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exercise is restricted." Hamilton's Lectures, Appendix, p. 647.

Now that this can give no secure warrant for faith is evident as follows: 1. The faith is made to rest on a process of thought which is as truly beyond its law as that of the knowledge which has been rejected. We can think and know within the limits of the conditioned, and the process will be neither " fallible nor mendacious;" but contradictions and absurdities, and thus a negation of all object, come when thought transcends the conditioned. And yet this whole work of laying a basis for faith is a logical process which is made to go on and complete itself in a conclusion beyond the legitimate boundary, and quite over within the region of the unconditioned. We are warned not to trust the logical thought for our knowledge, but we put our faith upon the logical thought that can appear nowhere else except in this same delusive region. If the logical process is not valid for attaining either the infinite or the absolute, because carried on beyond the region of the conditioned, then surely that process which must take them as given, and apply the logi cal law of contradiction to them, must still more transcend the safe limit.

2. The infinite and the absolute are mere negatives of thought, and yet they are to be taken as positive realities in our faith. If we could legitimately take and safely rely upon the logical process of the excluded middle, in this region of the unconditioned, we could only embrace one of them in our conclusion as a self-contradictory negative. The infinite and the absolute are possible in our thought only as such negations, and the exclusion of either by the logical law can only leave the other for our faith such as it was in our thought, and thus our faith can embrace nothing other than such an absurd and empty Deity. But no man's faith can be satisfied in such an object any more than his knowledge could before have been. And elsewhere Hamilton shows that he supposes the faith should embrace more, for he says: "We are unable to think the divine attributes as in themselves they are; we cannot think God without

impiety unless we also implicitly confess our impotence to think him worthily, and if we should assert that God is as we think or can affirm him to be, we actually blaspheme." Hamilton's Lectures, Appendix, p. 692. The logic on which faith rests can give only a negative, but quite inconsequently the faith assumes a positive.

3. If a ground were in this given that could sustain a positive existence, still that existing being could not be a God both infinite and absolute. The logical law of contradiction can, at the best, only give one, and must exclude the other. But can any man's faith stop short with one to the exclusion of the other? Is it not necessary that we believe God to be both without beginning of days and that he inhabiteth eternity? that he is unbounded fulness, and that also he filleth immensity? If so, the ground is utterly unsatisfactory; it only can sustain one, and cannot at all indicate which one, while our faith needs both.

The basis for faith is then just as unsound as it would be for our knowledge, and in what it is assumed to sustain we can find only half we want. In taking for faith either the infinite or the absolute, we transgress the legitimate limits of thought, and then in taking both the infinite and absolute, we annihilate the law of contradiction, which gave the only ground on which we could take either. Surely the human intellect is not here, as Hamilton has assumed, merely weak; it is, as Kant found and affirmed, wholly self-repugnant. The only result which Hamilton's analysis can reach is, that the logical faculty he uses can do nothing with the problems of the infinite and the absolute. It runs them both into contradictions and negations, and can as little supply a ground for faith as for knowledge. In the very act of faith there is the contradiction to logical thought. It becomes not merely a trusting beyond thought, but directly against thought; not a faith that God is, while unable to think how he is; but a faith that he is, while neither the thought nor the faith can take him as any other than the absurdity of a self-contradictory negation. We must, on this ground, not merely erect our altars to the Unknown God, but to a God,

the knowledge of whom and the faith in whom must alike. be self-repugnant.

We will next examine the ground of faith, as understood by Mansel. His elaborate exhibitions of the contradictions and absurdities to which a logical process must run in attempting to reach the infinite or the absolute, and especially in applying these to God as First Cause, a personal Creator and moral Governor, are both conclusive and important. But his assumption that in this the human intellect is impotent and limited only, and not also deceptive, is, like Hamilton before him, a mistake, if only the logical process is ap prehended, and from which much evil follows. This logical process, alone, can in no way free itself from these absurdities; and then the support to faith, wherever placed, must itself necessarily encounter all the danger from such proved and admitted contradictions. We must be able to correct these antinomies of the understanding by a higher faculty, or no possible basis for faith can stand secure against the charges of credulity or superstition.

