the gods were created first. They were regarded as gods presiding over and revealed in the various powers and greater objects of nature. In recognizing them as created, these legends necessarily imply an absolute power transcending all these nature-gods and bringing them into being. Something like this is more or less clearly implied in the worship of nature-gods in all the polytheistic religions.

The same principle holds true of man's knowledge of God, in the second aspect of his being, as Spirit; the idea of God as Spirit and the belief in his existence as such precede the intellectual process of verification and definition. In all religions man spontaneously believes that the divinity whom he worships is an intelligent personal Spirit, that he is himself dependent on the divinity, can come into communication with him in worship, can gain his favor by service rendered to him and incur punishment for displeasing him; and with rare, if any, exceptions, even in the lower stages of development, he associates his religion with morality and believes that the God whom he worships punishes wrongdoers and favors those who do right. In the lower stages of development his conception of the Divinity as Spirit may be imperfect, yet it is always the conception of the god as an intelligent personal being, whatever the form in which he conceives him when he comes to him in worship. Thus he finds the divinity as personal Spirit in his spontaneous religious beliefs, before he enters on the intellectual processes of reflective thought in which he seeks reasonable grounds justifying his belief and ascertains more fully what the divinity is and what are his relations to man and the universe. This is true of man in his highest development and civilization as really as in the lower stages of his development.

2. The spontaneous belief in God presupposes God's action revealing himself to men.

The knowledge of God is not attained by pure speculative thinking, but presupposes God's own action revealing himself to men. This dependence of our knowledge of God, the absolute Spirit, on his action revealing himself, is analogous to physical science and to all knowledge. Man is waked to consciousness of the outward world and of himself only by the action of the outward world upon him. He can know the outward world only as it reveals itself to him by acting on him through his sensorium and

as he extends his knowledge of it, beyond what has been thus revealed to him under his observation, by reasoning on the data. thus given. So, in close analogy with the method of physical science, we seek to ascertain what God is by tracing out the revelation which he has made of himself in various lines and in reasoning on the facts thus ascertained.

man's spontaneous This is analogous

God's action revealing himself precedes belief and his ratiocinated knowledge of him. to man's knowledge of the physical world. The outward world first acts on him through his sensorium; then he reacts on it and perceives it. Thus man has knowledge of his physical environment as it reveals itself to him, and of himself as thus environed. So God acts in the various lines in which he reveals himself as rational Spirit to man, and the spirit of man reacts and perceives God. Thus man knows God as his spiritual environment, and himself as environed by God. No finite mind can acquire real knowledge of any outward object by mere subjective thinking. The perceiving and thinking must be preceded by some action of the object revealing itself. God alone has absolute knowledge independent of any environment.

3. The spontaneous belief in God is defined, verified, and developed by intellectual investigation in the light of reason of the facts and realities in which we find God revealed in the various lines of his revelation of himself, ascertaining their significance, relations, and unity, and their harmony with the truths, laws, and ideals of reason.

First, rational investigation confirms the spontaneous belief in God as the absolute Being. When, haunted by the mystery of the transcendent absolute Being, man brings it into the light of reason, he finds it demanded by reason not less than by religion. When we know that the universe exists, it is a necessary principle of reason that some absolute Being exists unconditioned by any power or reality independent of itself, the Being that the universe depends on for its existence and that is manifested or revealed in the creation and evolution of the universe. Something cannot be originated from nothing. An absolute beginning of being, or power, out of nothing is impossible.

This accords with the history of human thought. The existence of an absolute Being is implied, if not definitely apprehended, in spontaneous belief in the religions of all races. It is

recognized as known in a necessary principle of reason in the philosophy of Greece and Rome, as well as in oriental Brahmanism and Buddhism. At the present day materialists, pantheists, and Spencerian agnostics agree with the theist in affirming that some absolute Being must exist. It is denied only by extreme positivists, who equally deny that man can have knowledge of any real being and teach that all human knowledge is only of subjective appearances or phenomena; that is, that all man's alleged knowledge is only of illusions. As man advances in development and civilization, the belief that the absolute Being exists is found to be, not only the spontaneous and unelaborated belief in all religions, but also to be scientifically and philosophically true. It is a necessary, self-evident principle of reason that some absolute or unconditioned Being exists. It is equally a necessary principle of reason that only one absolute Being can exist. The supposition that there may be two is absurd. If contemporaneous, each would condition and limit the other; if existing one after the other, each would be limited and conditioned in time as well as by the other. Thus neither could be the absolute Being, but each would be finite and conditioned.

