philosophically admit that belief is the primary condition of reason, and not reason the ultimate ground of belief. We are compelled to surrender the proud Intellige ut oredas' of Abelard, to content ourselves with the humble Crede ut intelligas' of Anselm."* The quotation is entirely irrelevant, for Augustine is speaking of the authority of the Church. The same is true of Anselm and Abelard. The doctrine early appeared that the church had authority to declare the mind of the Spirit and the meaning of the word of God. The "crede ut intelligas" then meant, Believe implicitly what the church teaches without personal investigation and conviction of its truth. The intelligence of reflective thought following the belief was merely a reverent ascertaining of what the church meant. Abelard asserted the right to investigate the truth of the doctrine of the church before believing it. It is curious to note the special pleading by which Hamilton endeavors to apply this utterly irrelevant definition to "the original warrants of cognition."

At the Reformation the Bible as the word of God, accredited and illuminated by the testimony of the Spirit, was recognized, instead of the church, as the authoritative rule of faith and practice. But the testimony of the Spirit gradually receded in the Protestant theological thinking until the letter of the scripture, supposed according to an arid theory of verbal inspiration to be itself the testimony of the Spirit, was recognized as the authoritative rule of faith and practice, and thus became the formal principle of Protestantism. Belief in this was demanded as pre-requisite to intelligent investigation of Christian truth.

It is evident that these special applications and peculiar meanings of the maxim are entirely irrelevant to questions concerning the relation of reflective knowledge to primitive, the true conception and proper designation of primitive knowledge, and the reality of religious knowledge and its legitimate place in the circle of human intelligence.

4. Knowledge through the belief of testimony is reflective knowledge because it is attained by the interpretation of symbols. It can never be intuitive or primitive knowledge. It may be said, however, that man is constituted susceptible of receiving knowledge by testimony. A man cannot be defined from his individual personality alone. He is a member of a race which is constantly in contact with him and acting on him at many points; and he is constituted susceptible of receiving these influences. Only as this fact, complemental to his personality, is recognized can man be understood. His susceptibility of receiving knowledge through testimony is one of these points of contact with the race. The child believes everything. We do not

Reid's Works: Hamilton's Ed. Note A, page 760.

learn to believe but to disbelieve. The consciousness of the race always in contact with the individual seems to infuse itself into his individual consciousness and enlarge it to a world-wide knowledge. In this way the knowledge of past generations is communicated to the living and knowledge is continually enlarged. Principles and laws and science get incorporated into customs, institutions and civilizations and are thus perpetuated. Were it not for this power of participating in the consciousness of the race, men would remain through all time at the lowest grade of savagery; or rather man could not have continued to exist on the earth. Testimony, in its broadest sense as denoting all communication of knowledge from man to man, is an important medium through which knowledge already elaborated by others is communicated to us and received in its elaborated form.

V. Reflection and experience become a sort of spontaneous knowledge in common sense. The Philosophy of Reid is called the philosophy of common sense. The phrase here means the sensus communis of mankind, and refers to the principles believed or at least acted on by all mankind. Thus used "common sense" is essentially the same with intuition. There is also a popular and homely use of the word in which it has a different meaning. This Locke speaks of as "large roundabout common sense." This is continually appealed to as a source of knowledge, especially in the practical direction of conduct. It is a knowledge by which a man judges what action is wise, while unable to tell why he believes it to be so. I suppose it to be the result of the experience and reflection of life, which has inwoven itself into the texture of knowledge and acts with the quickness and insight of an intuition and with the unconsciousness of an instinct. Customary action tends to become automatic. What was learned with painstaking, as speaking a language, tends to become spontaneous. What was once the slow result of thought, may come, by long experience and hereditary transmission, to act with unerring unconsciousness as an instinct. So common sense may be the past experience half sunk already into an instinct and spontaneously indicating what it has always found to be wise. It is not an intuition, since it is always possible even at the moment to think that the contrary may be true. It is not unerring. But the continual appeal to it is not unphilosophical; and it should be noted as a source of knowledge, which can only remotely be resolved into intuition, memory and thought.

16. Relation of Reflective Thought to the Universal

Reason.

The processes of reflective thought essentially imply that the universe is grounded in and is the manifestation of Reason. They thus rest on the assumption that a personal God exists.

I. This assumption is the ultimate ground of the possibility of knowledge by inference. If the mathematics by which astronomers make their calculations are not the mathematics of all space and time, all our astronomy is worthless. If the law of causation, and the principle of the uniformity of nature that the same complex of causes always produces the same effect, are not true of the whole universe, all our science is invalidated. If the law of love is not the law of all rational beings all ethical knowledge is annihilated. That the principles of reason are everywhere and always the same is the basis of the possibility of rational knowledge. But this is only saying that Reason supreme and universal, everywhere and always one and the same, is energizing in the universe and is the ultimate ground of its existence, constitution and development. And this Energizing Reason is God. Science assumes that the universe is a system or cosmos concatenated and ordered under principles and laws everywhere and always the same, and that by these it can determine what the ongoing of the universe is in its farthest extent in space and what it has been and will be in the remotest past and future. This is possible only because these truths and laws are eternal in the one absolute Reason who expresses them by his energizing in the constitution and evolution of the universe. And the theist adds that the evolution of the universe is the forever progressive expression and realization, not only of truths and laws, but also of rational ideals and ends; ideals and ends of wisdom and love, which are eternal and archetypal in the Absolute Reason, God.

