In philosophical discussions of religion as well as in popular exhortations upon it, too exclusive stress has been laid upon its emotional elements. “It is,” says Professor Bain, “an affair of the feelings.”87-1 “The essence of religion,” observes John Stuart Mill, “is the strong and earnest direction of the emotions and desires towards an ideal object.” “It must be allowed,” says Dr. Mansel,87-2 “that it is not through reasoning that men obtain their first intimation of their relation to a deity.” In writers and preachers of the semi-mystical school, which embraces most of the ardent revivalists of the day, we constantly hear the “feeling of dependence” quoted as the radical element of religious thought.87-3 In America Theodore Parker, and in Germany Schleiermacher, were brilliant exponents of this doctrine. To the latter the philosopher Hegel replied that if religion is a matter of feeling, an affectionate dog is the best Christian.

This answer was not flippant, but founded on the true and only worthy conception of the religious sentiment. We have passed in review the emotions which form a part of it, and recognize their power. But neither these nor any other mere emotions, desires or feelings can explain even the lowest religion. It depends for its existence on the essential nature of reason. We cannot at all allow, as Dr. Mansel asks of us, that man’s first intimations of Deity came in any other way than as one of the ripest fruits of reason. Were such the case, we should certainly find traces of them among brutes and idiots, which we do not. The slight signs of religious actions thought to have been noticed by some in the lower animals, by Sir John Lubbock in ants, and by Charles Darwin in dogs, if authenticated, would vindicate for these species a much closer mental kinship to man than we have yet supposed.

If we dispassionately analyze any religion whatever, paying less attention to what its professed teachers say it is, than to what the mass of the votaries believe it to be, we shall see that every form of adoration unconsciously assumes certain premises in reason, which give impulse and character to its emotional and active manifestations. They are its data or axioms, or, as I shall call them, its “rational postulates.” They can, I believe, be reduced to three, but not to a lesser number.

Before the religious feeling acquires the distinctness of a notion and urges to conscious action, it must assume at least these three postulates, and without them it cannot rise into cognition. These, their necessary character and their relations, I shall set forth in this chapter.

They are as follows:—

• I. There is Order in things.
• II. This order is one of Intelligence.
• III. All Intelligence is one in kind.

I. The conscious or unconscious purpose of the religious sentiment, as I have shown in the last chapter, is the fruition of a wish, the success of which depends upon unknown power. The votary asks help where he cannot help himself. He expects it through an exertion of power, through an efficient cause. Obviously therefore, he is acting on the logical idea of Causality. This underlies and is essential to the simplest prayer. He extends it, moreover, out of the limits of experience into the regions of hypothesis. He has carried the analogy of observation into the realm of abstract conceptions. No matter if he does believe that the will of God is the efficient cause. Perhaps he is right; at any rate he cannot be denied the privilege of regarding volition as a co-operating cause. Limited at first to the transactions which most concerned men, the conception of order as a divine act extended itself to the known universe. Herodotus derives the Greek word for God ?e?? from a root which gives the meaning “to set in order,” and the Scandinavians gave the same sense to their word, Regin.90-1 Thus the abstract idea of cause or power is a postulate of all religious thought. Let us examine its meaning.

Every reader, the least versed in the history of speculative thought for the last hundred years, knows how long and violent the discussions have been of the relations of “cause and effect.” Startled by the criticisms of Hume, Kant sought to elude them by distinguishing between two spheres of thought, the understanding and the reason. Sir William Hamilton at first included the “principle of sufficient reason’ in the laws of thought, but subsequently rejected it as pertaining to judgments, and therefore material, not formal. Schopenhauer claimed to have traced it to a fourfold root, and Mill with most of the current English schools, Bain, Austin, Spencer, &c., maintained that it meant nothing but “uniformity of sequence.”

