positive elements of each of the former principles without the negative elements of either. Life constituted on such a principle would be a true age of Reason. On this speculative

plane all the spiritual truths of the human condition, grounded in the nature of God and of man, would be restored to consciousness in the light of understanding, and, through the principle of the Clearing-up, personal insight and assent. I have spoken of history as the evolution of the necessary process of thought. If this theory be correct, the age of speculative comprehension must, like the others, be eventually realized in history; and since the first two phases of the process have had already their historic day, and faint dawnings of a third can even now be seen by all who scan the East, we have reason to think that the final age of history is not far off from us.

It may be said that to make the course of history a necessary process is to render nugatory any active effort to hasten or to guide the progress of events; that a world which advances by its own necessity must bear humanity with it at its own speed to its own goal. But it is of no such external and mechanical necessity that I speak. The necessity that lives in Reason is its own necessity, and that is freedom. He reads history to little purpose who does not recognize amid its changing scenes the presence of a power which is steadily shaping its course to the end of spirit's full self-realization, and that power it is not in men to foil or defeat. This recognition is the true Theodicea, the vindication of God in history. Divine Providence dwells, not above us, in the clouds, interfering at odd times for a special purpose in the affairs of men, but with us, right here, amidst the events of every day; guiding, overruling the general movement of the world, so that its total result shall tell to the advancement of the supreme design. But it is also true that this divine work is carried on, not by passive, but self-active, forces. The planets roll with an unvarying motion, but man's life is a play-ground of contingency. His ignorance, his mistakes, his self-will, his narrow views and narrow aims, while they cannot thwart the divine end, yet can hinder and delay the process of spiritual

development, and make it difficult and painful. Had Brutus and Cassius understood the silent revolution which had already overthrown the Republic, they might have spared themselves a useless murder. Had Charles I. understood the demand for limitation of the royal power, the constitutional change might have been as peacefully effected as that of 1832. Thus, that human progress shall be smooth and steady, with least of friction, lapse, or digression, depends upon the intelligent action of men in each generation, their comprehension of the present in its genesis from the past, their quickness to discern in its tendencies the signs of the future. If Christian men will rise to a view of their faith as a religion for all time, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever—not because cast in the mould of any one epoch, or narrowed to the notions of any one clique, but one through the ages, because it meets the distinctive needs of every age, and in all times and places is one with the nature of man then they will learn the secret of that unfailing power which makes Christianity as able to satisfy the world's mind to-day, as in former days it satisfied the world's heart. And to do this, Christian thought must meet fairly and answer fairly the thought of the Clearing-up. It will not do on the one hand to ignore or to denounce the Clearing-up, nor on the other hand to make with it a hasty and a hollow peace. Knowing the Clearing-up in its genesis, spirit, and tendencies, we know that it is the part of the Christian religion neither blindly to oppose it nor blindly to surrender to it, but to embrace and transcend it, winning its own consent to an abrogation which is not destruction, but fulfillment.

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Looking with this purpose for a systematic expression of modern thought in regard to spiritual things, we find it in the First Part of Mr. Spencer's First Principles of a New Philosophy." The work scarcely bears out its title, for, like all who share the prevalent misunderstanding of Kant, Mr. Spencer remains in the general position of Hume, confronting an unbridged chasm between psychology and ontology. As Dr. Stirling has remarked, the Scottish School, so called, may be eliminated in its entirety from the history of philosophy. The

historic steps are from Locke to Hume, and from Hume to Kant. With Hume, Empiricism reached its logical culmination in the questions: How do we know that there is any substantiality under the phenomena of sense-perception? How do we know that there is any necessary connection in the course of things? How do we know that there is any real unity in this complex of fluctuating fancies and feelings which we call the soul or the self? In other words, knowledge being founded in experience, and experience being limited to the contingent and particular, how reach a knowledge of the universal and necessary? This is the question on which hangs the existence of philosophy, and of anything that can be called science or knowledge. The Scottish writers failed to answer it, or even to perceive its gravity; and, hence, their whole industry is philosophically beside the point. In falling back to Common Sense, Reid simply abandoned philosophy as such, and so, what he took for the positive basis of a practical knowledge became, with Hamilton, a negative basis for what he called philosophic ignorance. Paradoxical as it seems, the authority of Kant, whose one object was to find the answer to Hume, was claimed for this return to Humism. The general awe inspired by Hamilton's vast learning—which here, as in most other cases, shows itself to be the thinnest scratching of the mere surface-established his odd perversion of Kant as the long-sought exposition of that obscure and perplexing writer, whose immense achievement was distorted into this trivial result: Things in themselves Matter, Mind, God—all that is not finite, relative, and phenomenal, as bearing no analogy to our faculties, is beyond the verge of our knowledge. That is, the mind works under conditions, and can only know what is similarly conditioned. This was simple, and soon took popular phrase. We know only phenomena; the real object in itself we do not know. But is there any such unknown object? It is plain that its existence has become a gratuitous supposition. If there is no knowledge of the Absolute, we have no right to affirm its existence. If all that is known to exist involves relativity, that which is out of all relation cannot be known to exist. In Hamilton's view, the Absolute is a

