The idea of God Author:James Palmer Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: our theory which gives to each faculty its place and prominence in a religious life. Religious Experience. Introspection. — When Kant said of the Ontologi... more »cal Proof: " It leaves all experience out of account and concludes entirely a priori from mere concepts, the existence of a supreme cause," he certainly was not wide enough in his generalization. If sensuous experience is intended, the truth of the assertion might be admitted; but experience is as broad and possibly broader than consciousness and in this sense the Anselmic form of the proof is rather an appeal to experience. By its very nature it withdraws attention from the world and directs it inward. It is a conscious appeal to the soul for a knowledge of God. In other words the Ontological Proof necessitated the development of Psychology. Here again Anselm received the mantle of Augustine. In a pure spirit of literalism Augustine sought to vindicate the doctrine of the Trinity by careful introspection. If God had said " Let us make man in our own image." And " in the image of God created He him," then it is reasonable to search in man for the image of God. Such was the reasoning that led Augustine to give to the world his De Trinitate. Without estimating the success of this work, so far as its object is concerned, we are much interested in the worth of its method. It made inner experience the foundation of metaphysics. And Anselm was simply returning to this method when he sought in himself2 "for a single argument which would suffice to prove that there is indeed a God." In our analysis of consciousness we saw that emotions are inseparably linked with ideas. Without the idea of God religious emotions could not come into existence. " Kine Religion ohne Gottesforstellung die Gottesforstellung ist der bewusste Ausgang-...« less