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This holds that inspiration is but a higher development of that natural insight into truth which all men possess to some degree; a mode of intelligence in matters of morals and religion which gives rise to sacred books, as a corresponding mode of intelligence in matters of secular truth gives rise to great works of philosophy or art. This mode of intelligence is regarded as the product of man's own powers, either without special divine influence or with only the inworking of an impersonal God.

This theory naturally connects itself with Pelagian and rationalistic views of man's independence of God, or with pantheistic conceptions of man as being himself the highest manifestation of an all-pervading but unconscious intelligence. Morell and F. W. Newman in England, and Theodore Parker in America, are representatives of this theory. See Morell, Philos. of Religion, 127–179—“Inspiration is only a higher potency of what every man possesses in some degree.” See also Francis W. Newman (brother of John Henry Newman), Phases of Faith (= phases of unbelief); Theodore Parker, Discourses of Religion, and Experiences as a Minister: “God is infinite; therefore he is immanent in nature, yet transcending it; immanent in spirit, yet transcending that. He must fill each point of spirit, as of space; matter must unconsciously obey; man, conscious and free, has power to a certain extent to disobey, but obeying, the immanent God acts in man as much as in nature”—quoted in Chadwick, Theodore Parker, 271. Hence Parker's view of Inspiration: If the conditions are fulfilled, inspiration comes in proportion to man's gifts and to his use of those gifts. Chadwick himself, in his Old and New Unitarianism, 68, says that “the Scriptures are inspired just so far as they are inspiring, and no more.”

W. C. Gannett, Life of Ezra Stiles Gannett, 196—“Parker's spiritualism affirmed, as the grand truth of religion, the immanence of an infinitely perfect God in matter and mind, and his activity in both spheres.” Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:178–180—“Theodore Parker treats the regular results of the human faculties as an immediate working of God, and regards the Principia of Newton as inspired. … What then becomes of the human personality? He calls God not only omnipresent, but omniactive. Is then Shakespeare only by courtesy author of Macbeth? … If this were more than rhetorical, it would be unconditional pantheism.” Both nature and man are other names for God. Martineau is willing to grant that our intuitions and ideals are expressions of the Deity in us, but our personal reasoning and striving, he thinks, cannot be attributed to God. The word νοῦς has no plural: intellect, in whatever subject manifested, being all one, just as a truth is one and the same, in however many persons' consciousness it may present itself; see Martineau, Seat of Authority, 403. Palmer, Studies in Theological Definition, 27—“We can draw no sharp distinction between the human mind discovering truth, and the divine mind imparting revelation.”Kuenen belongs to this school.

With regard to this theory we remark:

(a) Man has, indeed, a certain natural insight into truth, and we grant that inspiration uses this, so far as it will go, and makes it an instrument in discovering and recording facts of nature or history.

In the investigation, for example, of purely historical matters, such as Luke records, merely natural insight may at times have been sufficient. When this was the case, Luke may have been left to the exercise of his own faculties, inspiration only inciting and supervising the work. George Harris, Moral Evolution, 413—“God could not reveal himself to man, unless he first revealed himself in man. If it should be written in letters on the sky: ‘God is good,’—the words would have no meaning, unless goodness had been made known already in human volitions. Revelation is not by an occasional stroke, but by a continuous process. It is not superimposed, but inherent. … Genius is inspired; for the mind which perceives truth must be responsive to the Mind that made things the vehicles of thought.” Sanday, Bampton Lectures on Inspiration: “In claiming for the Bible inspiration, we do not exclude the possibility of other lower or more partial degrees of inspiration in other literatures. The Spirit of God has doubtless touched other hearts and other minds … in such a way as to give insight into truth, besides those which could claim descent from Abraham.” Philo thought the LXX translators, the Greek philosophers, and at times even himself, to be inspired. Plato he regards as “most sacred” (ἱερωτατος), but all good men are in various degrees inspired. Yet Philo never quotes as authoritative any but the Canonical Books. He attributes to them an authority unique in its kind.

(b) In all matters of morals and religion, however, man's insight into truth is vitiated by wrong affections, and, unless a supernatural wisdom can guide him, he is certain to err himself, and to lead others into error.

