Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 31:122 (Apr 1874)
Article: The Foundations Of Theology Sure
Author: Thomas Hill

BSac 31:122 (April 1874) p. 209

The Foundations Of Theology Sure

Thomas Hill

It is difficult for his to distinguish between our most simple and direct inferences and the perceived facts on which we found them; and this difficulty is as real in the case of sensible as of supersensible objects. Nor is it always important for us to make the distinction; it is, in many cases, enough for us to feel the certainty of our knowledge or belief, and the reality of our emotions, without asking the grounds. As Catullus sings:

“I hate, I love; you ask why this I do?
My torture only tells me that ‘tis true.”

Sundry modern writers attempt to explain the instinctive desires and aversions on the ground of experience; Spencer calling in the experience of the ancestry to explain the fact that these desires and aversions are manifested at the very beginning of conscious life. The fact itself is patent to all observers, whether in animals or in new-born children. The appetites lead the animal directly, without tentation, to the actions which gratify them, very much as if the animal had an antecedent knowledge of the object, and of the gratification which would be yielded by its possession. In the child free to choose its mode of life the desire infallibly leads to the experience; and, although the knowledge is not innate,

BSac 31:122 (April 1874) p. 210

it is what has been called inchoate; its foundations are in the soul, and it grows with our growth.

Among the native cravings of the human soul is the craving for sympathy, for human society, which seems to imply, and which certainly develops in the child, at a very early period, a knowledge of human beings, and of its own human nature. We know the existence of our fellow men with a certainty like that of intuition or of direct sight. We are certain of the existence of beings with a nature fundamentally identical with our own—with thoughts and feelings, desires and purposes, and with a power of will like unto ours. The ground on which we base our certainty might be assumed, by some persons, to be the cumulative probability in favor of the hypothesis which would explain such an indefinite number of facts in our experience. But a child, certainly, is never conscious of weighing the probabilities whether his father or mother, his brother or sister, exist; nor does the mature mind look at it in that light. We know, of course, that there is every probability in favor of the proposition; but we drop the question of probability, and know the existence of other men as certainly as we know our own.

This voice of authority within us is the unrecognized voice of the social instincts; its authority is recognized, but not its origin; that is, we do not here, any more than in ...