had a beginning, or in other words, from the present harmony of the universe, that there exists an intelligence and will adequate to its contrivance. But whether this intelligence and will is personal or impersonal, creator or only fashioner, one or many, finite or infinite, eternal or owing its being to another, necessary or free, this argument cannot assure us.

In it, however, we take a step forward. The causative power which we have proved by the Cosmological Argument has now become an intelligent and voluntary power.

John Stuart Mill, Three Essays on Theism, 168-170-"In the present state of our knowledge, the adaptations in nature afford a large balance of probability in favor of causation by intelligence." On the whole argument, see Bib. Sac., 1849: 634; Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 216; Flint, Theism, 131-210; Pfleiderer, Die Religion, 1: 164–174.

III. THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARGUMENT, OR ARGUMENT FROM MAN'S MENTAL AND MORAL NATURE.

This is an argument from the mental and moral constitution of man to the existence of an Author, Lawgiver, and End. It is sometimes called the Moral Argument.

The common title "Moral Argument" is much too narrow, for it seems to take account only of conscience in man, whereas the argument which this title so imperfectly designates really proceeds from man's intellectual and emotional, as well as from his moral, nature. In choosing the designation we have adopted, we desire, moreover, to rescue from the mere physicist the term "Anthropology"-a term to which he has attached altogether too limited a signification, and which, in his use of it, implies that man is a mere animal. Anthropology means, not simply the science of man's physical nature, origin, and relations, but also the science which treats of his higher spiritual being. Hence, in Theology, the term Anthropology designates that division of the subject which treats of man's spiritual nature and endowments, his original state and his subsequent apostasy. As an argument, therefore, from man's mental and moral nature, we can with perfect propriety call the present argument the Anthropological Argument.

The argument is a complex one, and may be divided into three parts. 1. Man's intellectual and moral nature must have had for its author an intellectual and moral Being. The elements of the proof are as follows:(a) Man, as an intellectual and moral Being, has had a beginning upon the planet. (b) Material and unconscious forces do not afford a sufficient cause for man's reason, conscience, and free will. (c) Man, as an effect, can be referred only to a cause possessing self-consciousness and a moral nature, in other words, personality.

This argument is in part an application to man of the principles of both the Cosmological and the Teleological Arguments. Flint, Theism, 74-"Although causality does not involve design, nor design goodness, yet design involves causality, and goodness both causality and design." Jacobi: "Nature conceals God; man reveals him." Man is an effect. The history of the geologic ages proves that man has not always existed, and even if the lower creatures were his progenitors, his intellect and freedom are not eternal a parte ante. We consider man, not as a physical, but as a spiritual, being. Thompson, Christian Theism, 75-" Every true cause must be sufficient to account for the effect." Locke, Essay, book 4, chap. 10-" Cogitable existence cannot be produced out of incogitable."

Personality self-consciousness

self-determination in view of moral ends. The brute has intelligence and will, but has neither self-consciousness, conscience, nor freewill. See Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1: 76 sq. Diman, Theistic Argument, 91, 251— "Suppose the intuitions of the moral faculty are the slowly organized results of experience received from the race'; still, having found that the universe affords evidence of a supremely intelligent cause, we may believe that man's moral nature affords the

highest illustration of its mode of working "; 358: "Shall we explain the lower forms of will by the higher, or the higher by the lower?"

2. Man's moral nature proves the existence of a holy Lawgiver and Judge. The elements of the proof are:-(a) Conscience recognizes the existence of a moral law which has supreme authority. (b) Known violations of this moral law are followed by feelings of ill-desert and fears of judgment. (c) This moral law, since it is not self-imposed, and these threats of judgment, since they are not self-executing, respectively argue the existence of a holy will that has imposed the law, and of a punitive power that will execute the threats of the moral nature.

See Bishop Butler's Sermons on Human Nature, in Works, Bohn's ed., 385-414. Butler's great discovery was that of the supremacy of conscience in the moral constitution of man: "Had it strength as it has right, had it power as it has manifest authority, it would absolutely govern the world." Conscience the moral judiciary of the soul - not law, nor sheriff, but judge; see under Anthropology. Diman, Theistic Argument, 251 -"Conscience does not lay down a law; it warns us of the existence of a law; and not only of a law, but of a purpose-not our own, but the purpose of another, which it is our mission to realize." See Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 218 sq. It proves personality in the Lawgiver, because its utterances are not abstract, like those of reason, but are in the nature of command; they are not in the indicative, but in the imperative, mood; it says, "thou shalt" and "thou shalt not." This argues will.

