, without the help of
revelation, attained to a knowledge or at least to a conception of God
in one of two ways, either by meditating on the operations of his own
mind, or by observing the processes of external nature: inward
experience and outward experience have conducted him by different roads
to the same goal. By whichever of them the conception has been reached,
it is regularly employed to explain the causal connexion of things,
whether the things to be explained are the ideas and emotions of man
himself or the changes in the physical world outside of him. In short, a
God is always brought in to play the part of a cause; it is the
imperious need of tracing the causes of events which has driven man to
discover or invent a deity. Now causes may be arranged in two classes
according as they are perceived or unperceived by the senses. For
example, when we see the impact of a billiard cue on a billiard ball
followed immediately by the motion of the ball, we say that the impact
is the cause of the motion. In this case we perceive the cause as well
as the effect. But, when we see an apple fall from a tree to the ground,
we say that the cause of the fall is the force of gravitation exercised
by the superior mass of the earth on the inferior mass of the apple. In
this case, though we perceive the effect, we do not perceive the cause,
we only infer it by a process of reasoning from experience. Causes of
the latter sort may be called inferential or hypothetical causes to
distinguish them from those which are perceived. Of the two classes of
causes a deity belongs in general, if not universally, to the second,
that is, to the inferential or hypothetical causes; for as a rule at all
events his existence is not perceived by our senses but inferred by our
reason. To say that he has never appeared in visible and tangible form
to men would be to beg the question; it would be to make an assertion
which is incapable of proof and which is contradicted by a multitude of
contrary affirmations recorded in the traditions or the sacred books of
many races; but without being rash we may perhaps say that such
appearances, if they ever took place, belong to a past order of events
and need hardly be reckoned with at the present time. For all practical
purposes, therefore, God is now a purely inferential or hypothetical
cause; he may be invoked to explain either our own thoughts and
feelings, our impulses and emotions, or the manifold states and