Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/55

8 the religious element itself; it is expressed by the spontaneous intuition of Reason.

Now men come to this Idea early. It is the logical condition of all other ideas; without this as an element of our consciousness, or lying latent, as it were, and unrecognized in us, we could have no ideas at all. The senses reveal to us something external to the body, and independent thereof, on which it depends; they tell not what it is. Consciousness reveals something in like manner, not the human spirit, in me, but its absolute ground, on which the spirit depends. Outward circumstances furnish the occasion by which we approach and discover the Idea of God; but they do not furnish the Idea itself. That is a fact given by the nature of Man. Hence some philosophers have called it an innate idea; others, a reminiscence of what the spirit knew in a higher state of life before it took the body. Both opinions may be regarded as rhetorical statements of the truth that the Idea of God is a fact given by Man's nature, and not an invention or device of ours. The belief in God's existence therefore is natural, not against nature. It comes unavoidably from the legitimate action of the intellectual and the religious faculties, just as the belief in light comes from using the eyes, and belief in our existence from mere existing. The knowledge of God's existence, therefore, may be called in the language of Philosophy, an ; or in the mythological language of the elder Theology, a.

If the above statement be correct, then our belief in God's existence does not depend on the à posteriori argument,