This very difficulty, indeed, in some moods, may minister to a temporary
doubt. For let us catch man in those moods,--perhaps after long
meditation on the metaphysical grounds of human belief,--and he begins
to doubt, with unusual modesty, whether the child of dust is warranted
to conclude anything on a subject which loses itself in the infinite,
and which so far transcends all his powers of apprehension; he begins
half to doubt, with Hume, whether he can reason analogically from the
petty specimens of human ingenuity to phenomena so vast and so unique;
a misgiving which is strengthened by reflecting on all those to him
incomprehensible inferences to which the admission of the argument leads
him, and which seem almost to involve contradictions. Let him ponder for
awhile the ideas involved in the notion of Selfsubsistence, Eternity,
Creation; Power, Wisdom, and Knowledge, so unlimited as to embrace at
once all things, and all their relations, actual and possible,--this
'unlimited' expanding into a dim apprehension of the 'infinite';--of
infinitude of attributes, omnipresent in every point of space, and
yet but one and not many infinitudes;--let him once humbly ponder such
incomprehensible difficulties as these, and he will soon feel that
though in the argument from design, there seemed but one vast scene of
triumph for his reason, there is as large a scene of exertion left for
his faith.
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