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This is an argument from the mental and moral condition of man to the existence of an Author, Lawgiver, and End. It is sometimes called the Moral Argument.

The common title “Moral Argument” is much too narrow, for it seems to take account only of conscience in man, whereas the argument which this title so imperfectly designates really proceeds from man's intellectual and emotional, as well as from his moral, nature. In choosing the designation we have adopted, we desire, moreover, to rescue from the mere physicist the term “Anthropology”—a term to which he has attached altogether too limited a signification, and which, in his use of it, implies that man is a mere animal—to him Anthropology is simply the study of la bête humaine. Anthropology means, not simply the science of man's physical nature, origin, and relations, but also the science which treats of his higher spiritual being. Hence, in Theology, the term Anthropology designates that division of the subject which treats of man's spiritual nature and endowments, his original state and his subsequent apostasy. As an argument, therefore, from man's mental and moral nature, we can with perfect propriety call the present argument the Anthropological Argument.

The argument is a complex one, and may be divided into three parts.

1. Man's intellectual and moral nature must have had for its author an intellectual and moral Being. The elements of the proof are as follows:—(a) Man, as an intellectual and moral being, has had a beginning upon the planet. (b) Material and unconscious forces do not afford a sufficient cause for man's reason, conscience, and free will. (c) Man, as an effect, can be referred only to a cause possessing self-consciousness and a moral nature, in other words, personality.

This argument is is part an application to man of the principles of both the Cosmological and the Teleological Arguments. Flint, Theism, 74—“Although causality does not involve design, nor design goodness, yet design involves causality, and goodness both causality and design.” Jacobi: “Nature conceals God; man reveals him.”

Man is an effect. The history of the geologic ages proves that man has not always existed, and even if the lower creatures were his progenitors, his intellect and freedom are not eternal a parte ante. We consider man, not as a physical, but as a spiritual, being. Thompson, Christian Theism, 75—“Every true cause must be sufficient to account for the effect.” Locke, Essay, book 4, chap. 10—“Cogitable existence cannot be produced out of incogitable.” Martineau, Study of Religion, 1:258 sq.

Even if man had always existed, however, we should not need to abandon the argument. We might start, not from beginning of existence, but from beginning of phenomena. I might see God in the world, just as I see thought, feeling, will, in my fellow men. Fullerton, Plain Argument for God: I do not infer you, as cause of the existence of your body: I recognize you as present and working through your body. Its changes of gesture and speech reveal a personality behind them. So I do not need to argue back to a Being who once caused nature and history; I recognize a present Being, exercising wisdom and power, by signs such as reveal personality in man. Nature is itself the Watchmaker manifesting himself in the very process of making the watch. This is the meaning of the noble Epilogue to Robert Browning's Dramatis Personæ, 252—“That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, Or decomposes but to recompose, Become my universe that feels and knows.” “That Face,” said Mr. Browning to Mrs. Orr, “That Face is the face of Christ; that is how I feel him.”Nature is an expression of the mind and will of Christ, as my face is an expression of my mind and will. But in both cases, behind and above the face is a personality, of which the face is but the partial and temporary expression.

Bowne, Philos. Theism, 104, 107—“My fellow beings act as if they had thought, feeling, and will. So nature looks as if thought, feeling, and will were behind it. If we deny mind in nature, we must deny mind in man. If there be no controlling mind in nature, moreover, there can be none in man, for if the basal power is blind and necessary, then all that depends upon it is necessitated also.” LeConte, in Royce's Conception of God, 44—“There is only one place in the world where we can get behind physical phenomena, behind the veil of matter, namely, in our own brain, and we find there a self, a person. Is it not reasonable that, if we could get behind the veil of nature, we should find the same, that is, a Person? But if so, we must conclude, an infinite Person, and therefore the only complete Personality that exists. Perfect personality is not only self-conscious, but self-existent. They are only imperfect images, and, as it were, separated fragments, of the infinite Personality of God.”

Personality = self-consciousness + self-determination in view of moral ends. The brute has intelligence and will, but has neither self-consciousness, conscience, nor free-will. See Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:76 sq. Diman, Theistic Argument, 91, 251—“Suppose ‘the intuitions of the moral faculty are the slowly organized results of experience received from the race’; still, having found that the universe affords evidence of a supremely intelligent cause, we may believe that man's moral nature affords the highest illustration of its mode of working”; 358—“Shall we explain the lower forms of will by the higher, or the higher by the lower?”