It would be vain to touch upon a discussion so extended as this. In the first chapter I have remarked that the idea of cause does not enter into the conceptions of pure logic or thought. It is, as Hamilton saw, material. I shall only pause to show what is meant by the term “cause” in the physical sciences. When one event follows another, time after time, we have “uniformity of sequence.” Suppose the constitution of the race were so happy that we slept at night only, and always awoke a few moments before sunrise. Such a sequence quite without exception, should, if uniform experience is the source of the idea of cause, justly lead to the opinion that the sun rises because man awakes. As we know this conclusion would be erroneous, some other element beside sequence must complete a real cause. If now, it were shown that the relation of cause to effect which we actually entertain and cannot help entertaining is in some instances flatly contrary to all experience, then we must acknowledge that the idea of cause asks to confirm it something quite independent of experience, that is abstract. But such examples are common. We never saw two objects continue to approach without meeting; but we are constrained to believe that lines of certain descriptions can forever approach and never meet.

The uniformity of sequence is, in fact, in the physical sciences never assumed to express the relation of cause and effect, until the connection between the antecedent and consequent can be set forth abstractly in mathematical formulÆ. The sequence of the planetary motions was discovered by Kepler, but it was reserved for Newton to prove the theoretical necessity of this motion and establish its mathematical relations. The sequence of sensations to impressions is well known, but the law of the sequence remains the desideratum in psychology.92-1

Science, therefore, has been correctly defined as “the knowledge of system.” Its aim is to ascertain the laws of phenomena, to define the “order in things.” Its fundamental postulate is that order exists, that all things are “lapped in universal law.” It acknowledges no exception, and it considers that all law is capable of final expression in quantity, in mathematical symbols. It is the manifest of reason, “whose unceasing endeavor is to banish the idea of Chance.”93-1

We thus see that its postulate is the same as that of the religious sentiment. Wherein then do they differ? Not in the recognition of chance. Accident, chance, does not exist for the religious sense in any stage of its growth. Everywhere religion proclaims in the words of Dante:—

“le cose tutte quante,
Hann’ ordine tra loro;”

everywhere in the more optimistic faiths it holds this order, in the words of St. Augustine, to be one “most fair, of excellent things.”93-2

What we call “the element of chance” is in its scientific sense that of which we do not know the law; while to the untutored religious mind it is the manifestation of divine will. The Kamschatkan, when his boat is lost in the storm, attributes it to the vengeance of a god angered because he scraped the snow from his shoes with a knife, instead of using a piece of wood; if a Dakota has bad luck in hunting, he says it is caused by his wife stepping over a bone and thus irritating a spirit. The idea of cause, the sentiment of order, is as strong as ever, but it differs from that admitted by science in recognizing as a possible efficient motor that which is incapable of mathematical expression, namely, a volition, a will. Voluntas Dei asylum ignorantiÆ, is no unkind description of such an opinion.

So long as this recognition is essential to the life of a religious system, just so long it will and must be in conflict with science, with every prospect of the latter gaining the victory. Is the belief in volition as an efficient cause indispensable to the religious sentiment in general? For this vital question we are not yet prepared, but must first consider the remaining rational postulates it assumes. The second is

II. This order is one of intelligence.

By this is not meant that the order is one of an Intelligence, but simply that the order which exists in things is conformable to man’s thinking power,—that if he knows the course of events he can appreciate their relations,—that facts can be subsumed under thoughts. Whatever scheme of order there were, would be nothing to him unless it were conformable to his intellectual functions. It could not form the matter of his thought.94-1Science, which deals in the first instance exclusively with phenomena, also assumes this postulate. It recognizes that when the formal laws, which it is its mission to define, are examined apart from their material expression, when they are emptied of their phenomenal contents, they show themselves to be logical constructions, reasoned truths, in other words, forms of intelligence. The votary who assumes the order one of volition alone, or volition with physical necessity, still assumes the volitions are as comprehensible as are his own; that they are purposive; that the order, even if not clear to him, is both real and reasonable. Were it not so, did he believe that the gods carried out their schemes through a series of caprices inconceivable to intelligence, through absolute chance, insane caprice, or blind fate, he could neither see in occurrences the signs of divine rule, nor hope for aid in obtaining his wishes. In fact, order is only conceivable to man at all as an order conformable to his own intelligence.

This second postulate embraces what has been recently called the “Principle of continuity,” indispensable to sane thought of any kind. A late work defines it as “the trust that the Supreme Governor of the Universe will not put us to permanent intellectual confusion.”96-1 Looked at closely, it is the identification of order with reason.

