Feuerbach calls God “the Brocken-shadow of man himself”; “consciousness of God = self-consciousness”; “religion is a dream of the human soul”; “all theology is anthropology”; “man made God in his own image.” But conscience shows that man does not recognize in God simply his like, but also his opposite. Not as Galton: “Piety = conscience + instability.” The finest minds are of the leaning type; see Murphy, Scientific Bases, 370; Augustine, Confessions, 1:1—“Thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless till it finds rest in thee.” On John Stuart Mill—“a mind that could not find God, and a heart that could not do without him”—see his Autobiography, and Browne, in Strivings for the Faith (Christ. Ev. Socy.), 259–287. Comte, in his later days, constructed an object of worship in Universal Humanity, and invented a ritual which Huxley calls “Catholicism minus Christianity.” See also Tyndall, Belfast Address: “Did I not believe, said a great man to me once, that an Intelligence exists at the heart of things, my life on earth would be intolerable.” Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, 1:505,506.
The last line of Schiller's Pilgrim reads: “Und das Dort ist niemals hier.” The finite never satisfies. Tennyson, Two Voices: “'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant, Oh life, not death, for which we pant; More life, and fuller, that I want.” Seth, Ethical Principles, 419—“A moral universe, an absolute moral Being, is the indispensable environment of the ethical life, without which it cannot attain to its perfect growth. … There is a moral God, or this is no universe.” James, Will to Believe, 116—“A God is the most adequate possible object for minds framed like our own to conceive as lying at the root of the universe. Anything short of God is not a rational object, anything more than God is not possible, if man needs an object of knowledge, feeling, and will.”
Romanes, Thoughts on Religion, 41—“To speak of the Religion of the Unknowable, the Religion of Cosmism, the Religion of Humanity, where the personality of the First Cause is not recognized, is as unmeaning as it would be to speak of the love of a triangle or the rationality of the equator.” It was said of Comte's system that, “the wine of the real presence being poured out, we are asked to adore the empty cup.” “We want an object of devotion, and Comte presents us with a looking-glass”(Martineau). Huxley said he would as soon adore a wilderness of apes as the Positivist's rationalized conception of humanity. It is only the ideal in humanity, the divine element in humanity that can be worshiped. And when we once conceive of this, we cannot be satisfied until we find it somewhere realized, as in Jesus Christ.
Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 265–272—Huxley believes that Evolution is “a materialized logical process”; that nothing endures save the flow of energy and “the rational order which pervades it.” In the earlier part of this process, nature, there is no morality or benevolence. But the process ends by producing man, who can make progress only by waging moral war against the natural forces which impel him. He must be benevolent and just. Shall we not say, in spite of Mr. Huxley, that this shows what the nature of the system is, and that there must be a benevolent and just Being who ordained it? Martineau, Seat of Authority, 63–68—“Though the authority of the higher incentive is self-known, it cannot be self-created; for while it is in me, it is above me. … This authority to which conscience introduces me, though emerging in consciousness, is yet objective to us all, and is necessarily referred to the nature of things, irrespective of the accidents of our mental constitution. It is not dependent on us, but independent. All minds born into the universe are ushered into the presence of a real righteousness, as surely as into a scene of actual space. Perception reveals another than ourselves; conscience reveals a higher than ourselves.”
We must freely grant, however, that this argument from man's aspirations has weight only upon the supposition that a wise, truthful, holy, and benevolent God exists, who has so constituted our minds that their thinking and their affections correspond to truth and to himself. An evil being might have so constituted us that all logic would lead us into error. The argument is therefore the development and expression of our intuitive idea of God. Luthardt, Fundamental Truths: “Nature is like a written document containing only consonants. It is we who must furnish the vowels that shall decipher it. Unless we bring with us the idea of God, we shall find nature but dumb.” See also Pfleiderer, Die Religion, 1:174.
A. The defects of the Anthropological Argument are: (a) It cannot prove a creator of the material universe. (b) It cannot prove the infinity of God, since man from whom we argue is finite. (c) It cannot prove the mercy of God. But,
B. The value of the Argument is, that it assures us of the existence of a personal Being, who rules us in righteousness, and who is the proper object of supreme affection and service. But whether this Being is the original creator of all things, or merely the author of our own existence, whether he is infinite or finite, whether he is a Being of simple righteousness or also of mercy, this argument cannot assure us.
Among the arguments for the existence of God, however, we assign to this the chief place, since it adds to the ideas of causative power (which we derived from the Cosmological Argument) and of contriving intelligence (which we derived from the Teleological Argument), the far wider ideas of personality and righteous lordship.
Sir Wm. Hamilton, Works of Reid, 2:974, note U; Lect. on Metaph., 1:33—“The only valid arguments for the existence of God and for the immortality of the soul rest upon the ground of man's moral nature”; “theology is wholly dependent upon psychology, for with the proof of the moral nature of man stands or falls the proof of the existence of a Deity.” But Diman, Theistic Argument, 244, very properly objects to making this argument from the nature of man the sole proof of Deity: “It should be rather used to show the attributes of the Being whose existence has been already proved from other sources”; “hence the Anthropological Argument is as dependent upon the Cosmological and Teleological Arguments as they are upon it.”
Yet the Anthropological Argument is needed to supplement the conclusions of the two others. Those who, like Herbert Spencer, recognize an infinite and absolute Being, Power and Cause, may yet fail to recognize this being as spiritual and personal, simply because they do not recognize themselves as spiritual and personal beings, that is, do not recognize reason, conscience and free-will in man. Agnosticism in philosophy involves agnosticism in religion. R. K. Eccles: “All the most advanced languages capitalize the word ‘God,’ and the word ‘I.’ ” See Flint, Theism, 68; Mill, Criticism of Hamilton, 2:266; Dove, Logic of Christian Faith, 211–236, 261–299; Martineau, Types, Introd., 3; Cooke, Religion and Chemistry: “God is love; but nature could not prove it, and the Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world in order to attest it.”
Everything in philosophy depends on where we begin, whether with nature or with self, whether with the necessary or with the free. In one sense, therefore, we should in practice begin with the Anthropological Argument, and then use the Cosmological and Teleological Arguments as warranting the application to nature of the conclusions which we have drawn from man. As God stands over against man in Conscience, and says to him: “Thou”; so man stands over against God in Nature, and may say to him: “Thou.” Mulford, Republic of God, 28—“As the personality of man has its foundation in the personality of God, so the realization by man of his own personality always brings man nearer to God.” Robert Browning: “Quoth a young Sadducee: ‘Reader of many rolls, Is it so certain we Have, as they tell us, souls?’ ‘Son, there is no reply!’ The Rabbi bit his beard: ‘Certain, a soul have I—We may have none,’ he sneered. Thus Karshook, the Hiram's Hammer, The Right-hand Temple-column, Taught babes in grace their grammar, And struck the simple, solemn.”
It is very common at this place to treat of what are called the Historical and the Biblical Arguments for the existence of God—the former arguing, from the unity of history, the latter arguing, from the unity of the Bible, that this unity must in each case have for its cause and explanation the existence of God. It is a sufficient reason for not discussing these arguments, that, without a previous belief in the existence of God, no one will see unity either in history or in the Bible. Turner, the painter, exhibited a picture which seemed all mist and cloud until he put a dab of scarlet into it. That gave the