knowledge in the feeling of absolute and infinite dependence. This they claim to be an inseparable element of every man's self- consciousness, and they represent this feeling as apprehending God immediately as he is in himself, an infinite being, embracing and conditioning our dependent being upon every hand. Schell- ing, Cousin, and others maintain that human reason, in its high- est exercise, is capable of an immediate intuition of the infinite, and thus God is directly seen in his all-perfect being, by the appropriate organ of such an infinite knowledge in the human soul.
Both of these pretended ways of the immediate and adequate apprehension of the infinite are disproved by the self-evident principle that the mind in every thought contains the conception which it forms of its object, but a finite mind cannot contain an infinite thought. We may know that God is infinite, but we can form only a finite conception of him. -Every form of human consciousness, whether of thought or of feeling, is finite, and de- pends upon conditions, but the infinite has no limits or condi- tions. We believe God to be infinite, but we positively conceive of him only as indefinitely great, that is, of a degree of greatness from which we remove one by one the limitations which inhere in all human thinking. — See Mansel's Limits of Eeligious Thought, pp. 101, 122, 124, and Sir William Hamilton's Discussions, pp. 29, 30.
17. What is the Cosmological argument, or that argument which deduces the necessary existence of a First Self-existent Cause from the fact that the ivorld certainly exists, and is evi- dently an effect ?
Whatever exists must have a cause, either without or within itself. It must either have at some time been brought into ex- istence by some preexistent cause, or it must have the necessary cause of its own existence in itself. If it have the necessary cause of its own existence in itself, it must be eternal, for the same necessary cause must have operated equally at all times, and if there ever was a time when it was not, it never could have caused itself to be.
Thus far even the Atheist, Pantheist, Materialist, and Idealist all agree with us. They maintain, however, under different forms,
20 THE BEING OF GOD.
the view that the world itself is eternal. We maintain that the world is not self-existent, but an effect created by a God.
18. What is a cause, and whence do ive derive our conviction that every effect must have a cause ?
A spiritual cause is a spirit originating its own acts and pro- ducing its effect out of its own energy. An effect is some new thing or change produced by the power or efficiency residing in the cause.
" A material cause consists always in two or more material substances with their active properties sustaining a certain rela- tion to one another in a certain state, and the effect is the same substances in another state. Thus, when a hammer is made to strike a stone and break it, the cause consists of the hammer and stone in one state and relation, and the effect the hammer and stone in the state they are after the blow." — McCosh, Divine Government, p. 100.
The conviction that every effect must have a cause is an origi- nal and essential law of our intelligence, which, instead of being deduced as a consequence from experience, is involved in those elementary processes of thought upon which all experience de- pends. The judgment is not simply, that every change which we have ever seen did have a cause, but that every change of every kind, past, present, and future, must have a cause, and further, a cause adequate to produce the effect.
19. Hoiv can it be proved that the world is an effect ?
The entire world, in all of its departments, as far as it is cog- nizable by our senses, consists of the results of past changes and of present changes, proceeding in continual succession. Now either one of these three things must be true :
I. Either there must be supposed one or more eternal, self- existent beings, which have the cause of their existence necessarily in themselves, and which cause all the succession of dependent changes which we see proceeding around us.
Or, II. All these dependent changes which we see passing around us are only the necessary modifications of the one univer- sal, necessary, self-existent substance. This is the Pantheistic theory, and is disproved below, under question 35.
THE WOKLD AN EFFECT. 21