inclined now as I was twenty years ago to make my judgment blind. If, after full inquiry and long reflection, I had thought the Catholic creed irrational, if I had discovered it to be in conflict with any truth, I could not have accepted it. To have found it teaching, as of faith, any demonstrated error, would have been, as Mr. Leslie Stephen would say, to have found it out; for that would have been fatal to its claims as the oracle of the God of Truth. PYTHIAS. "Tis strange, 'tis passing strange: and I am curious to know-we are too old friends for you to attribute to me the impertinence of an idle curiosity-I am curious to know how you got over difficulties which, as I remember, we both felt strongly twenty years ago, and which I feel as strongly still. DAMON. I will gladly tell you anything I can, and, although I do not profess, like the clown in the play, to have an answer that will fit all questions, still I say, with the clown, "Spare me not." But let us know what we start from. Here, too, it is true "c'est le premier pas qui coûte." May I take it that you believe in God-in the old acceptation I mean: not as a mere anima mundi, nor as the totality of the forces of the universe, nor as an abstraction of the mind, like Humanity with a big II, but as a person in the most transcendent sense of the term, and as the person who put personality into us? CHAP. IV.] THE BALANCE OF DIFFICULTIES. 245 PYTHIAS. You remember the verse of Goethe:- "Mein Liebchen, wer darf sagen, Ich glaub' an Gott? Magst Priester oder Weise fragen, It seems to me the last word on the question. DAMON. Yes, indeed. I know the lines well, too well: "So sweet a voice and vague, fatal to men." I remember that they long rang in my ears as the knell of Theism, until I rose up against their authority and fought my doubts for myself. Then I am to begin with the beginning, and to tell you how I got over the difficulties of the Theistic hypothesis? Well, perhaps I may say that I feel them now as strongly as I ever did. Only they have sunk into another place in my mind. A difficulty is one thing. A doubt is quite another. What inexplicable difficulties attend every biological theory that has ever been put forward! Yet who doubts the fact of life? Then again the difficulties of the Atheistic or the Agnostic hypothesis seem to me to be far greater than those of the Theistic: far harder to reconcile with facts. So far as I know, Butler's pregnant question has never received an affirmative answer:-" Will any man in his senses say that it is less difficult to conceive how the world came to be, and to continue as it is, without, than with, an intelligent author and governor of it?" I was reading in a book of ?"/I 1 Schweizer's only this morning,-" It is indubitable that the human mind has from the earliest times worshipped as the higher truth the reality which is hidden behind phenomena but consciously felt in the heart, and has ascribed to it greater analogy with ideas than with the primary elements of the phenomenal world, such as matter and force." Now this unquestionable fact seems to me a very momentous fact, not in the least robbed of its significance because a certain school of scientists decline to recognize anything beyond the physical phenomena to which the methods of their science necessarily restrict them. Their assumption, that their way of investigation is the sole instrument of discovering truth, seems to me obviously false. As we used to read in Plato: "Being is not perceived by sense, nor is goodness, beauty, resemblance, difference, number." And St. Augustine says: "God is nearer, more related to us, and therefore more easily known by us, than any sensible, corporeal thing." I hold that the senses are but one, and by no means the surest, of the ways of finding truth; that there are in the moral order, as in the mathematical, certain necessary truths, not known experimentally but intuitively, recognized p. 94. 1 The passage will be found in his Die Zukunft der Religion, It is much to be regretted that this writer, perhaps the first of living Protestant theologians-I know not who else among them combines such profound philosophical culture, such deep religious feeling, and such delicate critical acumen-is so little read in England. CHAP. IV.] NECESSARY TRUTHS. 247 instinctively as true by the cognitive faculty, truths which are their own sufficient vouchers and justifications; in other words, that there is an a priori element in our knowledge, and that our instinctive faculties are rather to be trusted than any conclusions derived by the phenomenist, through "inductive processes " from his narrow and arbitrarily restricted range of "experienced facts." Hence it is that the argument of the Divine existence drawn from conscience, from Kant's categorical imperative of duty, comes home to me with such irresistible force that I do not hesitate to say with Julius Müller: "Conscience is the consciousness of God." Subsidiary (as I account of them) to this supreme proof there are of course others; the argument from design, the argument from first causes, the ontological argument urged by St. Anselm and Descartes, from the necessary existence of an archetype corresponding to our idea of an infinite and immense Being, which Kant seems to me to have misapprehended and not to have refuted.' It must be owned that to many minds, of which it would be impertinent to speak otherwise than with deep respect, none of these arguments, nor all of them together, bring conviction. I cannot help that. I can answer only for myself. But I suppose that what Mill says in his 1 On Kant's well-known criticism of this argument see The Philosophy of Kant, by Edw. Caird, c. xviii.; and An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, by John Caird, D.D. c. 5, Autobiography about the fundamental difference between the two schools of philosophy-that of intuition and that of association and experience - is profoundly true. PYTHIAS. I suppose so. But conscience-you know that the late Professor Clifford has recorded his opinion that it is of human invention: that it is "the voice of Man, ingrained in our hearts, commanding us to work for Man"; that it "springs out of the habit of judging things from the point of view of all, and not of one." 1 DAMON. I remember the passage, and have always prized it as a curious specimen of dogmatic Materialism, enforced as it is by a sort of ex cathedra "I say." It seems to me, however, that this view of conscience is out of harmony with "experienced facts." Let any one consider what the monitions of his individual conscience are, and he certainly will not find that they are mandates "to work for man": "Nil conscire sibi, nulla pallescere culpa," says the ancient poet, and he speaks more wisely than the modern professor. The voice of conscience is mainly an accusing voice. Self-disapproval, guilt, remorse-these are its most notable phenomena ; it speaks of a law broken and of a Lawgiver outraged; and thus it is the creative principle of natural religion. 1 The passage referred to will be found in the late Professor Clifford's Lectures and Essays, vol. ii. pp. 238-9 :—“Such as we are -moral and rational beings I say Man has made us," &c. |