through it the certainty of the existence of a God, is now closed up. There is no escape in that direction.1 The battle between those who believe in something which transcends our senses and our reason, who claim for man the possession of a faculty or potential energy for apprehending the infinite, and those who deny it on purely psychological grounds, must end in the victory of one, and the surrender of the other party.

CONDITIONS ACCEPTED ON BOTH SIDES.

Before we commit ourselves to this struggle for life or death, let us inspect once more the battle-field, as it is measured out for us, and survey what is the common ground on which both parties have agreed to stand or to fall. What is granted to us is that all consciousness begins with sensuous perception, with what we feel, and hear, and see. This gives us sensuous knowledge. What is likewise granted is that out of this we construct what may be called conceptual knowledge, consisting of collective and abstract

1 One of the first who pointed out the uncertainty of the foundation on which Kant attempted to reconstruct religion, in the widest sense of the word, was Wyttenbach, Opusc. ii. p. 190: "Non consentaneus sibi est (Kantius) in eo, quod, quum categorias à priori intelligibiles et antiquiores esse experientia statuit, ab his nullum progressum ad nova intelligibilia concedit. . . . . Tum quod illa tria placita, dei, immortalitatis, libertatis,' ex metaphysica ad ethicam, ex theoretica ratione ad practicam relegat, non modo hæc ipsa placita labefactat, ex lucido firmoque intelligentiæ fastigio in lubricam et confusam interni sensus latebram rejiciens, sed adyooobs agit et ipsum primum philosophiæ officium negligit. . . . Theoretica dogmata ex practico ducuntur contra naturum philosophiæ, cujus est practica ex theoretico ducere. . . . . Illa tria theoretica dogmata longe dilucidiora et minus incerta sunt, quam ille sensus moralis dubius et controversus . . . . novo habitu imperatorio, inaudito nomine imperativi categorici in scenam revocatus et productus. Nonne hoc est Deum ex machina inducere?" See Prantl, Sitzungsberichte der philos. philolog. und historischen Classe der K. B. Akademie der Wissenschaften. 1877, p. 284.

concepts. What we call thinking consists simply in addition and subtraction of percepts and concepts. Conceptual knowledge differs from sensuous knowledge, not in substance, but in form only. As far as the material is concerned, nothing exists in the intellect except what existed before in the senses. The organ of knowledge is throughout the same, only that it is more highly developed in animals that have five senses than in animals that have but one sense, and again more highly developed in man who counts and forms concepts than in all other animals who do

not.

On this ground and with these weapons we are to fight. With them, we are told, all knowledge has been gained, the whole world has been conquered. If with them we can force our way to a world beyond, well and good; if not, we are asked to confess that all that goes by the name of religion, from the lowest fetishism to the most spiritual and exalted faith, is a delusion, and that to have recognized this delusion is the greatest triumph of our age.

I accept these terms, and I maintain that religion, so far from being impossible, is inevitable, if only we are left in possession of our senses, such as we really find them, not such as they have been defined for us. Thus the issue is plain. We claim no special faculty, no special revelation. The only faculty we claim is perception, the only revelation we claim is history, or, as it is now called, historical evolution.

For let it not be supposed that we find the idea of the infinite ready-made in the human mind from the very beginning of our history. There are even now millions of human beings to whom the very word would be unintelligible. All we maintain is that the

germ or the possibility, the Not-yet of that idea, lies hidden in the earliest sensuous perceptions, and that as reason is evolved from what is finite, so faith is evolved from what, from the very beginning, is infinite in the perceptions of our senses.

Positive philosophy imagines that all that is supplied to us through the senses is by its very nature finite, that whatever transcends the finite is a mere delusion, that the very word infinite is a mere jingle, produced by an outward joining of the negative particle with the adjective finite, a particle which has a perfect right with serial or correlative concepts, but which is utterly out of place with an absolute or exclusive concept, such as finite. If the senses tell us that all is finite, and if reason draws all her capital from the senses, who has a right, they say, to speak of the infinite? It may be true that an essential element of all religious knowledge is the admission of beings which can neither be apprehended by sense nor comprehended by reason, which are in fact infinite, and not finite. But instead of admitting a third faculty or potential energy in order to account for these facts of religion, positive philosophers would invert the argument, and prove that, for that very reason, religion has no real roots in our consciousness, that it is a mere mirage in the desert, alluring the weary traveler with bright visions, and leaving him to despair, when he has come near enough to where the springs of living water seemed to flow.

Some philosophers have thought that a mere appeal to history would be a sufficient answer to this despairing view. No doubt, it is important that, so long as we know man in possession of sense and rea

son, we also find him in possession of religion. But not even the eloquence of Cicero has been able to raise this fact to the dignity of an invulnerable argument. That all men have a longing for the gods is an important truth, but not even the genius of Homer could place that truth beyond the reach of doubt. Who has not wondered at those simple words of Homer (Od. iii. 48), πάντες δὲ θεῶν χατέουσ' ἄνθρωποι, "All men crave for the gods;" or, as we might render it still more literally and truthfully, "As young birds ope their mouth for food, all men crave for the gods." For xarer, as connected with xaive, meant originally to gape, to open the mouth, then to crave, to desire. But even that simple statement is met with an equally simple denial. Some men, we are told, in very ancient times, and some in very modern times, know of no such cravings. It is not enough, therefore, to show that man has always transcended the limits which sense and reason seem to trace for him. It is not enough to show that, even in the lowest fetish worship, the fetish is not only what we can see, or hear, or touch, but something else, which we cannot see, or hear, or touch. It is not enough to show that in the worship paid to the objects of nature, the mountains, trees, and rivers are not simply what we can see, but something else which we cannot see; and that when the sky and the heavenly bodies are invoked, it is not the sun or the moon and the stars, such as they appear to the bodily eye, but again something else which cannot be seen, that forms the object of religious belief. The rain is visible; he who sends the rain is not. The thunder is heard, the storm is felt; but he who thunders and rides on the whirlwind is never seen by human eye. Even if the

gods of the Greeks are sometimes seen, the Father of gods and men is not; and he who in the oldest Aryan speech was called Heaven-Father (Dyaus Pitar), in Greek Zeus Tarp, in Latin Jupiter, was no more an object of sensuous perception than He whom we call our Father in heaven.

All this is true, and it will be the object of these lectures to watch this important development of religious thought from its very beginning to its very end, though in one stream only, namely, in the ancient religion of India. But before we can do this, we have to answer the preliminary and more abstract question, Whence comes that something else, which, as we are told, neither sense nor reason can supply? Where is the rock for him to stand on, who declines to rest on anything but what is called the evidence of the senses, or to trust in anything but the legitimate deductions derived from it by reason, and who nevertheless maintains his belief in something which transcends both sense and reason?

APPREHENSION OF THE INFINITE.

We have granted that all our knowledge begins with the senses, and that out of the material, supplied by the senses, reason builds up its marvelous structure. If, therefore, all the materials which the senses supply are finite, whence, we ask, comes the concept of the infinite?

1. The Infinitely Great.

The first point that has to be settled- and on that point all the rest of our argument turns is this: "Are all the materials which the senses supply finite, and finite only?" It is true that all we can