(_c_) There is more in this knowledge than reasoning could ever have furnished. Men do not limit their belief in God to the just conclusions of argument. The arguments for the divine existence, valuable as they are for purposes to be shown hereafter, are not sufficient by themselves to warrant our conviction that there exists an infinite and absolute Being. It will appear upon examination that the _a priori_ argument is capable of proving only an abstract and ideal proposition, but can never conduct us to the existence of a real Being. It will appear that the _a posteriori_ arguments, from merely finite existence, can never demonstrate the existence of the infinite. In the words of Sir Wm. Hamilton (Discussions, 23)--"A demonstration of the absolute from the relative is logically absurd, as in such a syllogism we must collect in the conclusion what is not distributed in the premises"--in short, from finite premises we cannot draw an infinite conclusion.
Whately, Logic, 290-292; Jevons, Lessons in Logic, 81; Thompson, Outline Laws of Thought, sections 82-92; Calderwood, Philos. of Infinite, 60-69, and Moral Philosophy, 238; Turnbull, in Bap. Quarterly, July, 1872:271; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 239; Dove, Logic of Christian Faith, 21. Sir Wm. Hamilton: "Departing from the particular, we admit that we cannot, in our highest generalizations, rise above the finite." Dr. E. G. Robinson: "The human mind turns out larger grists than are ever put in at the hopper." There is more in the idea of God than could have come out so small a knot-hole as human reasoning. A single word, a chance remark, or an attitude of prayer, suggests the idea to a child. Helen Keller told Phillips Brooks that she had always known that there was a God, but that she had not known his name. Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 119--"It is a foolish assumption that nothing can be certainly known unless it be reached as the result of a conscious syllogistic process, or that the more complicated and subtle this process is, the more sure is the conclusion. Inferential knowledge is always dependent upon the superior certainty of immediate knowledge." George M. Duncan, in Memorial of Noah Porter, 246--"All deduction rests either on the previous process of induction, or on the intuitions of time and space which involve the Infinite and Absolute."