) This is
a very old argument, which has always had great weight with most people,
and has appeared sufficient. It does not acquire the least additional
strength by being developed in a learned treatise. It is as intelligible
in its simple enunciation as it can be made. If it is rejected, there is
no arguing with him who rejects it: and if it is worked out into
innumerable particulars, the value of the evidence runs the risk of
being buried under a mass of words.

Man being conscious that he is a spiritual power, or that he has such a
power, in whatever way he conceives that he has it--for I wish simply to
state a fact--from this power which he has in himself, he is led, as
Antoninus says, to believe that there is a greater power, which, as the
old Stoics tell us, pervades the whole universe as the intellect[A]
([Greek: nous]) pervades man. (Compare Epictetus' Discourses, i. 14;
and Voltaire a Mad^e. Necker, vol. lxvii., p. 278, ed. Lequien.)

[A] I have always translated the word [Greek: nous],
"intelligence" or "intellect." It appears to be the word used
by the oldest Greek philosophers to express the notion of
"intelligence" as opposed to the notion of "matter." I have
always translated the word [Greek: logos] by "reason," and
[Greek: logikos] by the word "rational," or perhaps sometimes
"reasonable," as I have translated [Greek: noeros] by the word
"intellectual." Every man who has thought and has read any
philosophical writings knows the difficulty of finding words to
express certain notions, how imperfectly words express these
notions, and how carelessly the words are often used. The
various senses of the word [Greek: logos] are enough to perplex
any man. Our translators of the New Testament (St. John, c. 1.)
have simply translated [Greek: ho logos] by "the word," as the
Germans translated it by "das Wort;" but in their theological
writings they sometimes retain the original term Logos. The
Germans have a term Vernunft, which seems to come nearest to
our word Reason, or the necessary and absolute truths which we
cannot conceive as being other than what they are. Such are
what some people have called the laws of thought, the
conceptions of space and of time, and axioms or first
principles, which need no proof and cannot be proved or denied.
Accordingly the Germans can say, "Gott ist die hoechste
Vernunft," the Supreme