Note (return) — Chapter V

(ii.) We do not hold that the idea of God, in its completeness, is a simple, direct, and immediate intuition of the reason alone, independent of all experience, and all knowledge of the external world. The idea of God is a complex idea, and not a simple idea. The affirmation, "God exists," is a synthetic and primitive judgment spontaneously developed in the mind, and developed, too, independent of all reflective reasoning. It is a necessary deduction from the facts of the outer world of nature and the primary intuitions of the inner world of reason--a logical deduction from the self-evident truths given in sense, consciousness, and reason. "We do not perceive God, but we conceive Him upon the faith of this admirable world exposed to view, and upon the other world, more admirable still, which we bear in ourselves." 213 Therefore we do not say that man is born with an "innate idea" of God, nor with the definite proposition, "there is a God," written upon his soul; but we do say that the mind is pregnant with certain natural principles, and governed, in its development, by certain necessary laws of thought, which determine it, by a spontaneous logic, to affirm the being of a God; and, furthermore, that this judgment may be called innate in the sense, that it is the primitive, universal, and necessary development of the human understanding which "is innate to itself and equal to itself in all men." 214