THE DEFENDER:

a Weekly Magazine,

OF CHRISTIAN EXPOSITION AND ADVOCACY.

Who knows not that truth is strong, next to the Almighty; she needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensings to make her victorious, those are the shifts and the defences that error uses against her power.-MILTON.

SIR,

DISCUSSION ON ATHEISM.

REJOINDER TO DEFENDER'S' LETTER I. ON THE NECESSITY FOR A GOD.'

Letter III.

In your first reply to my argument against the 'necessity for a God,' on my affirmation of the eternity of matter,' you say, 'It is only upon the mind of an unthinking man that any doubt of the existence of a God will be thrown by the fact that he does not stand revealed to the senses "like a piece of wood or a human being.' A thinking man knows of many things of which he has a far higher certainty than the material objects around him. With his bodily eye he never saw love, joy, gratitude, hope, sympathy, thought; and yet he is more certain of these spiritual facts than of any material facts whatever, and he can assure himself of a spiritual nature of which they are the phenomena, as he can never assure himself of the existence of a material world. Most unfortunate for you is your appeal to the senses. It tempts one to hand you over to the tender mercies of some Berkleian philosopher, who, if he does not lead you altogether to doubt this evidence, will at least convince you that man has much surer sources of information. It is neither by an exercise of the senses, nor by an effort of reason, that I attain the knowledge of my personal existence. Logic fails where intuition begins. The syllogism, "I think therefore I am,' deepens not my certainty. I have the same evidence for my existence as I have for my thinking. I am; I am myself and not another: these are primi

No. 1, Vol. II.

1

tive mental intuitions. Next and akin to them stands the great truth-God is.' In reply to this, I again affirm the fact of the 'impossibility of demonstrating the existence of a God to the senses,' to either one man or all MEN, and as all knowledge of every kind primarily proceeds from sensation, which, in the case of Deity, is totally wanting: this I assert to be sufficient in classing such belief as a mere hypothesis without any basis of facts to support it; and, therefore, 'Defender' is mistaken in saying that a doubt of the existence of a God will only rise in the mind of an unthinking man' in the absence of a demonstration to the senses. You assert that a thinking man knows of many things of which he has a far higher certainty than the material objects around him,' &c. You instance the fact that with his bodily eye he never say love, joy, hope,' &c. I reply, that love, joy, &c., have no separate existence of themselves; they are merely modes of existence. It would be equally as unphilosophical to ask what colour is love, or how large is joy, or what shape is gratitude, or of what magnitude is hope, or what comparison and weight is sympathy, or what extent is thought. The absurdity of these questions is manifest to the most obtuse intellect, as the above qualities are simply attributes of organised existence. They are inseparable from animal life, and are but typical of certain stages of daily experience. Supposing we ring a bell and a sound is the result-we do not separate the sound from the bell and prove the sound by a mental INTUITION, The sound has no separate existence; it is a result of the concussion of the

iron clapper with the it produces the sound, and is con

veyed to our ear by the concussion displacing the particles of air in its vicinity, which carry the sound into our sense of hearing through the ear, and is instantly transmitted to the brain by the same nerve. Yet this sound is not seen by our 'bodily ear.'

It is through the previous knowledge of the species by the senses that I can learn the attributes of the human organisation, and discover the meaning of 'love, joy,' &c. I defy my opponent to produce a single example of existence discovered by means of attributes without knowledge of the organisation to which these attributes belong; in fact, the attributes are inseparable from the organisation. Could we take size, shape, colour, and weight from a block of granite, what would then be left? And those are the attributes of stone. You speak of handing me over to some Berkleian philosopher,' so I will give you Lewes's opinion of Berkeley and Berkeley's words on this argument. *When Berke ey denied the existence of matter, he simply denied the existence of that unknown substratum, the existence of which Locke had declared to be a necessary inference from our knowledge of qualities, but the nature of which must be altogether hidden from us. Philosophers had assumed the existence of substance, ie., of a noumenon lying underneath all phenomena a substratum supporting all quali ties-a SOMETHING in which all accidents INHERE. This unknown substance Berkeley denies. "It is a mere abstraction," he says. "If it is unknown, unknowable, it is a figment, and I will one of it; for it is a figment worse than useless; it is pernicious as the basis of all atheism. If by matter you understand that which is seen, felt, tasted, and touched, then I say that matter exists. I am as firm a believer in its existence as any one can be, and herein I agree with the vulgar. If, on the contrary, you understand by matter that occult substratum which is not seen, NOT felt, NOT tasted, and not touched, that of which the senses do not, cannot, inform you, then herein I differ with the philosophers and agree with the vulgar.