When the existence of the absolute Being is acknowledged, the question arises whether the universe itself may not be the absolute Being. The answer is given in the so-called Cosmological argument. This is simply the evidence that the universe is conditioned and limited in space and time, is composed of parts, is dependent and ever changing, and therefore cannot be the absolute Being. For this conclusion the evidence is decisive.1 The objection to the argument as invalid rests on the mistake that it is designed to prove the existence of an absolute Being merely by reasoning from effect to cause, which can never carry us beyond the series of finite causes and effects. That the absolute Being exists is a self-evident principle of reason.

Here it is objected that, if so, it gives only a necessary subjective idea of reason, but not an objectively real absolute Being. The reply is that all necessary principles of reason present themselves in consciousness only on occasion of knowing some being in experience. The law of continuity that every beginning or change has a cause, and the law of uniformity that the same combination of causes will always produce the same effect, on 1 See "The Self-Revelation of God," chap. xi. VOL. I. 4

which all physical science rests, are themselves self-evident, unprovable principles of reason as really as is the belief in the existence of the absolute Being. But we become conscious of them as true only on observing some beginning or change in being. Thus in their very essence they carry the knowledge of being in its objective reality. The same is true of the principle that some absolute Being must exist. It arises on occasion of our knowledge of being in its objective reality and carries that knowledge in it as really as do the laws of continuity and uniformity. If this gives only a subjective idea without objective reality, the same must be true of the laws of continuity and uniformity and of all the necessary principles of reason which regulate all human thinking and on which all science rests; and the assumed knowledge, in observation and experience, of being in its objective reality, on occasion of which these principles assert themselves in consciousness, would be equally unreal, all human knowledge would be empty of objective content, and the whole universe only a subjective illusion like the Hindu Maia. The knowledge of the absolute Being as objectively real is essential to any rational recognition of the reality of human knowledge and of the actual existence of ourselves and of the world in which we live. The objection is valid only against speculations on the absolute abstracted from being, an adjective without a noun. Such an absolute is a mere zero indicating the vanishing point of human thought. This has often been the error of seemingly profound speculations on the absolute.

The conclusion is inevitable that some absolute Being exists; and that this absolute Being is not the universe itself, but transcends the universe and manifests itself in it. As Spencer says, it is the Power that manifests itself in the universe and wells up in human consciousness.1

Secondly, in the process of rational investigation we also find reasonable grounds for our spontaneous belief in God as a rational Spirit, revealed in the constitution, order, and evolution of the universe.

The evidence of this has been called the Physico-theological argument. We have found that the universe is symbolic of

1 See "The Philosophical Basis of Theism," chap. xii.; "The SelfRevelation of God," chap. viii. ix. x.

2 The Self-Revelation of God, chap. xii.

rational truth, ordered under rational law, progressive toward the realization of rational ideals, subservient to rational uses, and existing in the unity and continuity of a reasonable and scientific system. These evidences of the action of rational Spirit are found in innumerable particulars. Evolution shows that they are revealed also in the physical universe as a whole, progressively through successive epochs realizing a rational ideal in accordance with rational law.

It must be added that all science rests on the postulate that the universe is grounded in reason, that it is constituted and has been evolved in accordance with principles of reason the same in kind with human reason. All science assumes that the law of continuity that every beginning or change must have a cause, the law of uniformity that the same combination of causal agencies must always produce the same effect, the principles of mathematics, and other universal principles of human reason, are true throughout all space and.all time. If not, astronomy, chemistry, physics, and all other sciences break down and give no real knowledge. Science not only postulates absolute Reason as the ground of the universe, but it reasons on observed facts in accordance with these principles, assuming that they are true everywhere and always; then it finds by further observation that its conclusions from reasoning according to these principles are correct. Thus it both assumes as a postulate and finds by observation that the universe is everywhere constituted and evolved in accordance with the principles of reason the same in kind with human reason. Accordingly it is both the necessary postulate of all science and the actual discovery of all science, so far as it has attained knowledge of the universe, that the universe is grounded in absolute Reason, that reveals itself as such throughout the universe so far as science has explored it, and is in its fundamental principles and constituent elements the same in kind with human reason. Reason thus revealing itself in the constitution and evolution of the universe is God. The whole fabric of human knowledge and of all science rests on the postulate that God, the absolute Spirit, exists and is revealing himself in the universe.

Science is continuously finding that the absolute Being reveals himself in the physical universe as acting always in the light of reason and in accordance with reason whose fundamental principles, laws, and ideals are the same with those which are the