Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/627

No. 5.] interest this latest product of his philosophic thinking. In 1890, as the author tells us in his preface, he was called upon to deliver a course of lectures on theism before the Theological College at Salisbury. These lectures were given again in London in 1891, and are now published with some additions in the present volume. After the introductory chapter, in which the problem and the outline of its solution are set forth, two chapters are devoted to a cursory sketch of the historical development of the theistic idea. In the next two chapters on 'Inadequate and Partial Theism,' the ontological, the cosmological, and the teleological arguments are presented and criticised in the conventional manner. The essential error in Descartes' argument is clearly shown, but our author fails to point out the peculiar subtlety which has given this form of the ontological proof such a vivid semblance of solidity. Descartes says: "Necessary existence is contained in the nature or the concept of God. Hence it may be with truth affirmed that necessary existence is in God, or that God exists." 'Necessary existence' is simply transmuted into 'necessary existence,' and the change of emphasis and the double meaning of 'necessary' make the illusion almost perfect. In the teleological argument two branches are distinguished; first, the popular argument from design, which is subjected to some fifteen pages of criticism and pronounced 'fallacious,' 'illusory,' and 'incomplete'; and second, the argument which the author calls a 'nomo-theological one,' and which he states as follows: "Another branch is the argument from the order of the Universe,—the types or laws of Nature, indicating, it is said, an Orderer or law-giver whose intelligence we discern. In this case it is not that the adjustment of means to ends proves the presence of a mind that has adjusted them; but that the law itself, in its regularity and continuity, implies a mind behind it, an intelligence animating the otherwise soul-less universe." (p. 60.) No further statement or criticism of this argument is given. If by this is meant that the intelligibility of phenomena implies that they are manifestations of intelligence, we can only wish that this view had been subjected to the same critical scrutiny as the more common forms of the design-argument. In the next two chapters, on 'the Metaphysics of Physics' and on 'Causality,' the constructive effort of the book begins, and this effort culminates in the next, the eighth chapter, which is entitled 'the Evidence of Intuition.' A few quotations will best show the view of intuitive evidence which is found to cover the only sufficient and the all convincing ground for theistic belief. "Intuition is the root of all evidence.… The only