A similar process has been going on throughout the history of religion. For instance, the idea of God as Father suggested itself first in connection with the love of animals or men for their progeny. But the latter contains no proof of the former. The idea is suggested to the consciousness by particular facts; but those who understand it at all, accept it on its own evidence; and forthem it henceforth governs their ideas of particularfacts.
Superstition has always been trying to cumber our ideas about God with the pomposity, or vengefulness, or jealousy, or whatever vice happened to prevail in the parents of the particular era. Philosophy has always been trying to algebraize our conception of Fatherhood; to present the normal or Ideal Father; and to induce human fathers to conform their conduct to this Ideal.
The difference between our imperfect and fumbling knowledge of things, and our absolute and perfect knowledge about Laws of Thought, has been thus described:—
"The general Laws of Nature are not, for the most part, immediate objects of perception. They are either inductive inferences from a large body of facts,[1] the common truth in which they express, or, in their origin at least, physical hypotheses of a causal nature, serving to explain phenomena and to predict new combinations of them. They are in all cases, and in the strictest sense of the term, probable conclusions; approaching, indeed, ever and ever nearer to certainty, as they receive more and more of the confirmation of experience; but of the character of probability, in the strict and proper sense of that term, they are never wholly divested. On
- ↑ The author means "our mode of stating them are."