2. Man's moral nature proves the existence of a holy Lawgiver and Judge. The elements of the proof are:—(a) Conscience recognizes the existence of a moral law which has supreme authority. (b) Known violations of this moral law are followed by feelings of ill-desert and fears of judgment. (c) This moral law, since it is not self-imposed, and these threats of judgment, since they are not self-executing, respectively argue the existence of a holy will that has imposed the law, and of a punitive power that will execute the threats of the moral nature.

See Bishop Butler's Sermons on Human Nature, in Works, Bohn's ed., 385–414. Butler's great discovery was that of the supremacy of conscience in the moral constitution of man: “Had it strength as it has right, had it power as it has manifest authority, it would absolutely govern the world.” Conscience = the moral judiciary of the soul—not law, nor sheriff, but judge; see under Anthropology. Diman, Theistic Argument, 251—“Conscience does not lay down a law; it warns us of the existence of a law; and not only of a law, but of a purpose—not our own, but the purpose of another, which it is our mission to realize.” See Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 218 sq. It proves personality in the Lawgiver, because its utterances are not abstract, like those of reason, but are in the nature of command; they are not in the indicative, but in the imperative, mood; it says, “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not.” This argues will.

Hutton, Essays, 1:11—“Conscience is an ideal Moses, and thunders from an invisible Sinai”; “the Atheist regards conscience not as a skylight, opened to let in upon human nature an infinite dawn from above, but as a polished arch or dome, completing and reflecting the whole edifice beneath.” But conscience cannot be the mere reflection and expression of nature, for it represses and condemns nature. Tulloch, Theism: “Conscience, like the magnetic needle, indicates the existence of an unknown Power which from afar controls its vibrations and at whose presence it trembles.” Nero spends nights of terror in wandering through the halls of his Golden House. Kant holds that faith in duty requires faith in a God who will defend and reward duty—see Critique of Pure Reason, 359–387. See also Porter, Human Intellect, 524.

Kant, in his Metaphysic of Ethics, represents the action of conscience as like “conducting a case before a court,” and he adds: “Now that he who is accused before his conscience should be figured to be just the same person as his judge, is an absurd representation of a tribunal; since, in such an event, the accuser would always lose his suit. Conscience must therefore represent to itself always some other than itself as Judge, unless it is to arrive at a contradiction with itself.” See also his Critique of the Practical Reason, Werke, 8:214—“Duty, thou sublime and mighty name, that hast in thee nothing to attract or win, but challengest submission; and yet dost threaten nothing to sway the will by that which may arouse natural terror or aversion, but merely holdest forth a Law; a Law which of itself finds entrance into the mind, and even while we disobey, against our will compels our reverence, a Law in presence of which all inclinations grow dumb, even while they secretly rebel; what origin is there worthy of thee? Where can we find the root of thy noble descent, which proudly rejects all kinship with the inclinations?” Archbishop Temple answers, in his Bampton Lectures, 58, 59, “This eternal Law is the Eternal himself, the almighty God.”Robert Browning: “The sense within me that I owe a debt Assures me—Somewhere must be Somebody, Ready to take his due. All comes to this: Where due is, there acceptance follows: find Him who accepts the due.”

Salter, Ethical Religion, quoted in Pfleiderer's article on Religionless Morality, Am. Jour. Theol., 3:237—“The earth and the stars do not create the law of gravitation which they obey; no more does man, or the united hosts of rational beings in the universe, create the law of duty.” The will expressed in the moral imperative is superiorto ours, for otherwise it would issue no commands. Yet it is one with ours as the life of an organism is one with the life of its members. Theonomy is not heteronomy but the highest autonomy, the guarantee of our personal freedom against all servitude of man. Seneca: “Deo parere libertas est.” Knight, Essays in Philosophy, 272—“In conscience we see an ‘alter ego’, in us yet not of us, another Personality behind our own.” Martineau, Types, 2:105—“Over a person only a person can have authority. … A solitary being, with no other sentient nature in the universe, would feel no duty”; Study, 1:26—“As Perception gives us Will in the shape of Causality over against us in the Non-Ego, so Conscience gives us Will in the shape of Authority over against us in the Non-Ego. … 2:7—We cannot deduce the phenomena of character from an agent who has none.” Hutton, Essays, 1:41, 42—“When we disobey conscience, the Power which has therein ceased to move us has retired only to observe—to keep watch over us as we mould ourselves.” Cardinal Newman, Apologia, 377—“Were it not for the voice speaking so clearly in my conscience and my heart, I should be an atheist, or a pantheist, or a polytheist, when I looked into the world.”

3. Man's emotional and voluntary nature proves the existence of a Being who can furnish in himself a satisfying object of human affection and an end which will call forth man's highest activities and ensure his highest progress.

Only a Being of power, wisdom, holiness, and goodness, and all these indefinitely greater than any that we know upon the earth, can meet this demand of the human soul. Such a Being must exist. Otherwise man's greatest need would be unsupplied, and belief in a lie be more productive of virtue than belief in the truth.

Feuerbach calls God “the Brocken-shadow of man himself”; “consciousness of God = self-consciousness”; “religion is a dream of the human soul”; “all theology is anthropology”; “man made God in his own image.” But conscience shows that man does not recognize in God simply his like, but also his opposite. Not as Galton: “Piety = conscience + instability.” The finest minds are of the leaning type; see Murphy, Scientific Bases, 370; Augustine, Confessions, 1:1—“Thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless till it finds rest in thee.” On John Stuart Mill—“a mind that could not find God, and a heart that could not do without him”—see his Autobiography, and Browne, in Strivings for the Faith (Christ. Ev. Socy.), 259–287. Comte, in his later days, constructed an object of worship in Universal Humanity, and invented a ritual which Huxley calls “Catholicism minus Christianity.” See also Tyndall, Belfast Address: “Did I not believe, said a great man to me once, that an Intelligence exists at the heart of things, my life on earth would be intolerable.” Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, 1:505,506.

The last line of Schiller's Pilgrim reads: “Und das Dort ist niemals hier.” The finite never satisfies. Tennyson, Two Voices: “'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant, Oh life, not death, for which we pant; More life, and fuller, that I want.” Seth, Ethical Principles, 419—“A moral universe, an absolute moral Being, is the indispensable environment of the ethical life, without which it cannot attain to its perfect growth. … There is a moral God, or this is no universe.” James, Will to Believe, 116—“A God is the most adequate possible object for minds framed like our own to conceive as lying at the root of the universe. Anything short of God is not a rational object, anything more than God is not possible, if man needs an object of knowledge, feeling, and will.”

Romanes, Thoughts on Religion, 41—“To speak of the Religion of the Unknowable, the Religion of Cosmism, the Religion of Humanity, where the personality of the First Cause is not recognized, is as unmeaning as it would be to speak of the love of a triangle or the rationality of the equator.” It was said of Comte's system that, “the wine of the real presence being poured out, we are asked to adore the empty cup.” “We want an object of devotion, and Comte presents us with a looking-glass”(Martineau). Huxley said he would as soon adore a wilderness of apes as the Positivist's rationalized conception of humanity. It is only the ideal in humanity, the divine element in humanity that can be worshiped. And when we once conceive of this, we cannot be satisfied until we find it somewhere realized, as in Jesus Christ.

Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 265–272—Huxley believes that Evolution is “a materialized logical process”; that nothing endures save the flow of energy and “the rational order which pervades it.” In the earlier part of this process, nature, there is no morality or benevolence. But the process ends by producing man, who can make progress only by waging moral war against the natural forces which impel him. He must be benevolent and just. Shall we not say, in spite of Mr. Huxley, that this shows what the nature of the system is, and that there must be a benevolent and just Being who ordained it? Martineau, Seat of Authority, 63–68—“Though the authority of the higher incentive is self-known, it cannot be self-created; for while it is in me, it is above me. … This authority to which conscience introduces me, though emerging in consciousness, is yet objective to us all, and is necessarily referred to the nature of things, irrespective of the accidents of our mental constitution. It is not dependent on us, but independent. All minds born into the universe are ushered into the presence of a real righteousness, as surely as into a scene of actual space. Perception reveals another than ourselves; conscience reveals a higher than ourselves.”