"I am not for changing things into ideas," he says, "but rather ideas into things; since those immediate objects of perception, which, according to you, (Berk-1 ley might have said according to philosophers) are only appearances of things, 1 take to be the real things themselves.yum Im Ignisis y 10 97

ford what you please; but it is certain that you

'sensation; and, as the former is merely result from reflection upon

+Princip. Hum, Know,, sec, 35-40,

latter, and is unable of itself to do more than re-form the materials introduced by 'sensation,' and this duality of mental phenomena both agreeing in declaring to my 'consciousness' the fact of their being no 'necessity for a God,' and that which is particular-speaking to but one person of something another is ignorant of, and being part and parcel of the human species (which are the same everywhere), cannot give the slightest proof of the argument in dispute. You say that consciousness is the strongest evidence.' I ask you did you ever know of 'evidence' without 'consciousness?' If you did not, why say that it is the strongest,' thus admitting other evidence independent of consciousness' to a person, of which evidence I am entirely ignorant in any case whatever.

Consciousness being (as I have before stated) the aggregate impressions made upon the mind through the senses, classified by reflection, augmented by experience, and knit together by memory, cannot be separated from the evidence of sense, or demonstration. And 'intuitional certainty being higher than formal deduction,' when it is the ultimate of DEDUCTION, for I challenge my opponent to produce a single case in which 'intuitional certainty succeeded before formal induction' took place, in any science where facts are concerned, providing the 'intuition' succeeded without a knowledge of the facts in question.

A great artist can enter a picture-gallery and pass judgment on the works of art brought before his view-and by the first glance he can discern the salient points of the picture, and pass intuitively a correct judgment, but this sentence has been gained by years of study, comprising a thorough 'deduction' of the various properties of colour and shade, design and effect. The

same with a sense of the beautiful.

We praise a man who can amidst poverty and misery select an English bride, with a straight figure, good complexion, Grecian contour, and sylph-like appearance; we say, that though poor, he has an 'intuitional reverence for the symmetry of woman, the grand in humanity. But take an Arab's feeling of the artistic form of woman-he sees it in a fat and bloated form, with a rotundity of figure which destroys all our notions of elegance in structure and agility in action.

Yet this is his 'intuitional' feeling, and how can we reconcile the two. We cannot they are the results of a different educational treatment, which proves the idea of intuition' to be merely a process of instruction, and an atmosphere of circumstances peculiar to an individual, but which is not general to all.

I shall not stay to notice your feelings, I pass on to your arguments. You say, "As you so obligingly inform me that matter through the influence of all its properties, performs its necessitated chemical processes,' will you have the kindness to inform me by whom or by what these processes are necessitated, and where it got the properties which you ascribe to it ?" In the first place, I should have stated my meaning more explicitly by stating, "Matter acting upon matter" through the influences of its respective properties, &c., performs its necessitated chemical processes. If you require to know the simplest fact of chemistry, I can inform you the difference of a mechanical combination of portions of matter and natural chemical affinitions, which change one portion of matter by the action of another. But on this subject you will require no information which I can give you. You ask where it got the properties which I ascribe to it? I answer, from itself, that the properties of matter are a portion of the existence of matter, and cannot be separated from matter; if you can show me a single case where this statement is not true, I shall thank you.

You ask me to define 'Matter and Nature.' I answer, firstly, everything is 'matter' which occupies SPACE, and that which occupies space is found in three states-solid, liquid, or aeriform, and in no other form, each of these states of