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purely negative conception-equivalent, as Dean Mansel expresses it, to the Inconceivable and the logical inference is that no such Absolute exists. But here religious interests become affected, and so Hamilton falters at this step to positive denial and falls back on doubt (he calls it faith), abandoning logic to talk mistily about a "wonderful revelation which inspires belief in the existence of something beyond the sphere of comprehensible reality." Here Mr. Spencer takes up the question to give it a somewhat unexpected turn. He holds without reserve the general doctrine of nescience. He admits, moreover, that what is unthinkable as positive — what is thought as pure negation-must be thought as non-existent. He shows that Hamilton and Mansel are driven by their premises to accept this logical conclusion, and that any hinting on their part at a positive consciousness of the unconditioned, supernaturally at variance with the laws of thought," is a virtual throwing-up of their whole philosophy. But for himself he contrives an escape from the logical conclusion by going outside of logic to "the more general or psychological aspect of the question." Here he finds, "besides the definite consciousness formulated by logic, an indefinite consciousness which cannot be formulated," and this consciousness assures us of the positive existence of the Unconditioned. "To say that we can

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not know the Absolute is to affirm that there is an Absolute. In the denial of our power to learn what it is, lies the assumption that it is. * * The Noumenon, named as the antithesis of the Phenomenon, is throughout thought of as an actuality. It is impossible to conceive that our knowledge is a knowledge of Appearances only, without at the same time conceiving a Reality of which they are appearances; for appearance without reality is unthinkable. Strike out from the argument the terms Infinite and Absolute, and put in their place (Hamilton's equivalent) negation of conceivability,' or (Mansel's) absence of conditions which render consciousness possible,' and the argument becomes nonsense." He proceeds to argue

that the antithesis between Relative and Absolute, or Knowable and Unknowable, is a correlation, and, perceiving the mutual determination of correlatives, he points out that if the Absolute be conceived as mere negation, the conception of the

Relative itself disappears. The Relative, he says, is existence under conditions; the abstraction of these conditions is the abstraction of them only, leaving an indefinite, but positive, something as a permanent element of thought. The tenability of this position will be considered later.

The unconditioned, then, exists, but since it is unconditioned, it is in no possible way further to be known; we know that it is we cannot know anything about it. We come, says Mr. Spencer, to this "negative result: that the reality existing behind all appearances must ever be unknown." We see in these passages a dualism that was unknown to the materialism of the last century. For that the immediate, sensuous object was the ultimate and only reality. Mr. Spencer now asserts that everything immediate is phenomenal, is a manifestation of an essence; but when he says that that essence is essentially inscrutable, and must ever be unknown, he cuts his own ground from under him. If the phenomenon is phenomenon, it manifests the essence, and then essence is not unknowable, nor unknown. But if the phenomenon does not manifest the essence, then it is no phenomenon, no manifestation of aught but itself; consequently, it exists independently of essence; consequently, there is no need of any essence, and the hypothesis of an unknowable essence is purely gratuitous, and falls to the ground. We must conclude, then, to an essence manifested and known, or to no essence at all. And since Mr. Spencer tells us that "appearance without reality is unthinkable," he is bound to take the former alternative. This would lead him to recast the sentence above cited: "It is impossible to conceive that our knowledge is a knowledge of appearances only, without at the same time conceiving a reality of which they are appearances; for appearance without reality is unthinkable." A slight modification would make it an adequate statement: It is impossible to conceive that our knowl edge is a knowledge of appearances only, and not at the same time a knowledge of the reality of which they are appearances; for as appearance without reality is unthinkable, so knowledge of appearance without knowledge of reality is equally unthinkable.

Still, in this 26th section, Mr. Spencer is not wanting in