Hutton, Essays, 1: 11-" Conscience is an ideal Moses, and thunders from an invisible Sinai;" "the Atheist regards conscience not as a skylight, opened to let in upon human nature an infinite dawn from above, but as a polished arch or dome, completing and reflecting the whole edifice beneath." But conscience cannot be the mere reflection and expression of nature, for it represses and condemns nature. Tulloch, Theism: "Conscience, like the magnetic needle, indicates the existence of an unknown Power which from afar controls its vibrations and at whose presence it trembles." Nero spends nights of terror in wandering through the halls of his Golden House. Kant holds that faith in duty requires faith in a God who will defend and reward duty-see Critique of Pure Reason, 359-387. See also Porter, Human Intellect, 524.

3. Man's emotional and voluntary nature proves the existence of a Being who can furnish in himself a satisfying object of human affection and an end which will call forth man's highest activities and ensure his highest progress.

Only a Being of power, wisdom, holiness, and goodness, and all these indefinitely greater than any that we know upon the earth, can meet this demand of the human soul. Such a Being must exist. Otherwise man's greatest need would be unsupplied, and belief in a lie be more productive of virtue than belief in the truth.

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." 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 find 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. Soc'y), 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."

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. See Flint, Theism, 68; Mill, Criticism of Hamilton, 2: 266; Dove, Logic of Christian Faith, 211-236, 261-299; 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."

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.

IV. THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT, or ArgumenT FROM OUR ABSTRACT AND NECESSARY IDEAS.

This argument infers the existence of God from the abstract and necessary ideas of the human mind. It has three forms:

1. That of Samuel Clarke.

Space and time are attributes of substance or being. But space and time are respectively infinite and eternal. There must therefore be an infinite and eternal substance or Being to whom these attributes belong.

Gillespie states the argument somewhat differently. Space and time are modes of existence. But space and time are respectively infinite and eternal. There must therefore be an infinite and eternal Being who subsists in these modes. But we reply:

Space and time are neither attributes of substance nor modes of existence. The argument, if valid, would prove that God is not mind but matter, for that could not be mind, but only matter, of which space and time were either attributes or modes.

The Ontological Argument is frequently called the a priori argument, that is, the argument from that which is logically prior, or earlier than experience, viz. our intuitive ideas. All the forms of the Ontological Argument are in this sense a priori. Space and time are a priori ideas. See Samuel Clarke, Works, 2: 521; Gillespie, Necessary Existence of God. Per contra, see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 364; Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 226—“To begin, as Clarke did, with the proposition that 'something has existed from eternity,' is virtually to propose an argument after having assumed what is to be proved. Gillespie's form of the a priori argument, starting with the proposition 'infinity of extension is necessarily existing,' is liable to the same objection, with the additional disadvantage of attributing a property of matter to the Deity."

H. B. Smith says that Brougham misrepresented Clarke: "Clarke's argument is in his sixth proposition, and supposes the existence proved in what goes before. He aims here to establish the infinitude and omnipresence of this First Being. He does not prove existence from immensity." But we reply, neither can he prove the infinity of God from the immensity of space. Space and time are neither substances nor attributes, but are rather relations; see Calderwood, Philos. of Infinite, 331-335; Cocker, Theistic Conception of the World, 66-96. The doctrine that space and time are attributes or modes of God's existence tends to a materialistic pantheism like that of Spinoza, who held that "the one and simple substance" (substantia una et unica) is known to us through the two attributes of thought and extension; mind = God in the mode of thought; matter = God in the mode of extension. Dove, Logic of the Christian Faith, 127, says well that an extended God is a material God; "space and time are attributes neither of matter nor mind; we must carry the moral idea into the natural world, not the natural idea into the moral world." See also, Blunt, Dictionary Doct. and Hist. Theol., 740; Porter, Human Intellect, 567.

2. That of Descartes. We have the idea of an infinite and perfect Being. This idea cannot be derived from imperfect and finite things. There must therefore be an infinite and perfect Being who is its cause.

But we reply that this argument confounds the idea of the infinite with an infinite idea. Man's idea of the infinite is not infinite but finite, and from a finite effect we cannot argue an infinite cause.

