is sustained by the common consciousness of mankind; and in vindicating it we avail ourselves of this ancient argument, which Hesiod states at the end of his "Works and Days:" "The word proclaimed by the concordant voice of mankind fails not; for it is a sort of divinity." *

2. But we are told that these beliefs are not necessary even to cultivated persons. J. S. Mill says: "Any one accustomed to abstraction and analysis, who will fairly exert his faculties for the purpose, will, when his imagination has once learned to entertain the notion, find no difficulty in conceiving that in some one of the many firmaments into which sidereal astronomy now divides the universe, events may succeed one another at random without any fixed law; nor can anything in our experience or in our mental nature constitute a sufficient, or indeed any reason for believing that this is nowhere the case." Mr. Mill held that all necessary beliefs arise from association of ideas in the life-time of an individual. He could consistently suppose that under new conditions new associations could be formed. But here he supposes new conditions which break up the old associations without forming new ones. His supposition, therefore, is directly in contradiction to his own theory. Mr. Mill does not say that he can conceive of such a world of unreason, but only that he thinks one might learn to conceive of it.

It is very common for skeptics who hold that our knowledge is unreal because known through our own reason, to tell us of a world possibly known to other minds in which right is wrong, and the angles of a triangle may be equal to six right angles, or a hollow sphere with continuous surface may be turned inside out without rupture. But when we attend to it we see that it is a mere Shemhamphorash or abracadabra, words to conjure with, which overawe the unthinking but are seen by all thoughtful persons to be sounds without meaning. Accordingly Comte and others who exclude the very ideas of cause, force, and being from scientific thought and limit it to phenomena, yet continually think and write under the regulation of the principles which they reject. The existence of the real is unavoidably asserted in every attempt to prove that knowledge is only relative; the existence of both subject and object is asserted in every proof that we know no objective reality; the knowledge what a true cause is as distinguished from an invariable antecedent is asserted in every denial of the possibility of having knowledge of a true cause; the validity of rational intuitions is appealed to in asserting that they cannot be valid;

* Φήμη δ' ούποτε πάμπαν ἀπόλλυται ἤν τινα πολλοὶ

Λαοὶ φημίζουσι· Θεός νύ τις ἐστὶ καὶ ἀυτή.

† Logic, B. III. Chap. 21, 2 1.

the idea of God is recognized in denying the possibility of knowing him. And whatever theory of knowledge or of agnosticism prevails, men go on, alike in common life and in scientific investigation, prosecuting work, constructing institutions, enlarging science, subduing and civilizing the earth, and all in tacit accordance with the principles regulative of all thinking.

VI. Another objection is that Reason breaks down at last in irreconcilable contradictions. Though all must necessarily believe these principles yet they are contradictory to each other. We necessarily believe each of two contradictory propositions.

1. The second idea of the reason, according to Kant, is the Cosmos. In developing the cosmological ideas, there arise certain "sophistical propositions" which are necessary "in the very nature of reason," but which are "contrary" to each other. These he calls "antinomies." His four antinomies pertain solely to his second idea of Reason, the Cosmos. In the first the thesis affirms as a necessary belief that the world is limited in time and space; the antithesis affirms as equally necessary the belief that it is not thus limited but is infinite in time and space. In the second the thesis is that the world consists of simple parts; the antithesis, that no simple substance exists. In the third the thesis is that free-will exists; the antithesis, that free-will does not exist, but every thing happens necessarily under the laws of nature. In the fourth the thesis is that an Absolute Being exists; the antithesis, that Absolute Being does not exist either in the world or out of it.

The agnosticism and materialism of this day make frequent appeals to Kant's antinomies. Prof. Clifford says that in this "famous doctrine of the antinomies "Kant first set forth the opinion, "held by great numbers of the philosophers who have lived in the brightening ages of Europe," "that at the basis of the natural order there is something which we can know to be unreasonable."* From this doctrine of the antinomies Hamilton derives his fundamental law that "thought is possible only in the conditioned interval between unconditioned contradictory extremes or poles, each of which is altogether inconceivable, but of which the one or the other is necessarily true." Accordingly he regards the causal judgment and the other first principles of reason as resulting, not from a power of positive self-evident knowledge, but from an impotence of mind to think the inconceivable and to believe the contradictory. Thus he interprets the antinomies as manifesting simply "the common principle of a limitation of our faculties. Intelligence is shown to be feeble, but not false; our nature is thus not a lie nor the

Lecture on the Aims and Instruments of Science delivered before the members of the British Association at Brighton, Aug. 19, 1872.

author of our nature a deceiver." The truthfulness of our nature is consistent with the antinomies rightly interpreted; but it is impossible to reach this result and thus to rescue the trustworthiness of reason and the reality of knowledge, if with Hamilton we interpret the antinomies as direct contradictories.

Mansel in his "Limits of Religious Thought" accepts the doctrine that the antinomies are contradictories and uses it in defence of religious belief. He argues that if in developing religious ideas we find ourselves necessarily involved in contradictions, the fact does not invalidate our knowledge, because in philosophy and indeed in the ultimate development of thought on any subject, reason necessarily involves us in similar contradictions. It is surprising that this defence of religious belief was welcomed with exulting applause by many theologians. It is not surprising that it was also gladly welcomed by skeptics, not as proving the reality of religious knowledge, but as disproving philosophy, and ultimately the reality of all knowledge.

Through these and similar interpretations of Kant's antinomies it has come to pass that skepticism, appealing to them, habitually assumes that philosophy in the conclusions of its greatest masters has itself acknowledged its own incompetence and demonstrated that reason, on which it claims to rest, in its ultimate principles necessarily breaks down in self-contradiction.

