Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/174

Rh active in Nature at creation; is not immanently present and active therein. He has now nothing to do with the world but—to see it go. Here, then, is God on the one side; on the other, Man and Nature. But there is a great gulf fixed between them, over which there passes, neither God nor Man.

This theory teaches that Man, in addition to his organs of perception, has certain intellectual faculties by which he can reason from effect to cause; can discover truth, which is the statement of a fact; from a number of facts in science can discern a scientific law, the relation of thing to thing; from a number of facts in morals, can learn the relation of man to man, deduce a moral law, which shall teach the most expedient and profitable way of managing affairs. Its statement of both scientific and moral facts rests solely on experience, and never goes beyond the precedents. Still further, it allows that men can find out there is a God, by reasoning experimentally from observations in the material world, and metaphysically also, from the connection of notions in the mind. But this conclusion is only to be reached, in either case, by a process that is long, complicated, tortuous, and so difficult that but one man in some thousands has the necessary experimental knowledge, and but one in some millions the metaphysical subtlety, requisite to go through it, and become certain that there is a God. Its notion of God is this—a Being who exists as the Power, Mind, and Will that caused the universe.

The metaphysical philosophy of this system may be briefly stated. In Man, by nature, there is nothing but man; there is but one channel by which knowledge can come into man, that is sensation; perception through the senses. That is an assumption, nobody pretends it is proved. This knowledge is modified by reflection—the mind's process of ruminating upon the knowledge which sensation affords. At any given time, therefore, if we examine what is in Man, we find nothing which has not first been in the senses. Now the senses converse only with finite phenomena. Reflection—what can it get out of