Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/700

 its qualities, will resemble it also in the quality yet to be established. In exploring, for instance, some deserted spot, we find traces of a building. Now, previous experience has taught us that such buildings are only found where human builders have made them. We conclude, therefore, that we have stumbled upon a work of human hands. Suppose we explore further and find the remains of the building very extensive. We now draw the further inference that it was inhabited by a wealthy man, because we know that only the wealthy can afford to live in magnificent houses. But if prolonged excavation lead to the discovery of long rows of buildings, of various sizes and having streets between them, we confidently assert that we have unearthed a ruined city; for we are aware that no single man, however rich or powerful, is likely to have built so much. Of these three inferences, the first only is, strictly speaking, infallibly true. But the others are rendered by familiar analogies so highly probable as to be practically certain. Now let the thing sought be, not some single cause of a single phenomenon, or the various causes of various phenomena, but the ultimate cause of all phenomena whatever,—where is the corresponding case on which we can proceed to argue? Plainly there is none. There is no other world or system to which we can appeal and say, "Those stars and those planets were made by a God, therefore our own sun and its planets must have been made by a God also." Every single argument we can frame to establish the existence of deity assumes in its major premiss the very thing to be proved. It takes for granted that phenomenal objects require a cause, and were not the idea of this necessity already in the mind it could not take one single step. For if it be contended, say, that the world could not exist without a Creator, we have but to ask, "Why not?" and our adversary can proceed no further with his argument. All he can ever do is to appeal to a sentiment in us corresponding to the sentiment of which he himself is conscious.

Thus it appears that neither direct observation, nor reasoning, which is generalized observation, supplies the material for an induction as to the existence of an Unknowable Cause. Yet this idea is so persistent in the human race as to resist every effort to do without it. In one form or another it invariably