2. If it is a fact that reason necessarily issues in the necessary belief of contradictories, the objection is fatal. Reason is no longer trustworthy, the laws which necessarily regulate all thinking are discredited, the results of thought are disintegrated, and knowledge is volatilized into empty impressions and disappears.

It is evident, also, that this objection is the only one by which it is possible to disprove the trustworthiness of the reason or the truthfulness of its necessary intuitions. Reason cannot avail itself of any faculty more rational than itself nor lift itself to any sphere of knowledge above and beyond its own, by comparison with which to disprove its own intuitions. But if its own necessary intuitions contradict each other it can know the fact, and then must also know that some of its necessary intuitions are false and that it is itself discredited as an organ of the knowledge of truth. There is no other way conceivable by which reason can know itself untrustworthy.

And it must be noticed that even here it is the authority of reason itself to which reason appeals in judging that two contradictories cannot both be true. It is the first and most fundamental principle of reason, the law of non-contradiction, the truth of which is acknowledged

* Philosophy of Common Sense, p. 20; Philosophy of the Conditioned, pp. 500, 505, Wight's Ed, of Hamilton's Philosophy.

in judging all other principles of reason unworthy of belief. Reason therefore would necessarily trust itself in judging itself untrustworthy.

3. The antinomies rightly understood are not contradictories; the thesis and antithesis are true respectively of different realities, or they are complemental truths of the same reality, opposite poles of bi-polar truth. Reality is known under antinomies because it includes diverse beings and exists under contrasted and complemental aspects. It is casy to show in this way that Kant's antinomies are not contradictories. In the first, the thesis is true of the material universe; the antithesis is true of space and time, since these can be bounded respectively only by further space and time; and it is also true of God. In the second, the thesis expresses the consciousness of self persisting in individuality and identity; the antithesis expresses the consciousness of varied qualities and acts in which self exists and is known. The same thesis and antithesis are true of the factually infrangible atoms, if they exist. Thought is always dual; its first act is the apprehension of a being in its qualities and acts. But the existence of a being in its qualities involves no contradiction; the antinomy is only the expression of complemental truths; the two sides or aspects of one reality. In respect to the third, if we admit the existence of personal free-agents the contradiction disappears; for the thesis is true of free-agents, the antithesis, of impersonal things; or they express respecting man the complemental truths that he is at once free and dependent. In the fourth, the thesis is true of God. the antithesis of the finite universe. This antinomy is more commonly expressed as Spencer gives it: "If we admit there is something uncaused there is no reason to assume a cause for any thing;" or conversely "Since every thing is caused, God, if he exists, must have a cause." The seeming contradiction is removed when we know that the thesis and antithesis pertain to different realities. The causal judgment is not, "Every thing must have a cause," but, "Every beginning or change of existence must have a cause;" this is true of all which begins and changes. Reason gives us, as the thesis, another necessary truth, "An Absolute, Uncaused, and all-conditioning Being must exist." These are not contradictory, but complemental truths.

In a similar manner other antinomies, urged by skeptics and agnostics to prove that reason is contradictory to itself, may be demonstrated to be no contradictions. They are commonly founded on assumed contradictions between being and its qualities or modes of existence, or between noumena and phenomena, or between the personal and the impersonal, or between freedom and dependence, or between the absolute. and the finite, or between the absoluteness of God and his personality.

* First Principles, p. 37.

Kant's antinomies become contradictions because, on account of his phenomenalism, his antithesis of phenomenon and noumenon is so complete that they are reciprocally exclusive and therefore contradictory; they pertain to no common object, and the intellectual acts by which they are brought before the mind have no common intelligence as their root. The consequence is that the phenomenon is a mere subjective impression and without objective reality, and, as out of all relation to the noumenon, irrational and absurd; and the noumenon as out of all relation to the human faculties and to the phenomenon and unlike to anything which we conceive the phenomenon to be, is as truly as the phenomenon void of objective reality, and even as a subjective reality is unthinkable except as a symbol of the truism that something may exist transcending our power to know. It follows that the propositions necessarily affirmed of the one are contradictory to those necessarily affirmed of the other.

This contradiction is removed by the synthesis of the knowledge of particular beings in presentative intuition, with the knowledge of principles true of all beings in rational intuition. Then there is no longer the phenomenon known in sense and the totally different noumenon known in reason; but being known at once by presentative intuition in its particular reality and by rational intuition in its relation to universal truths and laws. The intuitions, whether presentative or rational, pertain to a common object and have their root in a common intelligence. The subjective and objective are no longer contradictory, but intelligence is the intellectual equivalent of reality, the objective reality accords with the subjective ideas of reason and the subjective ideas of reason are expressed in objective reality.

The antinomies are commonly explained as resulting from an attempt of the understanding, under the forms of sense, to apprehend and define the ideas of the higher reason. But this is only carrying into psychology the same divisive antithesis, as if sense, understanding and reason were shut completely apart from each other. The Kantian classification of Sense, Understanding and Reason tends to create and perpetuate this disintegration of the intellectual powers. The classification of them as Intuition, presentative and rational, Representation, and Reflection or Thought, takes up all the facts, while it emphasizes the unity of the mind in all its processes and the unity of its intelligence as having a common root and concerned with a common object.

It must be added, however, that notwithstanding Kant's sharp division of Sense, Understanding and Reason, his Reason is not the organ of rational intuitions, but only the understanding itself acting in its higher range and on its ultimate problems. There is no difference of kind between the two. He finds the rational intuitions in the