Morale Utilitaire,' the various forms of the theory are examined with fairness and penetration.

Note XXIX., page 229Chalmers and Bain on the Pleasure of Malevolence

Dr Chalmers devotes a chapter of his 'Natural Theology' to the illustration of "the inherent pleasure of the virtuous, and misery of the vicious affections." I do not think the psychological doctrine of that chapter unexceptionable; but, at the same time, I cannot understand on what ground Prof. Bain imagines that it "implies doubts as to the genuineness of the pleasures of malevolence," and virtually denies that "the feeling of gratified vengeance is a real and indisputable pleasure." – See Emotions and the Will, pp. 187-189. The very passage which Prof. Bain quotes is quite inconsistent with this view. It is as follows: "The most ordinary observer of his own feelings, however incapable of analysis, must be sensible, even at the moment of wreaking the full indulgence of his resentment on the man who has provoked or injured him, that all is not perfect within; but that in this, and indeed in every other malignant feeling, there is a sore burden of disquietude, an unhappiness tumultuating in the heart, and visibly pictured in the countenance. The ferocious tyrant who has only to issue forth his mandate, and strike dead at pleasure the victim of his wrath, with any circumstance too of barbaric caprice and cruelty which his fancy, in the very waywardness of passion unrestrained and power unbounded, might suggest to him – he may be said through life to have experienced a thousand gratifications, in the solaced rage and revenge which, though ever breaking forth on some new subject, he can appease again every day of his life by some new execution. But we mistake it if we think otherwise than that, in spite of these distinct and very numerous, nay, daily gratifications, if he so choose, it is not a life of fierce internal agony notwithstanding."

The sentence which precedes these words leaves no doubt that Prof. Bain's interpretation of them is incorrect. "True, it is inseparable from the very nature of a desire, that there must be some enjoyment or other at the time of its gratification; but, in the case of these evil affections, it is not unmixed enjoyment." The following passage is, however, still more explicit: "There is a certain species of enjoyment common to all our affections. It were a contradiction in terms to affirm otherwise; for it were tantamount to saying, that an affection may be gratified without the actual experience of a gratification. There must be some sensation or other of happiness at the time when a man attains that which he is seeking for; and if it be not a positive sensation of pleasure, it will at least be the sensation of a relief from pain, as when one meets with the opportunity of wreaking upon its object that indignation which had long kept his heart in a tumult of disquietude. We therefore would mistake the matter if we thought that a state even of thorough and unqualified wickedness was exclusive of all enjoyment, for even the vicious affections must share in that enjoyment which inseparably attaches to every affection at the moment of its indulgence. And thus it is that even in the veriest Pandemonium might there be lurid gleams of ecstasy and shouts of fiendish exultation – the merriment of desperadoes in crime, who send forth the outcries of their spiteful and savage delight when some deep-laid villany has triumphed, or when, in some dire perpetration of revenge, they have given full satisfaction and discharge to the malignity of their accursed nature. The assertion, therefore, may be taken too generally, when it is stated that there is no enjoyment whatever in the veriest hell of assembled outcasts; for even there, might there be many separate and specific gratifications. And we must abstract the pleasure essentially involved in every affection at the instant of its indulgence, and which cannot possibly be disjoined from it, ere we see clearly and distinctively wherein it is that, in respect of enjoyment, the virtuous and vicious affections differ from each other. For it is true that there is a common resemblance between them; and that, by the universal law and nature of affection, there must be some sort of agreeable sensation in the act of their obtaining that which they are seeking after. Yet it is no less true that, did the former affections bear supreme rule in the heart, they would brighten and tranquillise the whole of human existence; whereas, had the latter the entire and practical ascendancy, they would distemper the whole man, and make him as completely wretched as he was completely worthless." Dr Chalmers, then, did not call in question the pleasures of malevolence.

Note XXX., page 232History of the Moral Proof

Conscience has from the earliest times and among the rudest peoples exercised great influence in the formation of religious belief. Moral reasons weighed with men in their origination and elaboration of religion long before they expressed them in abstract propositions and logical forms. The historical proof of this truth is so ample that it would require a volume to do it justice: all literatures might be made to yield contributions to it.

