Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/175

123 these? The Absolute? The premise does not warrant the conclusion. Something “as good as Infinite?” Let us see. It makes a scientific law a mere generalization from observed facts which it can never go beyond. Its science, therefore, is in the rear of observation; we do not know thereby whether the next stone shall fall to the ground or from it. All it can say of the universality of any law of science, is this, “So far as we have seen, it is so.” It cannot pass from the Particular to the Universal. It makes a moral law the result of external experience, merely an induction from moral facts; not the affirmation of Man's moral nature declaring the eternal rule of Right. It learns Morality by seeing what plan succeeds best in the long run. Its Morality, therefore, is Selfishness verified by experiment. A man in a new case, for which he can find no precedents, knows not what to do. He is never certain he is right till he gets the reward. Its moral law at present, like the statute law, is the slowly elaborated product of centuries of experience. It pretends to find out God, as a law in science, solely, by reasoning from effect to cause; from a plan to the designer. Then on what does a man's belief in God depend? On man's nature, acting spontaneously? No; for there is nothing in man but man, and nothing comes in but sensations, which do not directly give us God. It depends on reflection, argument, that process of reasoning mentioned before. Now admitting that sensation affords sufficient premise for the conclusion, there is a difficulty in the way. The man must either depend on his own reasoning, or that of another. In the one case he may be mistaken, in an argument so long, crooked, and difficult. It is at best an inference. The “Hypothesis of a God,” as some impiously call it—may thus rest on no better argument than the hypothesis of Vortices, or Epicycles. In the other case, if we trust another man, he may be mistaken; still worse, may design to deceive the inquirer, as, we are told, the Heathen Sages did. Where, then, is the certain conviction of any God at all? This theory allows none. Its “proof of the existence of God” is a proof of the possibility of a God; perhaps of his probability; surely no more.

But the case is yet worse. In any argumentation there must be no more expressed in the conclusion than is lo-