manifestation, or forthrushing.

This system, it will be

noted, is at the opposite extreme from Nihilism. It is the system of Spinoza, and also, though with a difference, of Schelling.

In this classification of Philosophical Systems from one point of view, I have followed, with some liberty of rearrangement and change of expression, the best recent authority on the subject.* Objections may be taken to the classification even in respect of what it was intended for; nor, whatever may be its worth as respects the past, do I think that it provides, as it stands, a sufficient means of recognising and naming the various working cosmological conceptions now extant among philosophers, and of which it might be desirable to take account. But it goes so far. It brings out, at all events, what I wished to bring out-to wit, that we can have by no means an adequate collective view of the philosophers of our time, so long as we trust to

* Sir William Hamilton's Discussions (Articles " 'Philosophy of Perception" and "Idealism"); also his Lectures on Metaphysics (i. 293-297); but particularly his Dissertations on Reid (748—749 and 816-819). In these portions of Sir William's writings his classification of Philosophical Systems from the point of view of the Doctrine of External Perception is turned over and over again in all sorts of ways, and with all sorts of side-lights. I have taken his authority for the facts, but have modified and re-arranged the classification to suit it to my purpose in the text.

For example, a very prevalent form of cosmological conception among thinkers of the present day is one which, if I am not mistaken, it would be difficult to assign to any one of the six systems enumerated. It is a compound of Materialism with Constructive Idealism. A very large number of thinkers, if I am not mistaken, always think of Mind as bred out of Matter, and yet, when they study this Mind as perceiving and taking cognisance of that World of Matter out of which it has been bred, do not allow that it grasps the reality at all, but only that it

D

a mere preliminary division of them, however accurate, into Empiricists and Transcendentalists. Behold what crossings and matchings, both of Empiricism and Transcendentalism, incalculable beforehand, in even the cosmological classification so suggested to us! Empiricists among the Idealists, side by side with Transcendentalists! On the other hand, Transcendentalists in almost all the six classes, and even in those where we should expect only Empiricists! What if there should be such a thing even as a Transcendental Materialist, or a Materialistic Transcendentalist? I am not concerned here with what ought to be possible or impossible in cosmological conception consistently with either of the two psychological theories. My statement is that a philosopher may have a working cosmological conception which could not be reconciled with his avowed psychological theory if he would think that theory consistently out, or respecting which, at all events, his opponents give him this assurance. In short, as there have been strange crossings and matchings of the psychological theories with the prevailing cosmological conceptions in the past, so there may be in the future. And what if we were still farther to complicate the intertexture by introducing, even at this point, the theological element? There have been Atheistic as well as Theistic Idealists; there have

substitutes for the reality a hypothetical construction of its own affections. Sentiency, they think, is the child of Matter, but has never beheld, nor can behold, the real face of its mother. Are there not also millions of forms and degrees of sentiency, from the lowest of living creatures up to man, each apprehending the world according to a different measure of capacity? Is the dog's world-i.e. the construction of his own affections to which the dog attributes an external reality—the same, even so far as it goes, as his master's?

been Theistic as well as Atheistic Empiricists; there are in the world some whom rough popular speech does not hesitate to describe as Transcendental Atheists; and, as there have been examples of what might be called Theistic Materialism in the past, what if something still describable by that name should exist somewhere at present, throwing stones both at Atheism and Pantheism?

III. THE ONTOLOGICAL DIFFERENCE.

Mind or Consciousness, whatever it may be, is that organism in the midst of all things through which all our knowledge of all things must come. Philosophers, therefore, may make a study of that; and they have done so under the name of Psychology. Round this organism, howsoever related to it, is the vast and varied Cosmos, or phænomenal and historical Universe, which the organism reports to us as hung in Space and voyaging through Time. Philosophers may make a study of that; and such a study would be Cosmology. But, beyond this whole phænomenal Universe or Cosmos which has the Mind of Man in its midst, it has been the passion of Philosophy to assert or speculate a transcendent Universe, or Empyrean of Things in Themselves, of Essential Causes, of Absolute or Noumenal, as distinct from Phænomenal, Existence. What enspheres the Cosmos; what supports it; of what Absolute Reality underneath and beyond itself is it significant; of what Absolute Meaning is it the expression, the allegory, the poem? May not the entire Phænomenal Cosmos, hung in Space and voyaging through Time, be but an illusion— and this whether we consider it to be, within itself, a play of

Matter alone, or of Spirit alone, or of both Matter and Spirit? If we feel that it is not, on what warrant do we so feel? In what tissues of facts and events, material or moral, in this phænomenal Space-and-Time World shall we trace the likeliest filaments of that golden cord by which we then suppose it attached to a World not of Space and Time; and how shall we, denizens of Space and Time, succeed in throwing the end of the cord beyond our Space-and-Time World's limits? Is the Cosmos a bubble? Then, what breath has blown it, and into what Empyrean will it remelt when the separating film bursts? Asking these questions in all varieties of forms, Philosophy has debated the possibility of an Ontology, or science of things in themselves, in addition to a Psychology and a Cosmology. These two are sciences of the Phænomenal, but that would be a science of the Absolute. It would be the highest Metaphysic of all, and, indeed, in one sense, the only science properly answering to that name. It would be the science of the Supernatural. Can there be such a science? A question this which seems to break itself into two-Is there a Supernatural? and can the Supernatural be known? It is the differences that have shown themselves among philosophers in their answers, express or implied, to these questions that I have in view under the name of their differences in respect of Ontological Faith.

The Ontological difference is intertangled with the Psychological and Cosmological differences, and a discussion of them always brings it into sight. Most probably, if matters were fully reasoned out, all the three sets of differences might be knit together, and it might be shown that adhesion to one of the two psychological theories

involved, in strict consistency, an obligation to a particular mode of cosmological conception, and that this again involved obligation to a particular form of ontological faith. But the minds even of philosophers, coming at separate times on questions which are really inter-related, do not always march up to them in the same state of feeling, but sometimes bring forces to the front in one case which remain in the background in others. Hence, just as it seemed impossible to infer with any precision from our knowledge of a philosopher's theory of the Origin of our Ideas. in which of the six systems of conception as to the constitution of the Phænomenal Universe he might be found ranking himself, so neither from a philosopher's psychological theory nor from his cosmological system would it be safe, as things go, to infer his ontological faith.

Take the first ontological question. Is there an Absolute, a Supernatural, or is the Phænomenal Universe all that exists? It might seem that only the Transcendentalist would be entitled to a strong affirmative to this question. His very theory of the Mind of Man, as an organism bringing with it into the Phænomenal World ideas or structural forms of à priori origin, refers one, if it has any meaning, to a Supernatural World or Empyrean, out of which the Mind of Man is to be conceived as having proceeded, and from which it still carries recollections, or shreds of affinity. From the Empiricist on the other hand it might seem that the only answer to be expected to the question is " I do not know, nor can any man know." As all knowledge, according to the Empiricist, is the product of experience, and as there cannot have been and never can be experience of anything beyond