The simplest form of the moral argument, and the one which has been most generally employed, is that of an inference from the moral law to a moral lawgiver. Closely associated with it are those forms which rest on the emotions involved in or accompanying virtue and guilt. These are the directest modes of exhibiting what Chalmers calls "the theology of conscience, which is not only of wider diffusion but of far more practical influence than the theology of academic demonstration."

Raymond of Sebonde, in a work which I have previously had occasion to mention, was perhaps the first to present it in a more artificial form. He argues thus: Man is a responsible being who can neither reward nor punish himself, and who must consequently be under a superior being who will reward and punish him, unless his life is to be regarded as vain and purposeless – unless even the whole of external nature, which is subject to man and exists for his sake, is to be pronounced aimless and useless. External nature, however, is seen to be throughout orderly and harmonious; how can we suppose the moral world to be disorderly and chaotic? As the eye corresponds to things visible, the ear to things audible, the reason to things intelligible, so conscience must correspond to a judgment which implies some one to pronounce it, and to a retribution which implies some one to inflict it. But this some one must be absolutely just; he must be omniscient, as possessing a perfect knowledge of all human actions, and a thorough insight into their moral character; omnipotent, to execute his judgments; and, in a word, must be the most perfect of all beings —i. e., God.

Kant's argument is thus summarised by the Archbishop of York: "The highest good of man consists of two parts, the greatest possible morality and happiness. The former is the demand of his spiritual, the latter of his animal nature. The former only, his morality, is within his own power; and while, by persevering virtue, he makes this his personal character, he is often compelled to sacrifice his happiness. But since the desire of happiness is neither irrational nor unnatural, he justly concludes either that there is a Supreme Being who will so guide the course of things (the natural world, not of itself subject to moral laws) as to render his holiness and happiness equal, or that the dictates of his conscience are unjust and irrational. But the latter supposition is morally impossible; and he is compelled, therefore, to receive the former as true."

Akin to this argument are those which are based on man's desire of good. Proclus, in his 'Theology of Plato,' argues to the following effect: All beings desire the good; but this good cannot be identical with the beings which desire it, for then these beings would be themselves the good, and would not desire what they already possessed. The good is antecedent, therefore, to all the beings who desire it. Since the time of Proclus to the present many have argued that there must be a God because the heart demands one to satisfy its desire of love, or holiness, or happiness; few, perhaps, have done so with more ingenuity of logic or fervour of belief than John Norris in "Contemplation and Love, or the Methodical Ascent of the Soul to God by steps of Meditation," and in "An Idea of Happiness" ('Collection of Miscellanies').

A contemporary theologian, Principal Pirie of Aberdeen, has laid great stress on an argument which we may assign to this class. "No argument," he says, "can be valid which founds on innate ideas, or which embraces considerations so entirely beyond the range of human apprehension that we cannot positively be assured whether they be true or false. Yet we have no hesitation in saying that there is an argument a priori for the existence and attributes of a God, which is involved in the very nature of our feelings, and which therefore tells upon the faith of the whole human race, even when they are altogether ignorant of it logically, as existing in the form of a proposition. It makes no appeal, however, to profound metaphysical speculations, and is consequently plain and intelligible to any one capable of exercising reason at all. It rests on the principle which both our feelings and our experience demonstrate to be true, that every primary and essential desire of the human mind has a co-relative – or, in other words, a something to gratify it – existing in the nature of things. The mode in which the development of this principle constitutes an argument a priori for the existence and attributes of a God we now proceed to explain. Every human being feels from the moment in which he comes into existence, and through his whole subsequent history, that he is in himself a weak, helpless creature. As we have said, this feeling begins from the very beginning of our conscious existence. The appeals of the infant for aid are made continually… As we advance to childhood, youth, and manhood, our sense of power gradually increases. We are conscious that under certain circumstances we can do something for ourselves. Yet this capability, we are also conscious in its very exercise, does not depend on us for its continuance. We cannot preserve to ourselves fortune, health, or even life, for a single moment. Yet all these things we desire, and desire with the utmost earnestness, and desire as a primary tendency of our minds. We may not indeed always clothe such desire in words – we may not put it into the form of a proposition; but that it exists in every mind as a feeling, and practically operates upon every individual, is as certain as our existence itself, and is indeed manifest every moment in the efforts which we make to preserve these and all other forms of what we believe to involve happiness. In this desire, consequently, we have the voice of nature speaking, and commanding us to use such efforts. Of ourselves we know that they would be insufficient. The results depend upon causes over which we have no control. Our own efforts, we are conscious, are only means which nature has appointed us to employ, but their success depends on circumstances altogether beyond our power. It is, as has been said, the voice of nature telling us that each of our desires has a co-relative, through which it may be fully gratified by the use of the proper means. This co-relative, in the case of intense and permanent happiness, can only be found in the existence of a God, omnipotent, omniscient, true, just, benevolent, and eternal, in whom we repose entire confidence. No other assumption could by possibility satisfy our desire for the highest and permanent happiness now and for ever. For to realise thoroughly the argument, it is to be observed that our desire is for the highest and permanent happiness. It is not imperfect or temporary happiness merely which we desire, though we may be compelled to be content with this, if we cannot procure more. It is the highest happiness possible for our natures, and that without end. Now, if such happiness is to be attained at all, it can only be obtained through a God possessed of the attributes which we have enumerated." – Natural Theology, pp. 71-74.

