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extraordinary,—I know of but one or two theologians among the many who scrape together all the reasons they can possibly find or concoct for believing in God who mention this "neglected reason" at all, and these few do so but with significant brevity; so that, since it can be unknown to none of them, candour puts me to the chagrin of confessing that even in those eyes in which every grain of affirmative argument sparkles as gold, "the neglected argument" appears as base metal.
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On a Neglected Argument for the Reality of GOD.
To do full justice to a philosophical argument while restricting oneself to the dialect of polite literature would be, I suppose, as nearly impossible as it would if the argument related to any other science, say electricity, or political economy, or linguistics. But I hope I may manage, in this article, to avoid some dangers of misapprehension due to ineluctable departures, in the cases of a few words, from the common usages of speech, by the device of accurately defining, on its first occurrence, every peculiar meaning that I propose to attach sometimes to any word, even if the peculiarities consist
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in no more than a peculiar definiteness, and thereafter invariably capitalizing the word (as we say in America; that is, printing it with a capital initial,) every time it comes to be employed in that peculiar sense. For the word 'reason' this notation will not be enough; since besides its half dozen usual meaning, I might like to use the single word for dianoetic reason, or reasoning-power; for which I should have to be content with one of these synonyms; and I shall certainly wish to speak of Reason, in the sense of that part of Common Sense which seizes upon first principles. I will capitalize it (i.e. its initial,) in such case. But what am I to call the aggregate
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of man's cognitive powers, in contradistinction to the instinct of animals, but REASON? I will print that in small capitals as I just have done.
By the proper name, God, I shall refer to that Being who possesses those Attributes which I take to be most essential to the traditional notion; that is to say, while His nature is incomprehensible, He doubtless has Attributes called by proper extension of the terms Omniscience, Omnipotence, and Infinite Benignity. This statement excludes a finite god; although the Being of God would not, as far as I see, necessarily exclude that of a whole race of beings immensely superior to ourselves, such, for example, that the whole visible universe might
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be no more than a nucleolus in a single cell of the body of one of them. But I had better add that I do not mean by God a being merely "immanent in Nature," but I mean that Being who has created every content of the world of ideal possibilities, of the world of physical facts, and the world of all minds, without any exception whatever. For the argument that I am to consider; and which, by the way, I will designate as 'The Neglected Argument,' would not be true of any other being than God. But I do not, by 'God,' mean, with some writers, a being so inscrutable that nothing at all can be known of Him. I suppose