Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3)Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Religion
Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3)
Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Baptists -- Doctrines; Theology, Doctrinal
Mansel, Metaphysics, 52, 279—“To describe experience as the cause
of the idea of space would be as inaccurate as to speak of the
soil in which it was planted as the cause of the oak—though the
planting in the soil is the condition which brings into
manifestation the latent power of the acorn.” Coleridge: “We see
before we know that we have eyes; but when once this is known, we
perceive that eyes must have preëxisted in order to enable us to
see.” Coleridge speaks of first truths as “those necessities of
mind or forms of thinking, which, though revealed to us by
experience, must yet have preëxisted in order to make experience
possible.” McCosh, Intuitions, 48, 49—Intuitions are “like flower
and fruit, which are in the plant from its embryo, but may not be
actually formed till there have been a stalk and branches and
leaves.” Porter, Human Intellect, 501, 519—“Such truths cannot be
acquired or assented to first of all.” Some are reached last of
all. The moral intuition is often developed late, and sometimes,
even then, only upon occasion of corporal punishment. “Every man
is as lazy as circumstances will admit.” Our physical laziness is
occasional; our mental laziness frequent; our moral laziness
incessant. We are too lazy to think, and especially to think of
religion. On account of this depravity of human nature we should
expect the intuition of God to be developed last of all. Men
shrink from contact with God and from the thought of God. In fact,
their dislike for the intuition of God leads them not seldom to
deny all their other intuitions, even those of freedom and of
right. Hence the modern “psychology without a soul.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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