The Grounds of Theistic and Christian Belief

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Not only is the subject active in perception, but he necessarily and inevitably has an inchoate consciousness of himself as a subject in distinction from the subjects which that activity enables him to apprehend. . . . And the same is true of the idea of God which is presupposed in the division of the self from the not-self and in all other divisions of consciousness. . . . And, like the idea of self, the idea of God must at a very early period take some form for us, though it may not for a very long time take an adequate form. Man may hide his inborn sense of the infinite in vague superstitions which confuse it with the finite; but he cannot altogether escape from it, or prevent his consciousness of the finite from being disturbed by it.l Anterior to and independent of philosophy, a tacit faith in the ego, in external things, and in God, seems to pervade human experience; mixing, often unconsciously, with the lives of all; never perfectly defined, but in its fundamental ideas more or less operative; often intellectually confused, yet never without a threefold influence in human life. . . . Life is good and happy in proportion to the due acknowledgment of all the three. Confused conceptions of the three are inexhaustible sources of two extremes ? superstition and scepticism.2 But we have to look at men as they are. As a matter of fact, the consciousness of God is obscure, more latent than explicit, germinant rather than developed. It waits to be quickened and illuminated by the manifestation of God in nature and providence, and by instruction. Writers on psychology have frequently neglected to give an account of presentiment, a state of consciousness in which feeling is predominant, and knowledge is indistinct. There are vague anticipations of truth not yet clear...