_. The idea of
God is a complex idea, and not a simple idea. The affirmation, "God
exists," is a _synthetic_ and _primitive_ judgment spontaneously
developed in the mind, and developed, too, independent of all reflective
reasoning. It is a necessary deduction from the facts of the outer world
of nature and the primary intuitions of the inner world of reason--a
logical deduction from the self-evident truths given in sense,
consciousness, and reason. "We do not _perceive_ God, but we _conceive_
Him upon the faith of this admirable world exposed to view, and upon the
other world, more admirable still, which we bear in ourselves."[213]
Therefore we do not say that man is born with an "innate idea" of God,
nor with the definite proposition, "there is a God," written upon his
soul; but we do say that the mind is pregnant with certain natural
principles, and governed, in its development, by certain necessary laws
of thought, which determine it, by a _spontaneous logic_, to affirm the
being of a God; and, furthermore, that this judgment may be called
_innate_ in the sense, that it is the primitive, universal, and
necessary development of the human understanding which "is innate to
itself and equal to itself in all men."[214]

[Footnote 213: Cousin, "True, Beautiful and Good," p.102.]

[Footnote 214: Leibnitz.]

As the vital and rudimentary germ of the oak is contained in the acorn;
as it is quickened and excited to activity by the external conditions of
moisture, light, and heat, and is fully de developed under the fixed and
determinative laws of vegetable life--so the germs of the idea of God
are present in the human mind as the intuitions of pure reason
(_Rational Psychology_); these intuitions are excited to energy by our
experiential and historical knowledge of the facts and laws of the
universe (_Phenomenology_); and these facts and intuitions are developed
into form by the necessary laws of the intellect (_Nomology_, or
_Primordial Logic_).

The _logical demonstration_ of the being of God commences with the
analysis of thought. It asks, What are the ideas which exist in the
human intelligence? What are their actual characteristics, and what
their primitive characteristics? What is their origin, and what their
validity? Having, by this process, found that some of our ideas are
subjective, and some objective that some are derived from experience,
and that some can not be derived from experience, but are inherent in
the