Reason and Redemption [pp. 409-437]

436 REASON AND REDEMPTION. [July,
the ground of the experience doctrine;* that doctrine involving the postulate as to nescience. But the experience doctrine,
when tracked out, leads inevitably to a committal in favor of
Pantheism or Nihilism, and thus of Atheism. Reject the experience doctrine, and you have, ipso facto, reinstated "the funda
mental laws of thought;" the true Intuitionalism - of which
the false, philosophic Mysticism is but a seductive counterfeit.
Then is ree'stablished the law of causation as a law of objective
existence, no less than as a law of thought. This again involves
the confutation of the empirical skepticism of Hume and the
French and English schools of scientific positivists, as well as
of the transcendental skepticism of Kant and the German
idealists, naturalists, and absolutists. The inconsistent Realism
of Kant sinks under the same blow (to wit, the proof of selfcontradiction) which demolishes the utterly different, but
equally inconsistent, Realism of Spencer. With the restoration
of final and efficient causes, even in the ultimate sense, return
in all their ancient force, the cosmological, teleological, historical, moral, and religious arguments for the being and attributes of God. There follow in due ~equence not only the
possibility, but certainty, of the supernatural, the fact of miracles and prophecy, and the indissoluble concord of Reason
and Redemption.
Look at it as we may, therefore, the "Scientific Materialism"
of the Agnostic type, no less than that of which the hostility
to Revealed Religion is even more pronounced, comes back at
last to one of the varied forms of Atheism. So far as we are
able to judge, the modern advocate of iconoclastic nescience
is like one who, having discovered at the dawn a baffling riddle
graven in the eternal rock, should lie down at night in despair
of a solution, and arise in the morning to find that solution in
his own undoing.t We have attempted in this article to show
that the several assumptions, on which alone the counter-argument of the infidel is tenable, are alike without foundation in
reason. We have been led to conclude that Deism, Pantheism,
*The doctrine (with all its varieties) held in common by Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hi~me, Bentham, the Mills, Comte, Bain, Spencer, Lewes, etc.
~We are indebted for this image (though not for its application) to Hegel, who
applies it very differently to Jacobi. See AJoali, p. 6o~ and for the authorship,
Chq!5'j'~s, p. 66, Andover, 1854.