Prof. Wace, in the second course of his Boyle Lectures – Christianity and Morality (1876) – has exhibited, with considerable detail, and in an ingenious and eloquent manner, the testimony which conscience bears to a personal God, a moral Creator, and a moral Governor. A glimpse of his general idea may be obtained from the following words: "In our endeavour to trace in the conscience, and in the personal experience of individuals, the roots of our faith in a God of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness, we have now advanced two considerable steps beyond our first and simplest sense of right and wrong. We have seen that this sense, when allowed to speak with its full imperative and personal force, arouses in us, as it aroused in the Psalmist, a sense of our being in contact with a personal and righteous Will. This conviction necessarily involves, as it involved in the writer of the 139th Psalm, the further belief that an authority which has this claim upon our obedience in every particular of our conduct, in all our thoughts and acts, must at the same time be the author and source of our whole constitution; that the righteous eyes which now penetrate, whether through darkness or through light, to the very depths of our souls, must also have seen our 'substance, yet being imperfect,' and that in their book must all our members have been written. If it be the imperative and paramount law of our nature to obey our conscience, and to make moral perfection, or spiritual excellence, our ultimate aim, we cannot but conclude that our whole nature, and the whole order of things in which we are placed, is in the hands of a moral power; and that, as we are fearfully and wonderfully made for righteous and reasonable ends, it must be by a righteous and reasonable Will that we are made. The conscience of man must never be omitted from our view of the design of man; and it is only when we contemplate the adjustment of his whole nature to the purposes of the loftiest moral development, that the argument from design acquires its full strength… The apprehension of a Power which establishes righteousness as the law of life, involves also the conviction that it is able to enforce that law, and to render it finally and everywhere supreme. The conviction, indeed, is one of faith and not of demonstration; and the Scriptures, no less than life, are full of instances in which this faith is tried by the bitterest experience. Even prophets, as I have before observed, are at times driven to the cry that 'the law is slacked, and that judgment doth never go forth.' But the deepest instincts and necessities of conscience forbid the toleration of any such instinct of despair. If right were not essentially and ultimately might, I do not say – God forbid – that it would not still claim the supreme allegiance of the soul; but life would be a bitter mockery and an inexplicable cruelty. Not merely to be under an imperative law to pursue that which cannot be realised, but to be bound to such a fruitless pursuit by every noble and lovely influence – to be condemned in moral and spiritual realities to the torments of a Tantalus – this is a conception of human life against which the whole soul rebels. Accordingly, a God of all righteousness must of necessity be regarded as a God of all power… That 'categorical imperative' of the conscience, on which the German philosopher insisted, is imperative in demanding not only a God, but an Almighty God."

