therefore, to say that God is eternal is to deny that He has either thought or consciousness.
7. Again, " Benevolence, hohness, justice, wisdom," says Man- sel, " can be conceived by us only as existing in a benevolent and holy and just and wise being, who is not identical with any one of his attributes, but the common subject of them all ; in one woi*d, in a person. But personality, as we conceive it, is essentially a limi- tation and a relation. — To speak of an absolute and infinite person, is simply to use language to which, however true it may be in a superhuman sense, no mode of human thought can possibly attach itself." 1
The Conclusion to which Hamilton's Argument leads.
What then is the result of the whole matter ? It is, that if the definitions of the Absolute and Infinite adopted by transcenden- talists be admitted, the laws of reason lead us into a labyrinth of contradictions. If their idea of an infinite and absolute Being be correct, then it must include all being actual and possible ; it can neither know nor be the object of knowledge ; it cannot be con- scious, or cause, or a person, or the subject of any moral attribute. Hamilton infers from all this, that a philosophy of the Absolute is a sheer impossibility ; that the Absolute, from its nature and from the necessary limits of human thought, is unknowable, and conse- quently that the stupendous systems of pantheistic atheism which had been erected on the contrary assumption, must fall to the ground. Those systems have indeed already fallen by their own weight. Although only a few years ago they claimed the homage of the intellectual world and boasted of immutabihty, they have at the present time scarcely a living advocate.
Unhappily, however, Hamilton, like Samson, is involved in the ruin which he created. In overthrowing pantheism he overthrows Theism. All that he says of the Absolute as unknowable, he affirms to be true of God. All the contradictions which attend the assumption of an absolute and infinite being as the ground of philos- ophy, he says attend the assumption of an infinite God.
§ 3. Hamilton's Doctrine.
A. Crod an Object of Faith, but not of Knowledge.
The sense in which Hamilton and his followers represent God
as unknowable, has been a matter of dispute. When he says that
we can know that God is, but not what He is, he says only what
1 Mansel, pp. 102, 103.
350 PART L — THEOLOGY. [Ch. IV. — Can God be known ?
had been said a hundred times before. Plato had said that the search after God was difficult, and that when He is found, it is im- possible to declare his nature. Philo still more explicitly teaches that the divine essence is without qualities or attributes, and as we know nothing of any essence but by its distinguishing attributes, God in his own nature is altogether unknowable. -"^ This is repeated continually by the Greek and Latin fathers ; who, however, in most cases at least, meant nothing more than that God is incomprehen- sible. Others again, in asserting the incapacity of man to know God, refer to his spiritual blindness occasioned by sin. Therefore, while they deny that God can be known by the unregenerate, they affirm that He is known by those to whom the Son has revealed Him, In like manner although the Apostle asserts that even the heathen know^ God, he elsewhere speaks of a kind of knowledge due to the saving illumination of the Holy Spirit. It is in the sense that God is past finding out that the devout Pascal says,^ " We know there is an infinite, but we are ignorant of its nature. We may well know that^there is a God, without know- ing what He is." And even John Owen says, " All the rational conceptions of the minds of men are swallowed up and lost, w-hen they would exercise themselves directly on that which is absolute, immense, eternal, and infinite. When we say it is so, we know not what we say, but only that it is not otherwise. What we deny of God we know in some measure — but what we affirm we know not ; only we declare what we believe and adore." ^ Professor Tyler adds, that while the philosophy of Hamilton " confines our knowledge to the conditioned [the finite], it leaves faith free about the unconditioned [the infinite] ; indeed constrains us to believe in it by the highest law of our intelligence."
Although Hamilton often uses the same language when speaking of God as unknowable, as that employed by others, his meaning is very different. He really teaches an ignorance of God destructive of all rational religion, because inconsistent with the possibility of faith.
Different Kinds of Ignorance.
There are different kinds of ignorance. First, there is the igno- rance of the idiot, which is blank vacuity. In him the statement of a proposition awakens no mental action whatever. Secondly, there is the ignorance of a blind man, of colour. He does not know what colour is ; but he knows there is something which answers to
I Strauss, Dogmatik, i. p. 527. 2 Pensees, partie n. art. iii 5-
8 Tyler's Progress of Philosophy, second edit. p. 147.