Infinite, and should try to drag down my conception of it to the level of a purely negative experience arrived at by counting or measuring? The conception may, indeed, have arisen out of, it certainly transcends, experience. But still, if I have any knowledge at all which may be said to transcend the immediate affections upon which my own consciousness depends, nothing forbids that its range should embrace the Infinite. There is nothing in the subjectmatter of my thoughts that I can credit myself with having simply created; all has been furnished to me from without, whatever sport my imagination may have made with it, however fantastic and remote from experience the sequences and combinations which have thus arisen. How came I,

then, by the conception of the Infinite, a conception sui generis, essentially distinct from all syntheses or fusions of impressions derived from the finite? If I have not created it, I have simply recognized something which is. My recognition of it presupposes that it is cognoscible. If it is cognoscible, it may be expected to yield materials susceptible of investigation and available for the construction of a Science.

13. Here, however, before proceeding to the next chapter, it is needful for me to remark that infinite is far from adequately or distinctly representing the concept it

eyeball; and for the purpose of discrimination mere sense is of no avail: as affording materials for comparison it may sufficiently assist my intellect, but of itself it knows nothing whatever. What is it, then, of which I am immediately conscious? Simply a certain experience, namely, a sense of vision coinciding with the sensation of a shock and more or less of pain. By the exercise of reason I interpret this experience, I become aware that it is due to a kind of cerebral agitation, I discover the immediate cause, and still by the same process tracing back the links of consequent and antecedent I gain, it may be, further information.

must be understood to denote, and cannot without extreme caution be safely used in a metaphysical disquisition. The search after causes issues, as I have shown, in the recognition of a kind of existence which the conditions of our intellectual constitution preclude us from defining in relation to either Time or Space. But how is the conception reached? Not in the painful and vertiginous effort to comprehend boundlessness within the bounds of imagination, but in the rational and necessary assumption that there must be something superior to the possibilities involved in these two kinds of capacity for existence. It finds rhetorical expression when the essence thus conceived is affirmed to be present everywhere in its entirety, instead of being partly in this place and partly in that, and when it is said to have neither past nor future, but to exist in an eternal Now. Let it be granted that an essence which admits of being thus described is unthinkable: this must needs be the case with the Transcendental considered simply and purely as such. But who can think of force apart from the impressions he owes to its phenomenal effects? Who, if, in making the attempt, he imagines himself to have a concept, can either inform others what it is or honestly maintain that he perceives it himself? Yet no one would include forces in the category of the Unknowable: we are permitted to speak of the force of gravitation as of something which has obtained a scientific recognition. But the truth is, the Fundamental Force is the only force of which we have absolutely certain knowledge: the First Cause is the only cause which the laws of thought constrain us to assume, and whose existence may be held demonstrable.

14. But, while relatively to Time and Space we are compelled to think of it as unconditioned, we are not therefore warranted in demanding that the term shall be applied

to it in a larger sense; still less are we at liberty to jump to the conclusion that the application must be absolute, and must amount to the negation of every species of limit, that is to say, the negation of all conditions. Indeed, a negation such as this is self-destructive; for in coupling a subject with a predicate, whether in the way of affirmation or of denial, whether we say that it does or that it does not possess a given attribute, whether we include it in or exclude it from a given class, we equally limit it. But in denying it the possession of any attribute whatever, we not merely fail to liberate it from conditions-we make our limitation complete and absolute; in point of fact we declare the subject of our proposition to be non-entity. This is the Charybdis of philosophical thought. More easily avoided is the Scylla, a rock on which the conception of the Fundamental essence is shattered if it be supposed possible there may be a multiplicity of original causes, an aggregation of powers of which each is infinite and yet enjoys but a partial jurisdiction and operates within a limited sphere. But the ability to make the thing we speak of so much as an object of thought is, in the notion that it is so unique as to be void of quality, engulfed and swallowed up. Manifestly, there is no such thing as the Unconditioned: this term is the proper name for a metaphysical chimera, denoting, not indeed a creature of the imagination, for in the imagination it can find no place, but a purely conceptual figment, utterly meaningless, and simply due to the misinterpretation of a misleading word. Hence-to say the least-it is conceivable that the essence which transcends Time and Space has further properties. If it has, our apprehension of its existence forbids us to deny the possibility of our having faculties adapted to the perception of those properties, and to the acquisition of a knowledge which may fitly be called scientific.

CHAPTER II.

ORIGINATION.

“ Πίστει νοοῦμεν κατηρτίσθαι τοὺς αἰῶνας ῥήματι Θεοῦ, εἰς τὸ μὴ ἐκ φαινομένων τὸ βλεπόμενον γεγονέναι.”—HEB. xi. 3.

I. IN the preceding chapter my principal aim was to prove that the chain of the phenomenal has of necessity a first link and presupposes an Eternal and Immutable antecedent, distinctly cognoscible as such. But the human intellect having once made this leap from the finite to the Infinite, is not multiplicity absolutely and in every respect abhorrent from the nature of that which it has thus conceived? In any individual nature or essence is not a union of characteristics belonging respectively to the finite and the Infinite an inconceivable amalgamation? If so, we are precluded from accounting for the phenomenal universe by assuming a plurality of co-existent causes distributed throughout the occupied realms of space. It matters not whether we imagine them to be concurrent in their operation or to act in isolation from one another, if we suppose that severally they are incomplete and insufficient for the grand total of effect. No plurality of either interdependent or independent causes is admissible: the First and Infinite Cause must needs be One.

2. But even if this necessity were not apparent, the assumption of a multiplicity of causes must be held inad

The

missible, if it should reasonably seem gratuitous. interdependence of all phenomena, as grounded in a unity implied in apperception, is assumed by the metaphysician ;"

"The word 'communion' (Gemeinschaft) may be used in two senses, meaning either communio or commercium. We use it here in the latter sense: as a dynamical communion without which even the local communio spatii could never be known empirically. We can easily perceive in our experience, that continuous influences only can lead our senses in all parts of space from one object to another; that the light which plays between our eyes and celestial bodies produces a mediate communion between us and them, and proves the coexistence of the latter; that we cannot change any place empirically (perceive such a change) unless matter itself renders the perception of our own place possible to us, and that by means of its reciprocal influence only matter can evince its simultaneous existence, and thus (though mediately only) its coexistence, even to the most distant objects. Without this communion every perception (of any phenomenon in space) is separated from the others, and the change of empirical representations, that is, experience itself, would have to begin de novo with every new object, without the former experience being in the least connected with it, or standing to it in any temporal relation. I do not want to say anything here against empty space. Empty space may exist where perception cannot reach, and where therefore no empirical knowledge of coexistence takes place, but in that case it is no object for any possible experience. The following remarks may elucidate this. It is necessary that in our mind all phenomena, as being contained in a possible experience, must share a communion of apperception, and if the objects are to be represented in coexistence, they must reciprocally determine their place in time and thus constitute a whole. If this subjective communion is to rest on an objective ground, or is to refer to phenomena as substances, then the perception of the one must render possible the perception of the other, and vice versâ: so that the succession which always exists in perceptions, as apprehensions, may not be attributed to the objects, but that the objects should be represented as existing simultaneously. This is a reciprocal influence, that is, a real commercium of substances, without which the empirical relation of coexistence would be impossible in our experience. Through this commercium, phenomena being apart from each other and yet connected, constitute a compound (compositum reale), and such compounds become possible in many ways. . . . By nature (in the empirical sense of the word) we mean the coherence of phenomena in their existence, according to

...