We must freely grant, however, that this argument from man's aspirations has weight only upon the supposition that a wise, truthful, holy, and benevolent God exists, who has so constituted our minds that their thinking and their affections correspond to truth and to himself. An evil being might have so constituted us that all logic would lead us into error. The argument is therefore the development and expression of our intuitive idea of God. Luthardt, Fundamental Truths: “Nature is like a written document containing only consonants. It is we who must furnish the vowels that shall decipher it. Unless we bring with us the idea of God, we shall find nature but dumb.” See also Pfleiderer, Die Religion, 1:174.

A. The defects of the Anthropological Argument are: (a) It cannot prove a creator of the material universe. (b) It cannot prove the infinity of God, since man from whom we argue is finite. (c) It cannot prove the mercy of God. But,

B. The value of the Argument is, that it assures us of the existence of a personal Being, who rules us in righteousness, and who is the proper object of supreme affection and service. But whether this Being is the original creator of all things, or merely the author of our own existence, whether he is infinite or finite, whether he is a Being of simple righteousness or also of mercy, this argument cannot assure us.

Among the arguments for the existence of God, however, we assign to this the chief place, since it adds to the ideas of causative power (which we derived from the Cosmological Argument) and of contriving intelligence (which we derived from the Teleological Argument), the far wider ideas of personality and righteous lordship.

Sir Wm. Hamilton, Works of Reid, 2:974, note U; Lect. on Metaph., 1:33—“The only valid arguments for the existence of God and for the immortality of the soul rest upon the ground of man's moral nature”; “theology is wholly dependent upon psychology, for with the proof of the moral nature of man stands or falls the proof of the existence of a Deity.” But Diman, Theistic Argument, 244, very properly objects to making this argument from the nature of man the sole proof of Deity: “It should be rather used to show the attributes of the Being whose existence has been already proved from other sources”; “hence the Anthropological Argument is as dependent upon the Cosmological and Teleological Arguments as they are upon it.”

Yet the Anthropological Argument is needed to supplement the conclusions of the two others. Those who, like Herbert Spencer, recognize an infinite and absolute Being, Power and Cause, may yet fail to recognize this being as spiritual and personal, simply because they do not recognize themselves as spiritual and personal beings, that is, do not recognize reason, conscience and free-will in man. Agnosticism in philosophy involves agnosticism in religion. R. K. Eccles: “All the most advanced languages capitalize the word ‘God,’ and the word ‘I.’ ” See Flint, Theism, 68; Mill, Criticism of Hamilton, 2:266; Dove, Logic of Christian Faith, 211–236, 261–299; Martineau, Types, Introd., 3; Cooke, Religion and Chemistry: “God is love; but nature could not prove it, and the Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world in order to attest it.”

Everything in philosophy depends on where we begin, whether with nature or with self, whether with the necessary or with the free. In one sense, therefore, we should in practice begin with the Anthropological Argument, and then use the Cosmological and Teleological Arguments as warranting the application to nature of the conclusions which we have drawn from man. As God stands over against man in Conscience, and says to him: “Thou”; so man stands over against God in Nature, and may say to him: “Thou.” Mulford, Republic of God, 28—“As the personality of man has its foundation in the personality of God, so the realization by man of his own personality always brings man nearer to God.” Robert Browning: “Quoth a young Sadducee: ‘Reader of many rolls, Is it so certain we Have, as they tell us, souls?’ ‘Son, there is no reply!’ The Rabbi bit his beard: ‘Certain, a soul have I—We may have none,’ he sneered. Thus Karshook, the Hiram's Hammer, The Right-hand Temple-column, Taught babes in grace their grammar, And struck the simple, solemn.”

It is very common at this place to treat of what are called the Historical and the Biblical Arguments for the existence of God—the former arguing, from the unity of history, the latter arguing, from the unity of the Bible, that this unity must in each case have for its cause and explanation the existence of God. It is a sufficient reason for not discussing these arguments, that, without a previous belief in the existence of God, no one will see unity either in history or in the Bible. Turner, the painter, exhibited a picture which seemed all mist and cloud until he put a dab of scarlet into it. That gave the true point of view, and all the rest became intelligible. So Christ's coming and Christ's blood make intelligible both the Scriptures and human history. He carries in his girdle the key to all mysteries. Schopenhauer, knowing no Christ, admitted no philosophy of history. He regarded history as the mere fortuitous play of individual caprice. Pascal: “Jesus Christ is the centre of everything, and the object of everything, and he that does not know him knows nothing of nature, and nothing of himself.”