PRINCIPLES OF REASON, OR INTUITIVE TRUTHS.
It is maintained that the Author of mind has implanted, as a part of its constitution, the belief in certain truths, so that it is impossible to disbelieve them without losing that which distinguishes man as a rational being.
It is also assumed that there is an _infallible test_, by which we can distinguish these truths from all those acquired notions which men often falsely call intuitions, or principles of reason, etc.
Before proceeding, it will be premised that the attempt will not be to set forth _all_ those truths that may properly be called intuitive, but it will be limited to those which are immediately connected with the subjects to be discussed.
To proceed, then, the first principle of reason, or intuitive truth, is that by which we arrive at the idea of a great _First Cause, who was without a beginning_. In briefest form, this truth is usually thus expressed:
The position here maintained is that the human mind is so made that, whenever any kind of change (or effect) takes place, there inevitably follows a belief that there is some antecedent which is _the cause_ of this change, or, in other words, that there is _something that produced this change_.
Now the question is not how this conviction first finds entrance to the mind, nor whether it is consequent on experience.
It is simply a question of fact. Men always do, whenever they see any new form of existence, or any change take place, believe that there is some antecedent cause that produced this change.
Moreover, if a man should be found who was destitute of this belief, so that in his daily pursuits he assumed that things would spring into existence without any cause, and that there were no causes of any kind that produced the changes around him, he would be pronounced insane--a man who had "lost his reason."
Here, then, we have an example of an intuitive truth, and also an illustration of the _test_ by which we are to distinguish such truths from all others, viz.:
_Any truth is a principle of reason, or an intuitive truth, when all men talk and act as if they believed it in the practical affairs of life, and when talking and acting as if it were not believed, would universally be regarded as evidence that a man had "lost his reason."_