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allow the rightness of Kant from the point of view of abstract thought, but maintain his neglect of the volitional element in the assertion of the actuality of its infinite ideal by spirit; and who claim reality for what is a necessity to thought, a datum of feeling, and a necessary offspring of reason-in fact, regard it as the great reality, in another than the restricted Kantian sense of the term. It abides, as the great merit of Kant, to have cut away defective metaphysics, and paved the way for the juster conception of the Divine Being which is ours. And may we not still fitly apply to this conception the words once used by Dr Scholten, of Holland, as "the revelation of the One unique Infinite Being, Who acts in fixed laws which the human mind becomes acquainted with and systematises; Who manifests Himself to our reason as the Supreme Reason; Who specially manifests Himself in the moral world as Holy Love; Who, without being abstractedly separate from nature and man, lives and acts in nature and man, in ten thousand indefinitely diverse manners; and, at the same time, superior to the continual ebb and flow of finite forms, the Absolute Mind, the self-conscious and Supreme Personality, is all in all." Having said so much of the mauvais pas recent ontological thought has had to face, we now look on some of the more acute of its recent representations.

The recent thought of Germany in the region of ontological speculation has been fruitful of result

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as to the idea of God. Hegel had done excellent service in criticising Kant's criticism of the ontological proof. But the impossibility of any such intuition of the Absolute Being as would enable us thence to deduce the course of the world has certainly been far more clearly seen than in Hegel's time, and there has very properly been stronger effort to do justice to the widened range of scientific or empirical fact. Weisse, with the aim of reaching all Being through freedom, put the conception of the possible on a higher ontological plane than that of Being. Weisse viewed the ontological argument as unconsciously linking truth and beauty in its union of existence and perfection. German speculation, as represented by K. Phil. Fischer, laid stress on that whole which is no sum of the parts, but a qualitative thing. a whole under whose particularising the parts first have being, and under which God is man's Ideal. But, while God is thus duly exalted as the highest, it does not seem as if justice were done to Him as the all-grounding Essence. To Fischer the truth and reality of the idea of God are derived by the ontological argument from reason itself: that argument proves them by an inherent necessity of thought the truth of such thought for him includes, on this argument, reality or existence in itself, else we do not, he holds, escape inner contradiction. Hettinger and Luthardt have taken somewhat similar views as to God being found in our own

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minds. Hettinger has argued from truth - as objectively existent before and above our reason, and therefore eternal and absolute in its nature -that truth, which has its abode in the human mind, presupposes an Eternal Mind or Supreme Intelligence, which is called God. Hence this Supreme Reason is to Hettinger no mere abstraction, but something so real and independent of the mind of man that to Hettinger truth is God, and God is Truth.

With Luthardt, the idea of God, like other ultimate truths, is held to be the work of truth itself, the product within our minds of objective reason. Our intuitive idea of God is thus to Luthardt the proof of His existence, for we are here engaged, he holds, with a real God and not a mere idea.

Ulrici-whom Erdmann blames somewhat heavily for the British rather than German cast of his work-upholds the ontological Argument in the manner of one to whom God is the Creative Author of Nature and the absolute presupposition of natural science itself. He takes the conditional atoms which he postulates as the last elements of existence as here given, necessarily to presuppose an Unconditioned as Ground of their conditionality and existence. This conception of the conditioned powers of nature and their effects leads to the disclosure of an Unconditioned Cause, which is the Original Force mediating and determining

all that now is. But in such conception we are brought by Ulrici up to the ontological Argument as approached from the side of the scientific conceptions of matter and force-a result, it is to be observed, which brings us no more than the nature side of the Divine Essence, or, as it has been termed, Nature in God.

Rothe clings to a speculative knowledge of the Absolute, and thinks it strange that men find it so hard to believe-what to him is the kernel of the ontological Argument-in the original existence of that which is perfect or God, since the perfect is that which most nearly approaches the idea of self-existence.

Dorner places the ontological Argument first in his order of treatment, herein differing from Pfleiderer, Biedermann, and others, in that he claims a dependence on the ontological Argument for what the other proofs may be able to accomplish, as a reason for such priority. Hence the strength Dorner puts forth in its presentation, which in our view certainly marks a speculative advance. He has, it seems to us, helped recent philosophy of theism more surely to grasp the principle that what we necessarily think, and think as necessarily existing, has a title to validity. We are surely entitled to say that, as it has become more clearly perceived that not save in and through God are we able to reason or to think, it has become more evident how futile must remain our endeav

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ours to set God over against ourselves and make Him a wholly distinct and separate object of our thought. Dorner maintains that the Supreme Being can only be thought as Absolute or Unconditioned, as self-existing or objectively existent. Further, to think an Absolute is to him matter of necessity, and the Absolute so thought by us must be thought-if thought at all-as existent or possessed of being. The very possibility of rational thought is conditioned, with Dorner, by the Absolute, so that without it intellect is no longer itself. He goes on to show what a necessity of our rational nature is the recognition of the basal elements or ideas of the other proofs - those a priori elements in them, as he conceives; and these a priori and inherent elements or aspects of the arguments, he thinks it perfectly natural and feasible so to combine with the a posteriori aspects, as that, in the presentation of the ontological proof, intellectual dualism shall be transcended, and enrichment shall ensue.

The incompleteness of the ontological Argument, taken as a thing capable by itself of furnishing the true conception of God, has been explicitly shown. by Biedermann, whose own conception of the argument was yet not very fortunate. We should like to add in this connection that even Schopenhauer has done some service in the way he has given to ontological speculation a teleological turn, and the needful stress he has laid on the regulative value