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Thus the antinomy of pure reason in its cosmological ideas disappears.
For the sake of perspective, it will repay us to note the order in which these primitive ideas were attacked and replaced by more adequate ones. It will be noticed that the general cosmological setting was first reconstructed and that the growing point passed thence to the center, the nature and destiny of man.
Origen in a passage sometimes quoted, appeals to the order and harmony of the world, but it is to prove the unity of God rather than His existence. Perhaps the best and most elaborate example of the use of the Cosmological argument by the Ante-Nicene authors, is that made of it by "Athenagoras the Athenian; Philosopher and Christian," as he styled himself.
We can positively conceive of none but that of placing the cosmological cart before the horse, and so harnessing "cause and effect" in tandem, that the latter shall uniformly precede the former in the chain of logical induction.
In examining, therefore, the cosmological speculations of the Babylonians as they appear in the literary productions, we must carefully distinguish between those portions which are the productions of popular fancy, and therefore old, and those parts which give evidence of having been worked out in the schools.
Sanh. 3. 57 and Taittir. Br. See the curious legends about an attendant of Śiva called Bhriṅgi who would not worship Pârvatî. The Chinese, who are equally fond of using these two principles in their cosmological speculations, adopt the opposite view. On the other hand Buddhist works called Tantras are said to have been composed in north-western India.
After this proof of the viciousness of the argument commonly employed in maintaining cosmological assertions, both parties may now be justly dismissed, as advancing claims without grounds or title. But the process has not been ended by convincing them that one or both were in the wrong and had maintained an assertion which was without valid grounds of proof.
Thus it is properly the ontological argument which figures in the cosmological, and constitutes the whole strength of the latter; while the spurious basis of experience has been of no further use than to conduct us to the conception of absolute necessity, being utterly insufficient to demonstrate the presence of this attribute in any determinate existence or thing.
The first is the physico-theological argument, the second the cosmological, the third the ontological. More there are not, and more there cannot be. I shall show it is as unsuccessful on the one path the empirical- as on the other the transcendental, and that it stretches its wings in vain, to soar beyond the world of sense by the mere might of speculative thought.
That conception, the basis perhaps of the theory of cosmological days, is perhaps also itself but a dream, yet one that, however defective, has a beauty which must have been too fair. Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, originally regarded as emanations of the ideal, became concrete. Consorts were found for them. From infinity they were lodged in idols.
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