The third and final postulate of the religious sentiment is that

III. All intelligence is one in kind.

Religion demands that there be a truth which is absolutely true, and that there be a goodness which is universally and eternally good. Each system claims the possession, and generally the exclusive possession, of this goodness and truth. They are right in maintaining these views, for unless such is the case, unless there is an absolute truth, cognizable to man, yet not transcended by any divine intelligence, all possible religion becomes mere child’s play, and its professed interpretation of mysteries but trickery.

The Grecian sophists used to meet the demonstrations of the mathematicians and philosophers by conceding that they did indeed set forth the truth, so far as man’s intelligence goes, but that to the intelligence of other beings—a bat or an angel, for example—they might not hold good at all; that there is a different truth for different intelligences; that the intelligence makes the truth; and that as for the absolutely true, true to every intelligence, there is no such thing. They acknowledged that a simple syllogism, constructed on these premises, made their own assertions partake of the doubtful character that was by them ascribed to other human knowledge. But this they gracefully accepted as the inevitable conclusion of reasoning. Their position is defended to-day by the advocates of “positivism,” who maintain the relativity of all truth.

But such a conclusion is wholly incompatible with the religious mind. It must assume that there are some common truths, true infinitely, and therefore, that in all intelligence there is an essential unity of kind. “This postulation,” says a close thinker, “is the very foundation and essence of religion. Destroy it, and you destroy the very possibility of religion.”97-1

Clear as this would seem to be to any reflective mind, yet, strange to say, it is to-day the current fashion for religious teachers to deny it. Scared by a phantasm of their own creation, they have deserted the only position in which it is possible to defend religion at all. Afraid of the accusation that they make God like man, they have removed Him beyond the pale of all intelligence, and logically, therefore, annihilated every conception of Him.

Teachers and preachers do not tire of telling their followers that God is incomprehensible; that his ways are past finding out; that he is the Unconditioned, the Infinite, the Unknowable. They really mean that he is another order of intelligence, which, to quote a famous comparison of Spinoza, has the same name as ours, but is no more one with it than the dog is one with his namesake, the dog-star!

They are eagerly seconded in this position by a school of writers who distinctly see where such a doctrine leads, and who do not hesitate to carry it home. Mr. Mill is right in his scorn for those who “erect the incurable limitations of the human conceptive faculty into laws of the outward universe,” if there are such limitations. And Mr. Spencer is justified in condemning “the transcendent audacity which passes current as piety,” if his definition of the underlying verity of religion is admitted—that it is “the consciousness of an inscrutable power which, in its nature, transcends intuition, and is beyond imagination.”98-1 They are but following the orthodox Sir William Hamilton, who says: “Creation must be thought as the incomprehensible evolution of power into energy.”99-1 We are to think that which by the terms of the proposition is unthinkable! A most wise master!

Let it be noted that the expressions such as inscrutable, incomprehensible, unknowable, etc., which such writers use, are avowedly not limited to man’s intelligence in its present state of cultivation, but are applied to his kind of intelligence, no matter how far trained. They mean that the inscrutable, etc., is not merely not at present open to man’s observation—that were a truism—but that it cannot be subsumed under the laws of his reasoning powers. In other words, they deny that all intelligence is one in kind. Some accept this fully, and concede that what are called the laws of order, as shown by science, are only matters of experience, true here and now, not necessarily and absolutely true.

This is a consistent inference, and applies, of course, with equal force to all moral laws and religious dogmas.

The arguments brought against such opinions have been various. The old reply to the sophists has been dressed in modern garb, and it has been repeatedly put that if no statement is really true, then this one, to wit “no statement is really true,” also is not true; and if that is the case, then there are statements which really are true. The theory of evolution as a dogma has been attacked by its own maxims; in asserting that all knowledge is imperfect, it calls its own verity into question. If all truth is relative, then this at least is absolutely true.