Like this was the position of Descartes. He recognizes, at the basis of all reflective intelligence, primitive beliefs on which the force of all proofs depends and without which man is condemned to irremediable doubt; he sees that these fundamental principles thus necessarily believed must have their reality in God, and that if God does not exist, our reason has no guaranty; and he proclaims God, as the first and the most certain of all truths. Thus the existence of God, the absolute Reason, is the ultimate ground of the possibility of scientific knowledge. This rests on the truth that the universe is ultimately grounded in Reason, that it is constituted and goes on in accordance with rational truths and laws, and for the realization of rational ideals and ends. It implies also that we have knowledge of reason and of its truths, laws, ideals and ends; that the primitive intuitions of human reason are true; that the necessary and universal principles constituent of human rationality are constituent principles of rationality which is universal and supreme. Without this neither induction nor the Newtonian method can conclude in real knowledge. "This includes the assumption without which the principles, maxims and methods of the inductive philosophy have no meaning and no foundation, viz. that the universe of mat-.

ter and mind has its ground and explanation in an intelligent creator. In other words, Induction rests on the assumption, as it demands for its ground, that a personal Deity exists.”*

II. It is only on this assumption that thought can complete its necessary processes and solve its ultimate problem.

1. The necessary process of thought culminates in comprehending the manifold in unity; its ultimate problem is to comprehend all particular realities in unity; that is, to comprehend the all in one. In its necessary processes of apprehending, differentiating and comprehending, it continually finds larger and larger unities, till it comes to its ultimate problem to comprehend all the manifold in a unity of thought.

2. It cannot comprehend the all in a merely numerical unity, but only in the unity of a rational system. A numerical unity would be only a multitude of disintegrated individuals, excluding their real relations, their causes, interaction and laws; and so would not be the unity of the All.

The objects of thought are the actual beings and realities of the universe in their actual relations. They cannot be comprehended in unity till we know their cause or ground, and their sufficient reason. The mind must know the absolute ground of all that is and the accordance of all things with the truth, laws, ideals and ends of reason. The ultimate problem of thought is to find the unity of the all in a rational system.

3. This unity is possible only in the recognition of a personal God. The mind cannot find the ground or cause of all that begins and changes in that which itself begins and changes, but only beyond in the Absolute Being who never begins but is eternally the same. It cannot find the sufficient reason or rationale of things in the facts of experience but only in their accordance with principles, laws, ideals and ends which are eternal in Reason absolute, perfect and supreme. For if these are not eternal in the absolute ground of the universe they are not in the universe at all, and the scientific and philosophical knowledge of the universe as a rational system is forever impossible. This absolute Reason which is the ground or cause of the universe is what theism calls God. Theism, therefore, is the only possible solution of the ultimate and ever-urgent problem of human intelligence. Theism is not a creation of feeling and fancy excluded from the realm of knowledge. If recognized as knowledge it is not a mere appendix to completed science, which those may study who wish, while those who do not concern themselves with it suffer no intellectual loss. On the contrary it lies at the foundation of all science and philosophy, and

The Human Intellect; by President Porter, ? 497.

without it thought cannot complete itself as knowledge nor solve its own necessary problems on any subject whatever. Theology is not occupied with abstractions, but with the deepest realities both of nature and of man.

Skeptics continually miss the theistic conception that the universe is grounded in absolute Reason, and charge on theism the conception that the universe is grounded in caprice, that is, in will unregulated by reason. Even Prof. Jevons, from whom a more correct idea of theism might be expected, in a passage already quoted, twice uses the phrase "arbitrary change" as describing the action of God.

Krug calls attention to the fact that the relation of reason and consequent is different from that of cause and effect.* Hamilton criticises Leibnitz's "sufficient reason" because it includes both the reason why things exist, and the reason why we think them to exist. But if reason is the organ of principles or truths and not merely an organ of contradictions revealing only its own impotence, then the law of causality is at once a law of thought and a law of things; and the same is true of all the necessary principles of reason; then in concrete or realistic thought a logic of reason must be recognized as underlying the formal logic; then the fundamental basis alike of all being and of all thought is absolute reason energizing with almighty power in accordance with its own eternal laws, expressing its own eternal truths, and realizing its own ideals and ends. And this is the theistic conception of the universe. The study of the universe gives us science because its beginning and its ongoing express perfect and eternal

reason.

III. The primary motive of scientific investigation is in the constitution of man as rational, impelling him to seek the knowledge of all things in their reality, difference and relations, and to comprehend them in the unity of a rational system. He is impelled by his constitution as rational to seek the unity of all things in their cause or ground and their rational principles, laws and ends. The three questions of philosophy, according to Kant, are these: "What can we know? What shall we do? What may we hope?" The second and third of these questions of course present motives to seek the answer to the first. We seek knowledge to guide us in our action and to disclose the ends that are worthy of our pursuit. In fact a merely speculative interest in knowing is morbid and misleading. The pursuit of knowledge is safest from error and most fruitful in attaining truth when it is sought for its practical use in the right conduct of human life and for the attainment of worthy ends. Never

* Encyklopädisch-philosophisches Lexicon, article Ursache.