-equally with bare intellect-must be evident to all not clinging to garments of outworn scholasticism. We venture to suggest that it may be due to the memory of the destroying Kant-that Universal Crusher (zermalmen), as his countrymen call him-that better remembrance should be had of the contention of Kuno Fischer that, however Kant may have varied in his thinking about the knowableness or demonstrability of God, "there was not a moment in the course of the development of his philosophical convictions when he denied, or even only doubted, the reality of God." Not less striking and emphatic is the testimony of Zeller to the way in which Kant at every time held thus to the Being of God (das Dasein Gottes). Kant's own view of the matter was that "it is indeed necessary to be convinced of the existence of God, but it is not equally necessary to demonstrate it." It should not be overlooked how, in the section of the Critique of Pure Reason' dealing with the "criticism of all theology," he maintains the faultlessness of the ideal which the Supreme Being affords to the speculative reason, even though only an ideal. The fact remains that with a glorious disregard of consistency or fitness of things permissible only in philosophers, Kant avows his belief in a God Who had, according to him, set the pure and the practical reason at such variance, and Whose existence Kant had been at such

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pains to prove incapable of demonstration. These proofs, so called, have, no doubt, since Kant's day sunk to the position of being regarded as more of the nature of confirmations of the idea of God when already in the mind than as independent proofs of the existence of Deity. With the fine lucidity and directness characteristic of all his writing, Professor Pfleiderer has defended these proofs, alike in the interests of the historical spirit of humanity and of the needs of reason. "Kant notwithstanding, they will always occupy human thought. And it is right that they should do so. They certainly cannot, and are not intended to, engender the faith of the heart; yet they certainly serve a need of reason, which requires that faith be justified to thought." Kant's arguments did avail against a Deity that stood in mechanical and external relation to the world. But such is not the God of theism, Who, as selfconscious and personal Spirit, is at once immanent and transcendent. It is not pretended that these proofs are complete and final, for theistic philosophy has increasingly realised that they are but part of that whole and entire demand of man's spirit, in which place must be found for our moral yearnings and our æsthetic longings. It has certainly been an advance that these proofs of the Divine Existence are seen to be capable neither of separation nor identification, and have

come to be considered, in the way they have, as organically related, as, in fact, constitutive elements of one grand comprehensive whole of argument. As Professor Diman, of America, put the matter: "The argument for the Divine Existence is complex and correlative. Not from one, but from many sources is the evidence derived; and its force lies in the whole, not in any of its parts.” The true wisdom, then, is that which sees in this final result, woven out of all the partial and separate evidences, the real theistic proof-not something dependent on a single line of evidence but —the full sum of all that nature, history, and thought can teach us of God. What we mean to assert, in saying this, is not so much that any mere synthesis of these different arguments, even as complementary to each other, will suffice, as that such a lofty viewpoint of anthropocosmic theism must be gained as shall prove all-satisfying and all-inclusive.

In recent times the Agnostic tendencies due to Hamilton, Mansel, Spencer, and others, have stimulated theistic thought to higher effort in respect of these proofs, whose demonstrative force has been so often disallowed, that it might in newer forms of presentation redeem them from discredit, might turn Spencerianism itself to account in laying a basis for positive theistic belief, and, apart from that, might better exhibit what truth and value they possess. For, truth and value they do possess in

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what they teach at least of immanent causality, of immanent teleology, and of immanent rationality in man as in nature. The God Who is here and now known as the Infinite Spirit, the Absolute Ground of all things, the Eternal Self indwelling in all finite selves, is so infinitely knowable as to render Agnosticism for ever impossible. But, as Professor Flint has properly pointed out, the very wealth of contents in the idea of God inevitably exposes it to Agnostic assaults. But in our view Agnosticism is a possibility only where hypertrophy in some aspect of the thinking capacity exists.

The proofs of the Divine Existence we shall in their recently advanced forms consider in subsequent chapters devoted to them, but we take occasion here to say of the Intuitional Argument— which is not to be separately so dealt with--that it has by Professor Knight and others been more lucidly expounded of late years, though whether with the result of showing itself able to bear by itself all the strain sometimes put upon it, is a much more doubtful matter, even to those who may be disposed to grant, as we are, what a high criterion. of truth such spiritual intuition is. It is a rather large order to ask us to surrender our knowledge of Deity wholly to an intuitional theism, even though we may feel the mystical attractiveness of the "wise passiveness" needful to this end. Recent theism has in its faith, as we think, been

more clearly conscious of itself, through all, as no result of a logical process, but of the inward seal of the self-revealing God. For intuition implies direct beholding or vision of the truth, and, unlike reasoning, is an act rather than a process. This

is that Schauen - vision or intuition-of which Krause loved to speak. It has no finer expression than the poet's lines:

"As blind nestlings, unafraid,

Stretch up wide-mouthed to every shade
By which their downy dream is stirred,
Taking it for the parent bird;

So when God's shadow, which is light,
My wakening instincts falls across,
Silent as sunbeams over moss,

In my heart's nest half-conscious things.
Stir with a helpless sense of wings,
Lift themselves up, and tremble long,
With premonitions sweet of song."

The Intuitionalist position is so far clearly vindicated that the soul is seen to sustain a closer cognitive relation to Deity than should be implied in knowing Him merely by remote inference-as Dr W. L. Davidson would make it appear in his 'Theism'-even if its immediate-but not unmediated-consciousness of the Absolute be not without elements of vagueness and indefiniteness. No doubt, Dr Davidson asserts that the idea of God inevitably arises in man, but he does extremely little in the way of showing by psychological analysis that theism is really "grounded in human nature,'