It has also been noted that all such words as incomprehensible, unconditioned, infinite, unknowable, are in their nature privatives, they are not a thought but are only one element of a thought. As has been shown in the first chapter, every thought is made up of a positive and a privative, and it is absurd and unnatural to separate the one from the other. The concept man, regarded as a division of the higher concept animal, is made up of man and not-man. In so far as other animals are included under the term “not-man” they do not come into intelligent cognition; but that does not mean that they cannot do so. So “the unconditioned” is really a part of the thought of “the conditioned,” the “unknowable” a part of the “knowable,” the “infinite” a part of the thought of the “finite.” Under material images these privatives, as such, cannot be expressed; but in pure thought which deals with symbols and types alone, they can be.

But if the abstract laws of thought themselves are confined in the limits of one kind of intelligence, then we cannot take an appeal to them to attack this sophism. Therefore on maintaining their integrity the discussion must finally rest. This has been fully recognized by thinkers, one of whom has not long since earnestly called attention to “the urgent necessity of fathoming the psychical mechanism on which rests all our intellectual life.”101-1

In this endeavor the attempt has been made to show that the logical laws are derived in accordance with the general theory of evolution from the natural or material laws of thinking. These, as I have previously remarked, are those of the association of ideas, and come under the general heads of contiguity and similarity. Such combinations are independent of the aim of the logical laws, which is correct thinking. A German writer, Dr. Windelband, has therefore argued that as experience, strengthened by hereditary transmission, continued to show that the particular combinations which are in accord with what we call the laws of thought furnished the best, that is, the most useful results, they were adopted in preference to others and finally assumed as the criteria of truth.

Of course it follows from this that as these laws are merely the outcome of human experience they can have no validity outside of it. Consequently, adds the writer I have quoted, just as the study of optics teaches us that the human eye yields a very different picture of the external world from that given by the eye of a fly, for instance, and as each of them is equally far from the reality, so the truth which our intelligence enables us to reach is not less remote from that which is the absolutely true. He considers that this is proven by the very nature of the “law of contradiction” itself, which must be inconsistent with the character of absolute thought. For in the latter, positive truth only can exist, therefore no negation, and no law about the relation of affirmative to negative.102-1

The latter criticism assumes that negation is of the nature of error, a mistake drawn from the use of the negative in applied logic. For in formal logic, whether as quantity or quality, that is, in pure mathematics or abstract thought, the reasoning is just as correct when negatives are employed as when positives, as I have remarked before. The other criticism is more important, for if we can reach the conclusion that the real laws of the universe are other than as we understand them, then our intelligence is not of a kind to represent them.

Such an opinion can be refuted directly. The laws which we profess to know are as operative in the remotest nebulae as in the planet we inhabit. It is altogether likely that countless forms of intelligent beings inhabit the starry wastes, receiving through sensory apparatus widely different from ours very diverse impressions of the external world. All this we know, but we also know that if those beings have defined the laws which underlie phenomena, they have found them to be the same that we have; for were they in the least different, in principle or application, they could not furnish the means, as those we know do, of predicting the recurrence of the celestial motions with unfailing accuracy. Therefore the demonstrations of pure mathematics, such as the relation of an absciss to an ordinate, or of the diameter to the circumference, must be universally true; and hence the logical laws which are the ultimate criteria of these truths must also be true to every intelligence, real or possible.103-1

Another and forcible reply to these objections is that the laws which our intelligence has reached and recognizes as universally true are not only not derived from experience, but are in direct opposition to and are constantly contradicted by it. Neither sense nor imagination has ever portrayed a perfect circle in which the diameter bore to the circumference the exact proportion which we know it does bear. The very fact that we have learned that our senses are wholly untrustworthy, and that experience is always fallacious, shows that we have tests of truth depending on some other faculty. “Each series of connected facts in nature furnishes the intimation of an order more exact than that which it directly manifests.”104-1

But, it has been urged, granted that we have reached something like positive knowledge of those laws which are the order of the manifestation of phenomena, the real Inscrutable, the mysterious Unknowable, escapes us still; this is the nature of phenomenal manifestation, “the secret of the Power manifested in Existence.”104-2 At this point the physicist trips and falls; and here, too, the metaphysician stumbles.

