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Updated: May 22, 2025
He begins by purging away the realistic notion of Virtue, considered as a self-existing entity. He defines it a term expressing the relation of certain actions to certain emotions in the minds contemplating them; its universality is merely co-extensive with these minds.
Again, in 'Self-Reliance, he says, Trust thyself; insist on yourself; obey thy heart, and thou shalt reproduce the foreworld again. All this was very comforting to me, Cornelia; self-reliance was the great secret of success and happiness; but I chanced to read the 'Over-soul' soon after, and lo! these words: 'I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine. This was directly antagonistic to the entire spirit of 'self-reliance'; but I read on, and soon found the last sentence utterly nullified by one which declared positively 'that the Highest dwells with man; the sources of nature are in his own mind. Sometimes we are informed that our souls are self-existing and all-powerful; an incarnation of the divine and universal, and, before we fairly digest this tremendous statement, he coolly asserts that there is, above all, an 'over- soul, whose inevitable decrees upset our plans, and 'overpower private will. Cognizant of these palpable contradictions, Emerson boldly avows and defends them, by declaring that 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
What would they have done without it? In the person of Jesus, God perfected the divine purpose of bringing Himself into a realized nearness to the human family. He clothed Himself in our humanity, and became one with us. We are thus enabled to look upon Him, to contemplate Him, not as a great, self-existing Spirit, incomprehensible and awful, but as a man.
It is necessary to observe this, because it is the half-way-evolutionism, which professes to have a creator somewhere behind it, that is most popular; though it is, if possible, more unphilosophical than that which professes to set out with absolute and determined nonentity, or from self-existing stardust containing all the possibilities of the universe."
A quotation from the Associated Press, appearing recently in one of our magazines, states the need for this "new religion" as being the inadequacy of the religious forms and ideas of our fathers, and the new creed to be: "Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created. "Religion must formulate its hopes and plans in the light of the scientific spirit and method.
Now it is at least plain that whatever difficulty there is in thinking of the universe as either self-existing or self-adjusting is in no degree lessened by assuming a God as the originator and sustainer of the whole.
Proceeding next to examine the less superficial arguments in favour of Theism, it was first shown that the syllogism, All known minds are caused by an unknown mind; our mind is a known mind; therefore our mind is caused by an unknown mind, is a syllogism that is inadmissible for two reasons. In the first place, "it does not account for mind (in the abstract) to refer it to a prior mind for its origin;" and therefore, although the hypothesis, if admitted, would be an explanation of known mind, it is useless as an argument for the existence of the unknown mind, the assumption of which forms the basis of that explanation. Again, in the next place, if it be said that mind is so far an entity sui generis that it must be either self-existing or caused by another mind, there is no assignable warrant for the assertion. And this is the second objection to the above syllogism; for anything within the whole range of the possible may, for aught that we can tell, be competent to produce a self-conscious intelligence. Thus an objector to the above syllogism need not hold any theory of things at all; but even as opposed to the definite theory of materialism, the above syllogism has not so valid an argumentative basis to stand upon. We know that what we call matter and force are to all appearance eternal, while we have no corresponding evidence of a "mind that is even apparently eternal." Further, within experience mind is invariably associated with highly differentiated collocations of matter and distributions of force, and many facts go to prove, and none to negative, the conclusion that the grade of intelligence invariably depends upon, or at least is associated with, a corresponding grade of cerebral development. There is thus both a qualitative and a quantitative relation between intelligence and cerebral organisation. And if it is said that matter and motion cannot produce consciousness because it is inconceivable that they should, we have seen at some length that this is no conclusive consideration as applied to a subject of a confessedly transcendental nature, and that in the present case it is particularly inconclusive, because, as it is speculatively certain that the substance of mind must be unknowable, it seems
But He is what He is. Lifted above time and change, self-existing and self-determined, He is the fountain of life, the same for ever.
But the voice of my conscience cries to me: "Whatever these beings may be in and for themselves, thou shalt treat them as subsisting for themselves, as free, self-existing beings, entirely independent of thyself. Take it for granted that they are capable of proposing to themselves aims independently of thee, by their own power.
Then the sole self-existing power, himself undiscerned, but making this world discernible, with five elements and other principles of nature, appeared with undiminished glory, expanding his idea, or dispelling the gloom.
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