1 Cor. 2:14—“Now the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually judged”; 10—“But unto us God revealed them through the Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.” See quotation from Coleridge, in Shairp, Culture and Religion, 114—“Water cannot rise higher than its source; neither can human reasoning”; Emerson, Prose Works, 1:474; 2:468—“'Tis curious we only believe as deep as we live”; Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, 183, 184. For this reason we hold to a communication of religious truth, at least at times, more direct and objective than is granted by George Adam Smith, Com. on Isaiah, 1:372—“To Isaiah inspiration was nothing more nor less than the possession of certain strong moral and religious convictions, which he felt he owed to the communication of the Spirit of God, and according to which he interpreted, and even dared to foretell, the history of his people and of the world. Our study completely dispels, on the evidence of the Bible itself, that view of inspiration and prediction so long held in the church.” If this is meant as a denial of any communication of truth other than the internal and subjective, we set over against it. Num. 12:6–8—“if there be a prophet among you, I the Lord will make myself known unto him in a vision, I will speak with him in a dream. My servant Moses is not so; he is faithful in all my house: with him will I speak mouth to mouth, even manifestly, and not in dark speeches; and the form of Jehovah shall he behold.”

(c) The theory in question, holding as it does that natural insight is the only source of religious truth, involves a self-contradiction;—if the theory be true, then one man is inspired to utter what a second is inspired to pronounce false. The Vedas, the Koran and the Bible cannot be inspired to contradict each other.

The Vedas permit thieving, and the Koran teaches salvation by works; these cannot be inspired and the Bible also. Paul cannot be inspired to write his epistles, and Swedenborg also inspired to reject them. The Bible does not admit that pagan teachings have the same divine endorsement with its own. Among the Spartans to steal was praiseworthy; only to be caught stealing was criminal. On the religious consciousness with regard to the personality of God, the divine goodness, the future life, the utility of prayer, in all of which Miss Cobbe, Mr. Greg and Mr. Parker disagree with each other, see Bruce, Apologetics, 143, 144. With Matheson we may grant that the leading idea of inspiration is “the growth of the divine through the capacities of the human,”while yet we deny that inspiration confines itself to this subjective enlightenment of the human faculties, and also we exclude from the divine working all those perverse and erroneous utterances which are the results of human sin.

(d) It makes moral and religious truth to be a purely subjective thing—a matter of private opinion—having no objective reality independently of men's opinions regarding it.

On this system truth is what men “trow”; things are what men “think”—words representing only the subjective. “Better the Greek ἀλήθεια = ‘the unconcealed’(objective truth)”—Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 182. If there be no absolute truth, Lessing's “search for truth” is the only thing left to us. But who will search, if there is no truth to be found? Even a wise cat will not eternally chase its own tail. The exercise within certain limits is doubtless useful, but the cat gives it up so soon as it becomes convinced that the tail cannot be caught. Sir Richard Burton became a Roman Catholic, a Brahmin, and a Mohammedan, successively, apparently holding with Hamlet that “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”This same scepticism as to the existence of objective truth appears in the sayings: “Your religion is good for you, and mine for me”; “One man is born an Augustinian, and another a Pelagian.” See Dix, Pantheism, Introd., 12. Richter: “It is not the goal, but the course, that makes us happy.”

(e) It logically involves the denial of a personal God who is truth and reveals truth, and so makes man to be the highest intelligence in the universe. This is to explain inspiration by denying its existence; since, if there be no personal God, inspiration is but a figure of speech for a purely natural fact.

The animus of this theory is denial of the supernatural. Like the denial of miracles, it can be maintained only upon grounds of atheism or pantheism. The view in question, as Hutton in his Essays remarks, would permit us to say that the word of the Lord came to Gibbon, amid the ruins of the Coliseum, saying: “Go, write the history of the Decline and Fall!” But, replies Hutton: Such a view is pantheistic. Inspiration is the voice of a living friend, in distinction from the voice of a dead friend, i.e., the influence of his memory. The inward impulse of genius, Shakespeare's for example, is not properly denominated inspiration. See Row, Bampton Lectures for 1877:428–474; Rogers, Eclipse of Faith, 73 sq. and 283 sq.; Henderson, Inspiration (2nd ed.), 443–469, 481–490. The view of Martineau, Seat of Authority, 302, is substantially this. See criticism of Martineau, by Rainy, in Critical Rev., 1:5–20.