This form of the Ontological Argument, while it is a priori, as based upon a necessary idea of the human mind, is, unlike the other forms of the same argument, a posteriori, as arguing from this idea, as an effect, to the existence of a Being who is its cause. A posteriori argument from that which is later to that which is earlier, that is, from effect to cause. The Cosmological, Teleological, and Anthropological Arguments are arguments a posteriori. Of this sort is the argument of Descartes; see Descartes, Meditation 3: "Haec idea quae in nobis est requirit Deum pro causa; Deusque proinde existit." The idea in men's minds is the impression of the workman's name stamped indelibly on his work-the shadow cast upon the human soul by that unseen One of whose being and presence it dimly informs us. Blunt, Dict. of Theol., 739; Saisset, Pantheism, 1: 54-"Descartes sets out from a fact of consciousness, while Anselm sets out from an abstract conception;" "Descartes's argument might be considered a branch of the Anthropological or Moral Argument, but for the fact that this last proceeds from man's constitution rather than from his abstract ideas." See Bib. Sac., 1849: 637.

3. That of Anselm. We have the idea of an absolutely perfect Being. But existence is an attribute of perfection. An absolutely perfect Being must therefore exist.

But we reply that this argument confounds ideal existence with real existence. Our ideas are not the measure of external reality.

Anselm, Proslogion, 2-Id, quo majus cogitari nequit, non potest esse in intellectu solo. See translation of the Proslogion, in Bib. Sac., 1851: 529, 699; Kant, Critique, 368. The arguments of Descartes and Anselm, with Kant's reply, are given in their original form by Harris, in Journ. Spec. Philos., 15: 420-428. The major premise here is not that all perfect ideas imply the existence of the object which they represent, for then, as Kant objects, I might argue from my perfect idea of a $100 bill that I actually possessed the same, which would be far from the fact. So I have a perfect idea of a perfectly evil being, of a centaur, of nothing-but it does not follow that the evil being, that the centaur, that nothing, exists. The argument is rather from the idea of absolute and perfect Being-of "that, no greater than which can be conceived." There can be but one such Being, and there can be but one such idea.

Yet even thus understood, we cannot argue from the idea to the actual existence of such a being. "Anselm's argument implies," says Fisher, in Journ. Christ. Philos., Jan., 1883: 114, "that existence in re is a constituent of the concept. It would conclude the existence of a being from the definition of a word. This inference is justified only on the basis of philosophical realism." Dove, Logic of the Christ. Faith, 141-"The Ontological Argument is the algebraic formula of the universe, which leads to a valid conclusion with regard to real existence, only when we fill it in with the objects with which we become acquainted in the arguments a posteriori." See also, Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1: 231, and in Presb. Rev., April, 1884: 212-227 (favoring the argument); Fisher, Essays, 574; Thompson, Christian Theism, 171; H. B. Smith, Introd. to Christ. Theol., 122; Pfleiderer, Die Religion, 1: 181-187; Studien und Kritiken, 1875: 611-655.

Dorner, in his Glaubenslehre, 1: 197, gives us the best statement of the Ontological Argument: "Reason thinks of God as existing. Reason would not be reason, if it did not think of God as existing. Reason only is, upon the assumption that God is." But this is evidently not argument, but only vivid statement of the necessary assumption of the existence of an absolute Reason which conditions and gives validity to ours.

Although this last must be considered the most perfect form of the ontological argument, it is evident that it conducts us only to an ideal conclusion, not to real existence. In common with the two preceding forms of the argument, moreover, it tacitly assumes, as already existing in the human mind, that very knowledge of God's existence which it would derive from logical demonstration. It has value, therefore, simply as showing what God must be, if he exists at all.

But the existence of a Being indefinitely great, a personal Cause, Contriver and Lawgiver, has been proved by the preceding arguments; for the law of parsimony requires us to apply the conclusions of the first three arguments to one Being, and not to many. To this one Being we may now ascribe the infinity and perfection, the idea of which lies at the basis of the Ontological Argument-ascribe them, not because they are demonstrably his, but because our mental constitution will not allow us to think otherwise. Thus clothing him with all perfections which the human mind can conceive, and these in illimitable fulness, we have one whom we may justly call God.

McCosh, Div. Gov't, 12, note-"It is at this place, if we do not mistake, that the idea of the Infinite comes in. The capacity of the human mind to form such an idea, or rather its intuitive belief in an Infinite of which it feels that it cannot form an adequate conception, may be no proof (as Kant maintains) of the existence of an infinite Being; but it is, we are convinced, the means by which the mind is enabled to invest the Deity, shown on other grounds to exist, with the attributes of infinity, i. e., to look on his being, power, goodness, and all his perfections, as infinite." Even Flint, Theism, 68, who holds that we reach the existence of God by inference, speaks of "necessary conditions of thought and feeling, and ineradicable aspirations, which force on us ideas of absolute existence, infinity, and perfection, and will neither permit us to deny these perfections