I have already spoken of our aptitude to be frightened by a chimera, and deceived by such words as “nature” and “cause.” Laws and rules, by which we express Order, are restrictive only in a condition of intelligence short of completeness, only therefore in that province of thought which concerns itself with material facts. The musician is not fettered by the laws of harmony, but only by those of discord. The truly virtuous man, remarks Aristotle, never has occasion to practise self-denial. Hence, mathematically, “the theory of the intellectual action involves the recognition of a sphere of thought from which all limits are withdrawn.”105-1 True freedom, real being, is only possible when law as such is inexistent. Only the lawless makes the law. When the idea of the laws of order thus disappears in that of free function consistent with perfect order, when, as Kant expresses it, we ascend from the contemplation of things acting according to law, to action according to the representation of law,105-2 we can, without audacity, believe that we have penetrated the secret of existence, that we have reached the limits of explanation and found one wholly satisfying the highest reason. Intelligence, not apart from phenomena, but parallel with them, not under law, but through perfect harmony above it, power one with being, the will which is “the essence of reason,” the emanant cause of phenomena, immanent only by the number of its relations we have not learned, this is the satisfying and exhaustive solution. The folly lies not in claiming reason as the absolute, but in assuming that the absolute is beyond and against reason.

There is nothing new in this explanation; and it is none the worse for being old. If Anaxagoras discerned it dimly, and many a one since him has spoken of Intelligence, Reason, Nous or Logos as the constructive factor of the creation; if “all the riper religions of the Orient assumed as their fundamental principle that unless the Highest penetrates all parts of the Universe, and itself conditions whatever is conditioned, no universal order, no Kosmos, no real existence is thinkable;”106-1 such inadequate expressions should never obscure the truth that reason in its loftiest flights descries nothing nobler than itself.

The relative, as its name implies, for ever presupposes and points to the absolute, the latter an Intelligence also, not one that renders ours futile and fallacious, but one that imparts to ours the capacity we possess of reaching eternal and ubiquitous truth. The severest mathematical reasoning forces us to this conclusion, and we can dispense with speculation about it.

Only on the principle which here receives its proof, that man has something in him of God, that the norm of the true holds good throughout, can he know or care anything about divinity. “It takes a god to discern a god,” profoundly wrote Novalis.

When a religion teaches what reason disclaims, not through lack of testimony but through a denial of the rights of reason, then that religion wars against itself and will fall. Faith is not the acceptance of what intelligence rejects, but a suspension of judgment for want of evidence. A thoroughly religious mind will rejoice when its faith is shaken with doubt; for the doubt indicates increased light rendering perceptible some possible error not before seen.

Least of all should a believer in a divine revelation deny the oneness of intelligence. For if he is right, then the revealed truth he talks about is but relative and partial, and those inspired men who claimed for it the sign manual of the Absolute were fools, insane or liars.

If the various arguments I have rehearsed indicate conclusively that in the laws of thought we have the norms of absolute truth—and skepticism on this point can be skepticism and not belief only by virtue of the very law which it doubts—some important corollaries present themselves.

Regarding in the first place the nature of these laws, we find them very different from those of physical necessity—those which are called the laws of nature. The latter are authoritative, they are never means to an end, they admit no exception, they leave no room for error. Not so with the laws of reasoning. Man far more frequently disregards than obeys them; they leave a wide field for fallacy. Wherein then lies that theoretical necessity which is the essence of law? The answer is that the laws of reasoning are purposive only, they are regulative, not constitutive, and their theoretical necessity lies in the end, the result of reasoning, that is, in the knowing, in the recognition of truth. They are what the Germans call Zweckgesetze.108-1

But in mathematical reasoning and in the processes of physical nature the absolute character of the laws which prevail depends for its final necessity on their consistency, their entire correspondence with the laws of right reasoning. Applied to them the purposive character of the laws is not seen, for their ends are fulfilled. We are brought, therefore, to the momentous conclusion that the manifestation of Order, whether in material or mental processes, “affords a presumption, not measurable indeed but real, of the fulfilment of an end or purpose;”108-1 and this purpose, one which has other objects in view than the continuance of physical processes. The history of mind, from protoplasmic sensation upward, must be a progression, whose end will be worth more than was its beginning, a process, which has for its purpose the satisfaction of the laws of mind. This is nothing else than correct thinking, the attainment of truth.

