Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/250

 adduce them at all. It is allowed, however, that they may be used in a popular way, and these helps to truth are universally employed in connection with the instruction of youth, and the edification of those who are grown up. So, too, that eloquence which has for its principal aim to warm the heart and elevate the feelings necessarily takes and uses them as the inner fundamental and connecting principles of the ideas with which it deals. With regard to the so-called Cosmological Proof, Kant (“Critique of Pure Reason,” 2nd edition, p. 643) makes the general remark that if we presuppose the existence of anything, we cannot avoid what follows from this, namely, that something or other exists in a necessary way, and that this is an absolutely natural conclusion; and he goes on further to remark, at p. 651, with regard to the Physico-theological Proof, that “it ought always to be mentioned with respect, since it is the oldest, the clearest, and the one most in harmony with ordinary human reason.” He declares that “it would not only be a comfortless task, but an absolutely useless one, to attempt to detract in any way from the authority of this proof.” He holds, further, that “reason can never be so far repressed by any doubts suggested by subtle abstract speculation as to be unable to extricate herself from any such burrowing indecision as from a dream, by the mere glance which she directs to the wonders of Nature and the majesty of the universe, in order thus to go from one form of greatness to another until the highest of all is reached, and to rise from the conditioned to the condition, until she arrives at the supreme and unconditioned Author of all.”

If, then, the proof first adduced expresses an unavoidable conclusion from which it is impossible to escape, and if it would be absolutely useless to seek to detract from the authority of the second proof, and if reason can never be so far repressed as to renounce this method of proof and not to rise through it to the unconditioned Author of all, it must certainly appear strange that we should