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Updated: June 22, 2025
The opponents of Clarke charge him with begging the question in his work on The Being and Attributes of God. They say he has pretended to prove this existence a priori, which they deem impossible, seeing there is nothing anterior to the first of causes; that therefore it can only be proved a posteriori, that is to say, by its effects.
As the sufficiency of the volition can only be known a posteriori, or after experience, they imagined that there could be no cause but that which is infinite, or one which is invariably followed by the whole effect contemplated.
It embodies no formula or statable law; any formula is at best a poor abstraction, describing what, in some region and for some time, may be the most striking characteristic of existence; the law is a description a posteriori of the habit things have chosen to acquire, and which they may possibly throw off altogether. What a day may bring forth is uncertain; uncertain even to God.
Social economy, on the contrary, to which no a posteriori investigation could reveal directly the law of proportionality of values, can grasp it in the very force which produces it, and which it is time to announce. It is labor, labor alone, that produces all the elements of wealth, and that combines them to their last molecules according to a law of variable, but certain, proportionality.
It is hardly necessary again to repeat that, as in every other deductive science, verification a posteriori must proceed pari passu with deduction a priori.
II. The cosmological argument, or that one which proceeds after the posteriori fashion, from the present existence of the world as an effect, to the necessary existence of some ultimate and eternal first cause.
We should, a posteriori, be inclined to imagine a simpler answer to the question than that which Mohammed found; he might have become a missionary of Judaism or of Christianity to the Meccans. However natural such a conclusion may appear to us, from the premises with which we are acquainted, it did not occur to Mohammed.
The generalizations at present constituting the science of physiology, both general and special, have been reached a posteriori; but certain fundamental data have now been discovered, starting from which we may reason our way a priori, not only to some of the truths that have been ascertained by observation and experiment, but also to some others.
Let us now see if their labors have been more successful in applying to the solution of the difficulty the reasoning a posteriori. Archbishop King divides evil into three kinds imperfection, natural evil and moral evil including under the last head all the physical evils that arise from human actions, as well as the evils which consists in the guilt of those actions.
Had I, in reasoning a priori, asserted, That all mineral bodies might have been melted without change, when under sufficient compression, there might have arisen, in the minds of reasoning men, some doubt with regard to the certainty of that proposition, however probable it were to be esteemed: But when, in reasoning a posteriori, it is found that all mineral bodies have been actually melted, then, all that is required to establish the proposition on which I have founded my theory, is to see that there must have been immense degrees of compression upon the subjects in question; for we neither know the degree of heat which had been employed, nor that of compression by which the effect of the heat must have been modified.
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