But this conclusion, reached by a searching criticism of the validity of scientific laws, is precisely that which is the postulate of all developed creeds. “The faith of all historical religions,” says Bunsen, “starts from the assumption of a universal moral order, in which the good is alone the true, and the true is the only good.”109-1

The purposive nature of the processes of thought, as well as the manner in which they govern the mind, is illustrated by the history of man. His actions, whether as an individual or as a nation, are guided by ideas not derived from the outer world, for they do not correspond to actual objects, but from mental pictures of things as he wants them to exist. These are his hopes, his wishes, his ideals; they are the more potent, and prompt to more vigorous action, the clearer they are to his mind. Even when he is unconscious of them, they exist as tendencies, or instincts, inherited often from some remote ancestor, perhaps even the heir-loom of a stage of lower life, for they occur where sensation alone is present, and are an important factor in general evolution.

It is usually conceded that this theory of organic development very much attenuates the evidence of what is known as the argument from design in nature, by which the existence of an intelligent Creator is sought to be shown. If the distinction between the formal laws of mathematics, which are those of nature, and logic, which are those of mind, be fully understood, no one will seek such an argument in the former but in the latter only, for they alone, as I have shown, are purposive, and they are wholly so. The only God that nature points to is an adamantine Fate.

If religion has indeed the object which Bunsen assigns it, physical phenomena cannot concern it. Its votaries should not look to change the operation of natural laws by incantations, prayers or miracles.

Whenever in the material world there presents itself a seeming confusion, it is certain to turn out but an incompleteness of our observation, and on closer inspection it resolves itself into some higher scheme of Order. This is not so in the realm of thought. Wrong thinking never can become right thinking. A profound writer has said: “One explanation only of these facts can be given, viz., that the distinction between true and false, between correct and incorrect, exists in the processes of the intellect, but not in the region of a physical necessity.”111-1 A religion therefore which claims as its mission the discovery of the true and its identification with the good,—in other words the persuading man that he should always act in accordance with the dictates of right reasoning—should be addressed primarily to the intellect.

As man can attain to certain truths which are without any mixture of fallacy, which when once he comprehends them he can never any more doubt, and which though thus absolute do not fetter his intellect but first give it the use of all its powers to the extent of those truths; so he can conceive of an Intelligence in which all truth is thus without taint of error. Not only is such an Intelligence conceivable, it is necessary to conceive it, in order to complete the scientific induction of “a sphere of thought from which all limits are withdrawn,” forced upon us by the demonstrations of the exact sciences.111-2

Thus do we reach the foundation for the faith in a moral government of the world, which it has been the uniform characteristic of religions to assert; but a government, as thus analytically reached, not easily corresponding with that which popular religion speaks of. Such feeble sentiments as mercy, benevolence and effusive love, scarcely find place in this conception of the source of universal order. In this cosmical dust-cloud we inhabit, whose each speck is a sun, man’s destiny plays a microscopic part. The vexed question whether ours is the best possible or the worst possible world, drops into startling insignificance. Religion has taught the abnegation of self; science is first to teach the humiliation of the race. Not for man’s behoof were created the greater and the lesser lights, not for his deeds will the sun grow dark or the stars fall, not with any reference to his pains or pleasure was this universe spread upon the night. That Intelligence which pursues its own ends in this All, which sees from first to last the chain of causes which mould human action, measures not its purposes by man’s halting sensations. Such an Intelligence is fitly described by the philosopher-poet as one,

“Wo die Gerechtigkeit so Wurzel schlÄget,
Und Schuld und Unschuld so erhaben wÄget
Dass sie vertritt die Stelle aller GÜte.”112-1

In the scheme of the universe, pain and pleasure, truth and error, has each its fitness, and no single thought or act can be judged apart from all others that ever have been and ever shall be.

Such was the power that was contemplated by the Hebrew prophet, one from which all evil things and all good things come, and who disposes them all to the fulfilment of a final purpose:

“I am the Lord and there is none else. I form the light and create darkness; I make peace and create evil.”

“I am God and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things which are not yet done.”113-1