celebrated paradox of Foster,*-that infinity of knowledge, or an attribute of Divinity itself, would be necessary before a person could say, I know there is no God,-much more than a rhetorical flourish. For, first, there are few or none that would deliberately say they know, or have an absolute certainty, that there is no God: and, secondly, if it were otherwise, the futility of the position, as resting on the possible disclosures which omniscience might furnish, is apparent from the circumstance that it would be equally valid in support of the existence of any being whatever that fancy might choose to place in the sphere of the invisible.

Of similar worth is the famous argument of Pascal, which reduces the question of the existence of God to a mere wager, turning on a balance of profit or loss; as, apart from the untenableness of the assertions that it is absolutely necessary (in the sense, that is, of inevitable,) to take the affirmative or negative side, and that reason is no more in favour of the one than the other, † an admission-it could not be called belief-of his existence on principles so thoroughly selfish, would be no better, to say the least, than a denial of it through oversight or mistaken apprehensions of the evidence.

With regard to the problem of final causes, often no less narrowly than presumptuously treated in other respects than as an element in the atheistic controversy, the soundness of the superstructure of course depends on the solidity of the basis; which is not to be settled by affirming, with the so-called Natural theologians, that design implies a designer; which were a truism or self-evident proposition, taking for granted, or rather not touching, the point to be established; but by showing reason to believe that the class of phenomena adduced in illustration of this or that design, * In the Essay on a Man's writing Memoirs of Himself. "Dieu est, ou il n'est pas. Mais de quel côté pencherons-nous ? La raison n'y peut rien déterminer " "Votre raison n'est pas plus blessée, puisqu' il faut nécessairement choisir, en choisissant l'un que l'autre."-Pensées, p. 146, 7, Havet's ed.

M

in the sense of an end fulfilled, and which constitute a far less number than those in which such a characteristic is untraceable, can be referred to no other principle or law in nature. For instance, the forms of crystallization or of frost-work, with myriads of other phenomena that might be mentioned, seem hardly explainable on any known theory of teleology, especially if restricted to a system of ends distinguished by their bearing on utility. Passing by the consideration that with perceptive agents in particular, certain qualities or states of objects may be rendered available, without being intended, for certain purposes, the question may arise, whether, in cases which appear to indicate express arrangements for the production of specific results, the seeming adaptation is not rather to be interpreted on grounds analogous to those alleged as to crystallization and the like; and whether the whole series of physical sequences, indicative as they are of order, correlation, harmony, Thought, may not be resolvable into higher and more comprehensive laws, or ultimately into some one principle or Idea, in which all the several sciences shall find their centre and their key, while revealing itself chiefly as the unity of action of a Divine Will and ever creative Intelligence. But be this as it may, to speak of final causes, in the absolute sense, is what can scarcely belong to beings unpossessed of infinitude; certainly not to ourselves, to whom the issues as the origin of all things are wrapped in impenetrable darkness.

There is a singular species of philosophy which, under the guise of religious reverence, would set up a kind of antithesis between Law and Deity; as if the recognition of the former, in the varied phenomena of the universe, were tantamount to a denial of the latter: though Law, without which there is no evidence of Mind, is the very impress and revelation of a God.

Leaving however the notice of reasonings on the subject of an atheism which the constitution of human nature, and

the testimony of fact, would alike show to be but rare, those I account not least atheistic in spirit and effect, who from the tyranny of passion, or the perversion of systems elevating the mechanical or ritual above the divine, disparage the voice of God as speaking in the conscience. It is a strange though common hallucination, indeed, which traces God in matter rather than in mind; in symbolic or artificial presentments, rather than in the life and inspiration of the human soul.

MASQUERADES, IDEAL AND RELIGIOUS.

HE mythological fictions of antiquity, in their origin but the expression of the poetic and religious sentiment of an unscientific age, requiring no historical basis for the belief, and without the species of culture implied in abstract or speculative thought, have since received a frequent colouring of allegorical interpretation, as though intended to convey truth through the medium of fable; allegory being an element of which, if there are a few faint glimmerings in the divine legends, there are surely none in the heroic.

Akin to the illusion which discovers allegory in poetic tradition, is that which transmutes legend into fact, or supplies the deficiencies of fact by a later produce of fable; as in the attempts, common to nations in a certain stage of progression, to assign a definite historical character, often with a halo of preternatural accompaniments, to beliefs or usages which, not being clearly traceable to their sources, have the hiatus filled up by an overgrowth of fancy, slowly and unconsciously superinduced, in unrecording and uncritical ages, as a ready solution of things referable to a number of remote and complicated influences.

IT is not difficult to perceive, amid several points of discordance, an affinity between Plato's position, that nothing is true but the intellectual-the rà vra, or supersensuous,

archetypal forms of things-and Berkeley's theory respecting the non-existence of a material universe: a theory which, as referring the whole world of thought, with outward phenomena, so called, as a part of it, to the direct operation of the Deity, acting by certain laws, differs from the scheme of Spinoza-often strangely misconceived, and no less one-sidedly denounced-but in resolving such phenomena into ideas, in the sense of mental states, instead of into the quality of appearance or mode of extension as an attribute of the Infinite Spirit; and in admitting a plurality of selfsubsisting minds instead of One: though the notion of selfsubsistence under such a condition of being would probably, confronted with the Spinozistic hypothesis, reduce itself chiefly to a difference of exposition.*

THE groundwork of the Platonic reasoning, in relation to that Truth or Reality which, having its highest expression in God, is summed up as rò ov, or that which is, appears to be, that abstract qualities or essences, in other words, the ideas we express by general terms, have an actual existence apart from the mind, and are capable of being apprehended as such, irrespective of the substances to which they belong: a thesis kindred if not identical with that which divided the celebrated sects of scholastic philosophers, the Nominalists and Realists, anterior to the revival of letters; and involving, besides inadvertence to the process of thought on which the so-styled universals are dependent, an oversight or partial perception of the principle, now beyond dispute, that the sum of our knowledge in regard to any thing, mental or material, is confined to properties. Nor, I may add, is it possible to conceive of knowledge, in any future state, or combination of circumstances, that can include aught but properties: so

* The untenableness of some of the popular ideas about Spinoza's metaphysical views, is sufficiently exposed in Lewes's Biographical History of Philosophy, and in an admirable piece appended to the Characteristics of Goethe, vol. iii. p. 265 et seq.