Note XXXI., page 235Defects in the Physical World

Lucretius (ii. 177-v. 196) has dwelt on the arrangements which render one zone of the earth torrid and others frigid – on the extent of barren heaths and rocks, of sands and seas – on the prevalence of unseasonable weather, storms, and tempests – and on the abundance of noxious herbs and destructive animals, &c. – as evidences that the earth was faulty and ill made, and could not be the work of a Divine Intelligence. Whether it was well or ill made appears to have been a favourite subject of dispute between the Epicureans and Stoics. Lactantius (De Ira Dei, c. xiii.) reports, and attempts to answer, the objections which the Epicureans and Academics were accustomed to urge against the constitution of the physical world. In Cudworth's 'Intellectual System,' vol. iii., pp. 464-8, Bentley's 'Folly of Atheism,' pt. i., Serm. 8; Derham's 'Astro-Theology,' book vii., c. 2, &c., such objections are discussed. In the remarks which I made on the subject in the lecture, I have had chiefly in view the opinions of Comte, J. S. Mill, and J. J. Murphy (Scientific Bases of Faith, c. xvi.)

Mr Mill's charges against nature are very vigorously and graphically expressed. "Next to the greatness of these cosmic forces, the quality which most forcibly strikes every one who does not avert his eyes from it, is their perfect and absolute recklessness. They go straight to their end, without regarding what or whom they crush on the road. Optimists, in their attempts to prove that 'whatever is, is right,' are obliged to maintain, not that Nature ever turns one step from her path to avoid trampling us into destruction, but that it would be very unreasonable in us to expect that she should. Pope's 'Shall gravitation cease when you go by?' may be a just rebuke to any one who should be so silly as to expect common human morality from Nature. But if the question were between two men, instead of between a man and a natural phenomenon, that triumphant apostrophe would be thought a rare piece of impudence. A man who should persist in hurling stones or firing cannon when another man 'goes by,' and, having killed him, should urge a similar plea in exculpation, would very deservedly be found guilty of murder. In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are Nature's everyday performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognised by human laws, Nature does once to every being that lives, and in a large proportion of cases after protracted tortures, such as only the greatest monsters whom we read of ever purposely inflicted on their living fellow-creatures. If, by an arbitrary reservation, we refuse to account anything murder but what abridges to a certain term supposed to be allotted to human life, Nature also does this to all but a small percentage of lives, and does it in all the modes, violent or insidious, in which the worst human beings take the lives of one another. Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve, such as the ingenious cruelty of a Nabis or a Domitian never surpassed. All this Nature does with the most supercilious disregard both of mercy and of justice, emptying her shafts upon the best and noblest indifferently with the meanest and worst – upon those who are engaged in the highest and worthiest enterprises, and often as the direct consequence of the noblest acts, – and it might almost be imagined as a punishment for them. She mows down those on whose existence hangs the wellbeing of a whole people, perhaps the prospects of the human race for generations to come, with as little compunction as those whose death is a relief to themselves, or a blessing to those under their noxious influence. Such are Nature's dealings with life. Even when she does not intend to kill, she inflicts the same tortures in apparent wantonness. In the clumsy provision which she has made for that perpetual renewal of animal life, rendered necessary by the prompt termination she puts to it in every individual case, no human being ever comes into the world but another human being is literally stretched on the rack for hours or days, not unfrequently issuing in death. Next to taking life (equal to it, according to a high authority) is taking the means by which we live; and Nature does this, too, on the largest scale and with the most callous indifference. A single hurricane destroys the hopes of a season; a flight of locusts, or an inundation, desolates a district; a trifling chemical change in an edible root starves a million of people. The waves of the sea, like banditti, seize and appropriate the wealth of the rich and the little all of the poor with the same accompaniments of stripping, wounding, and killing, as their human antitypes. Everything, in short, which the worst men commit either against life or property, is perpetrated on a larger scale by natural agents. Nature has noyades more fatal than those of Carrier; her explosions of fire-damp are as destructive as human artillery; her plague and cholera far surpass the poison-cups of the Borgias. Even the love of 'order,' which is thought to be a following of the ways of Nature, is, in fact, a contradiction of them. All which people are accustomed to deprecate as 'disorder' and its consequences, is precisely a counterpart of Nature's ways. Anarchy and the Reign of Terror are overmatched in injustice, ruin, and death, by a hurricane and a pestilence." – Three Essays, pp. 28-31.