Mansel, at the outset, assumes that God is both infinite and absolute, and thus at once cuts himself off from all reliance for faith upon Hamilton's principle of logical contradiction or excluded middle, which can admit only that God is infinite or absolute. He hardly seems, himself, conscious of this disagreement; and, at times, makes a hesitating use of what might seem to be similar to Hamilton's ground: "The attempt to construct, in thought, an object answering to such names, necessarily results in contradictions; it proves our impotence, and it proves nothing more. Or rather, it indirectly leads us to believe in the existence of the infinite, which we cannot conceive; for the denial of its existence involves a contradiction no less than the assertion of its conceivability."- Bampton Lectures, p. 110.

In other places he alludes to man's dependence and subjective need of a God on which to rely, as some source of authority for faith. "Man learns to pray before he learns to reason; he feels within him the consciousness of a Supreme Being, and the instinct of worship before he can argue from VOL. XVII. No. 65.

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effects to causes, or estimate the traces of wisdom and benevolence scattered through creation."- Bampton Lectures, p. 115. But the direct and abiding reliance for faith, with Mansel, is not a logical nor a philosophical basis, but the interposition of the Bible. A divine revelation, in its express declarations, constitutes that ground on which he would have us place our faith, against all the weakness or the contradictoriness of human reason; and this appears all through his lectures. While he exposes the contradictions of all processes of thought beyond the limits of the phenomenal world, and assumes that these contradictions are but the evidence of a weakness that comes from the rashness and waywardness of speculation, he yet admits that these religious themes can have no place in thought but under such contradictions, and that " in this impotence of Reason we are compelled to take refuge in faith," and this faith must rest on the direct declarations of scripture. We are, here, in a more hazardous position than on the ground of Hamilton; since not a logical law, but an assumed declaration from Heaven, is put over against direct, and admitted, and even inevitable contradictions of logic. We must believe either with no thought and no object, or with a contradictory thought and an intrinsically absurd object. We must believe either without thinking, or against thought if we do think; for, on these points the logical faculty can think only in contradictions. The inherent antinomy of the understanding which Kant found and Hamilton boasted to have solved, comes out in all its necessity and with all its perplexity.

Great and good as is the service rendered by Mansel in bringing out, so glaringly and extensively, the necessary absurdities, when the logical faculty is set to expounding the problems of the infinite and the absolute; the danger perhaps more than counterbalances it, when he sets the Bible directly over against the contradictions, and makes our faith in it to stand in direct and necessary conflict with our thought. No matter how much it may be repeated, that the thought is unlicensed and transgressing its proper limits, it is the only

way admitted that we can think on these topics; and the alternative presented is faith without thinking. Instead of recognizing, in such a dilemma, that there must somehow be, here, a gross fallacy, and carefully going back to a deeper psychology to discover and remove it, he goes intrepidly and, we think, quite rashly on in the interposition of revelation, and demanding faith in it, while he allows and proves that, if reason be permitted to speak at all, it must be against it; and then himself finds and allows the following consequences, resulting from this method of sustaining faith:

1. Truth must differ with different orders of intelligence. Truth is relative to the subject only, and not any property in things themselves. What is truth to a man, may be very different from truth to an angel or God. Just as the phenomenon must be modified by the organ, and the taste of the same viands may be pleasant to one and disagreeable to another; so, the fundamental truths of philosophy and religion may be one thing to the human intellect, and another thing to angelic intelligences and to God. There can be no standard and test of even ultimate truths, but only the general consent of the specific order of intelligence; and, though the highest conception of truth would be that which is true for all intelligences, yet we can know nothing of such truth, and only that which is common to the human intelligence. "Truth, therefore, in relation to man, admits of no other test than the harmonious consent of all human faculties; and, as no such faculties can take cognizance of the absolute, it follows that correspondence with the absolute can never be required as a test for truth. The utmost deficiency that can be charged against the human faculties amounts only to this: that we cannot say that we know God as God knows himself; that the truth of which our finite minds are susceptible may, for aught we know, be but the passing shadow of some higher reality, which exists only in the divine intelligence." -Bampton Lectures, p. 147. Thus God and man can have no communion in the same truths; and therefore the infinite and the absolute, though absurdities and contradictory negatives to us, may be positive and consistent realities