"nomena."* The result of all which is that, if Theism will consent that the Divine Mind, for whose existence it contends, is knowable only as our own minds are knowable-to wit, as a series of thoughts and feelings, but these thoughts and feelings transcendently hyperphysical or Divine, or, again, as a thread of consciousness, but that consciousness transcendently hyperphysical or Divinethen Theism may remain an open question. And so, on the same terms of consistency with the mode of thought of Empirical Cogitationism, other questions of the supernatural, of similar moment, may also remain open questions.

Now, without returning on objections previously urged against the reconcileability of Mr. Mill's idealistic theory with any knowledge of the existence of other created sentiencies or threads of consciousness tantamount to that which we have of our own existence (which objections, however, if valid in that connexion, would be as valid now against the reconcileability of the theory with the required knowledge of the existence of a Divine. Mind-i.e. the knowledge of such a mind as more than a mere notion or conception of our own), let me simply say that I can see no interpretation of Mr. Mill's fundamental principle of Empiricism according to which those questions of a Supernatural which he would keep open ought not to be, at once and for ever, closed questions. Empiricism, so far as I can see any meaning in it, leads inevitably at last to Zero, Absolute Nihilism, or the resolute non-conception of an ultimate anything. It must either stop there, or transmute itself at that point, for the nonce, into an enormous all-including Transcend* Pp. 210, 211.

entalism. Unless as the name for the determining eternal à priori whence all else has proceeded, and has inherited law, structure, form, necessity, through every stage of the evolution, I can see no meaning whatever for the word Deity. If Mr. Mill vindicates the belief in such a Deity as compatible with true philosophy, well and good. Only how he can then assert that the true philosophy is that which supposes that every notion, belief, faculty, or power of the human mind is entirely generated out of experience, without the coefficiency of any innate or structural tendency, form, capability, necessity, or determination, passes my comprehension. I cannot conceive anything as resulting from the experience of a zero; and, unless I start with a human mind definable as zero, I must allow a very definite amount of à priori bequest in that human mind wherewith to grasp and mould experience. Or, if Empiricism pushes the dispute farther back, and, allowing that bequest, undertakes to resolve it into prior experience, still, at every stage, the assertion recurs, "We are not yet at zero; something is à priori, something structural and predetermined, even here.” Or, if at last, somewhere behind the Nebula, we do reach Zero, or Nothingness, what becomes of Deity ? Is Deity at the back of the original zero or nothingness out of which all else has been evolved or convolved empirically? Then either Zero would have remained such, and there would have been no evolution whatever, or else the true origin of the whole evolution is not zero but Deity. But, on this last supposition, what meaning, such as that claimed for it, remains in the principle of Empiricism?

Waiving this objection, however, and allowing Mr. Mill's reservation of the question of Deity and other cognate questions as open questions in philosophy to be perfectly consistent with his interpretation of the principle of Empiricism (for which it may very well happen that mine is but a blundering substitute), let me look farther at that notion of Deity for which Mr. Mill insists that a space is open in his philosophy. Let us look at it in its connexion with his cosmological theory of Idealism or Cogitationism. Here, I think, there are curious results. For what is the Deity or Divine Mind whose existence then remains an open question? A Divine, or transcendent, superhuman, thread of consciousness, or series of thoughts and feelings. Ex hypothesi, no other Deity is allowed than a Deity conceivable according to the sublimed analogy of our experience of our own minds. Now, what I say is, not that such a Deity of Idealism may not be a sufficient Deity for all the needs of religion or the human mind, but only that there seems to be an interesting consequence of such a notion of Deity, which Mr. Mill's Cogitationism implies, but which he has left undeveloped. Was it not involved in Mr. Mill's theory of the human mind as a thread of consciousness or series of feelings, that there must have been a crude period in the history of that consciousness or series of feelings, when as yet it had not worked out the notions of the Ego and the Non-Ego, but existed only as a confused neutrum of both? Is this analogy to be transferred to the Divine Mind? If so, what do we end in? In what but the Absolute Idealism, or Absolute Identity-system, of Schelling and others, which supposes an aboriginal

Absolute Neutrum, of which the universe as a whole is to be conceived as the external forthrushing or Non-Ego, and Deity personally as the self-consciousness, or Ego, accompanying the forthrushing?

Yes, that final alternative to which we seem to be led up by all other modes of purely speculative thought seems to be also the alternative to which Mr. Mill's Cogitationism leads us up. It is the alternative of Nihilism or Summation in an Absolute.

The choice between these ·

alternatives seems to be the question that is left open. But to say that it is left open at all is, I apprehend, the same as saying that one has to choose, now as heretofore, between Empiricism and Transcendentalism in philosophy. This, it seems, though with the scope and meaning of the two terms marvellously enlarged by science, is still the essential distinction. Logically, Empiricism seems to have its only termination in Nihilism, while Absolute Identity seems to be but the modern form of the principle of Transcendentalism reasoned back to its uttermost. Are we here in that predicament where it is only an act of faith, an impassioned throe of the soul obeying its own structural necessity, that can effect the solution? Are we in presence of the last and most gigantic possible form of that difficulty which is said to lie at the root of all our thinkings about anything whatsoever, and to be the very law of our thinkings-the perpetual balance of two propositions, mutually contradictory, and both inconceivable, yet one of which must necessarily be true? Or where is the logic, Hegelian or any other, that shall really dare the stricter solution of uniting the two extremes, by showing

how in one organic beat or swing of thought there may be comprised the whole arc. between Nothingness and Absolute Being? On these questions, as well as on all the crowd of homelier questions which concern the practical filling-up of any metaphysical system to fit it for the needs and uses of the human soul, much remains to be said, and much presses on me that might be said. But it will be more consistent with the nature of this work-which professes to be only a historical review of recent British Philosophy, with interspersed criticisms-if I stop, for the present, exactly at this point.

PRINTED BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE.