INTUITION, FEELING, BELIEF, AND KNOWLEDGE IN RELIGION.
There are few who hold in a consistent manner that God is known by immediate intuition. The great majority of those who profess to believe this, so explain it as to show that they believe nothing of the kind. Dr Charles Hodge (Systematic Theology, pt. i. ch. i.) may be indicated as an example. Professing to hold that the knowledge of God is innate and intuitive, he so explains and restricts these terms as would make our knowledge of our fellow-men as much innate and intuitive as our knowledge of God, or even more so; and even after all these qualifications finds that nothing more can be maintained than "that a sense of dependence and accountability to a being higher than themselves exists in all minds"--which is far from being equivalent to the conclusion that God is intuitively known. Cousin is sometimes represented as an advocate of the view in question, but erroneously. Discounting a few inaccurate phrases, his theory as to the nature of the theistic process is substantially identical with that expounded in the lecture. Its purport is not that reason directly and immediately contemplates the Absolute Being, but that it is enabled and necessitated by the essential conditions of cognition, the _a priori_ ideas of causality, infinity, &c., to apprehend Him in His manifestations. To find intuitionists who in this connection really mean what they say, we must go to Hindu Yogi, Plotinus and the Alexandrian Mystics, Schelling, and a few of his followers--or, in other words, to those who have thought of God as a pantheistic unity or a Being without attributes.
Many German theologians, unduly influenced by the authority of Schleiermacher, and destitute of a sound knowledge of psychology, have rested religion on feeling--mere or pure feeling. Hegel opposed the attempt to do this, with considerable effect, although on erroneous principles. Krause exposed it, however, with far more thoroughness in his 'Absolute Religionsphilosophie.' It is on feeling that belief is rested by most of the advocates of what is called "the faith philosophy." With thinkers of this class a man like Cousin must not be confounded, although he maintained that religion begins with faith and not with reflection; or like Hamilton, although he denied that the infinite can be _known_ while affirming that it "is, must, and ought to be, _believed_." Cousin meant by faith "nothing else than the consent of reason," and Hamilton meant by belief "assent to the original data of reason."