Mind_, the
Source of all the intelligence, and order, and harmony which pervades
the universe the Fountain of law and justice; the Ruler of the world;
the Avenger of injured innocence; and the final Judge of men. The
immortality of the soul and a state of future retribution were necessary
corollaries of this sublime faith. This primitive theology was
unquestionably the people's faith; the faith, also, of the philosopher,
in his inmost heart, however far he might wander in speculative thought.
The instinctive feeling of the human heart, the spontaneous intuitions
of the human reason, have led man, in every age, to recognize a God. It
is within the fields of speculative thought that skepticism has had its
birth. Any thing like atheism has only made its appearance amid the
efforts of human reason to explain the universe. The native sentiments
of the heart and the spontaneous movements of the reason have always
been towards faith, that is, towards "a religious movement of the
soul."[392] Unbridled speculative thought, which turns towards the outer
world alone, and disregards "the voices of the soul," tends towards
_doubt_ and irreligion. But, as Cousin has said, "a complete
extravagance, a total delusion (except in case of real derangement), is
impossible." "Beneath reflection there is still spontaneity, when the
scholar has denied the existence of a God; listen to the man,
interrogate him unawares, and you will see that all his words betray the
idea of a God, and that faith in a God is, without his recognition, at
the bottom of his heart."[393]

[Footnote 391: "Intellectual System of the Universe;" see also ch. iii.,
"On the Religion of the Athenians."]

[Footnote 392: Cousin's "Hist. of Philos.," vol. i. p. 22.]

[Footnote 393: Id., ib., vol. i. p. 137.]

Let us not, therefore, be too hasty in representing the early
philosophers as destitute of the idea of a God, because in the imperfect
and fragmentary representations which are given us of the philosophical
opinions of Thales, and Anaximenes, and Heraclitus, and Diogenes of
Apollonia, we find no explicit allusions to the _Uncreated Mind_ as the
first principle and cause of all. A few sentences will comprehend the
whole of what remains of the opinions of the earliest philosophers, and
these were transmitted for ages by _oral_ tradition. To Plato and
Aristotle we are chiefly indebted for a stereotype of those scattered,
fragmentary sentences which came to their hands t