universe sub specie æternitatis. Contingency is similarly excluded, for whatever is is divine. The logical elaboration of Pantheism thus brings us face to face with an ultimate dilemma.

• Either we reduce the universe of individual things and persons to shadows of reality, and then the undetermined substance or Deity of Spinoza comes in as an abstract featureless unity; or we must assume that the presented data of our temporal experience are real, so far as they go, and that God is signified, not modified, in the finite universe.'

Only facts can decide; and if facts oblige us to admit that what experience brings us into contact with are not shadows and dreams, but individual realities and a real succession of events, then we must decline to entertain the Spinozistic hypothesis. Such facts are found in the moral experience of remorse and responsibility, which form an insurmountable barrier in the way of Spinoza's logic. If, again, we are told that individual persons cannot possess a real or substantial independence, because this is inconsistent with the definitions of substance and reality, it may fairly be answered that in so arguing we are drifting into a dispute about words. Life implies that in point of fact they are as if they were distinct substances, for we so treat them in our moral judgments and in our actions.' The Pantheistic system, on the contrary, tends to become ‘a logical evolution of what is contained in the connotation of certain words of extreme abstraction.' To seek to override our most intimate convictions because they do not accommodate themselves to a speculative construction of existence, as supposed to be seen from the divine centre, is emphatically to begin philosophizing at the wrong end.

The three attempted monistic solutions having thus broken down under examination, we may be finally tempted to relinquish the speculative problem in despair, and relapse into agnosticism, which when thought out, as by Hume, results in universal scepticism. Professor Fraser accordingly, before proceeding to his own constructive suggestions, devotes a lecture to the attitude of universal nescience' as represented by Hume.. Hume and Spinoza, he says in his Preface, were seldom absent from his mind as types of the two extremes of speculative thought. If, as Hume assumes, momentary sensation is the measure of reality, the very notion of 'truth' falls to the ground; as Plato long ago proved, a consistent sensationalism must be speechless. But Professor Fraser finds that Hume himself, in the account which he gives of Custom, falls back upon a species of faith or trust as the only way of extricating

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himself from the sceptical dilemma. Moreover, he contends that this faith, attenuated though it be, carries in it the rudiments of the three commonly postulated existences-self, the outer world and God. Professor Fraser's interpretation of Hume at this point is both novel and suggestive, and should claim the attention of philosophical students. Hume's appeal to irrational or non-rational custom has generally been treated by his expositors and critics as an integral part of his scepticism, indeed as its culmination. But Professor Fraser sees in it rather the suggestion of a constructive principle, which only requires to be developed in order to lift us clear of scepticism altogether. In support of this view, he is able to refer to some of Hume's own expressions in regard to it, which are sufficiently remarkable, but which have been somewhat unaccountably neglected in preceding accounts of his thought. Custom, according to Hume, is 'a species of natural instinct' which generates expectations in conformity with the behaviour of facts in the past. This 'belief or faith' (as Hume also calls it) is in effect, Professor Fraser urges, a recognition of the practical trustworthiness of the universe-a faith in the interpretability of Nature; and is not this interpretability of Nature, he asks, another expression for its immanent divinity? Hume himself talks of the correspondence that appears between our trust in natural order and the facts of that order as a kind of preestablished harmony' between nature and the succession of our ideas. Though the powers and forces by which the universe is governed be wholly unknown to us, yet our thoughts and conceptions have still, we find, gone on in the same train with the other works of nature.' He even suggests in his half ironical, half serious vein, that those who delight in the discovery and contemplation of final causes' have here a supreme example ready to their hand. For

"the wisdom of nature" has implanted in us an instinctive faith "which carries forward the thought in a correspondent course to that which she has established among external objects, though we are ignorant of those powers and forces on which this regular course or succession of objects totally depends." The three primary

postulated existences,' Professor Fraser concludes, are virtually implied, each in a thin, attenuated form, in these notable words, "self" and "outward things," distinguished, yet in an established harmony with each other; and, withal, a rudimentary faith in order and purpose embodied in the whole, but with ignorance otherwise of the Power to which the order and purpose are due.'

But can we stop here? The starting-point-it might even be said, the central thought-of the constructive theory of the Lectures

Lectures is found in the challenge to the scientific agnostic with which the lecture on Hume concludes. Is the religious

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leap in the dark" more irrational than the induction?' Current agnosticism makes no scruple of treating physical science as completely certain and any deeper interpretation of life as vain imagination. But such agnosticism does not escape from the necessity of faith or trust. It only proposes to arrest it arbitrarily at a certain point.

In pressing home the theistic implication of scientific procedure, Professor Fraser's argument offers many undesigned, and on that account all the more interesting, points of coincidence with Mr. Balfour's reasoning in the Foundations of Belief.' Both argue that all scientific reasoning as to the causation of events rests on a fundamental presupposition which is not itself proved, and is not susceptible of proof, inasmuch as all proof takes it for granted. The belief in natural law-the conviction that we are living in a cosmos and not in a chaos-is essentially an act of faith or trust. It cannot be proved by any accumulation of inductions, for the very intention of making an induction presupposes it, and each individual induction depends for whatever cogency it possesses upon this assumption. Mill's laboured confusion of logic and psychology, in his futile struggle to remain true to the principles of a pure empiricism, served only to bring to light the manifest circle in which attempts at empirical proof involve themselves. We bring the belief with us to the facts, and when we do so, we find that we are able to interpret the facts in the light of the belief; in that sense, and in that sense alone, may the progress of science be regarded as a cumulative proof or justification of the soundness of the trust by which the whole advance has been inspired. This immovable belief in cosmical law, or the intelligibility of the universe, is rightly regarded both by Professor Fraser and Mr. Balfour as, pro tanto, a belief in God; for it treats nature as a rational system, and therefore the product of an intelligence akin to our own.

'Natural science,' says Professor Fraser, is a product which depends for its existence upon the fact of intellectual affinity between man and his surroundings.'

'I do not believe,' says Mr. Balfour, that any escape from a purely sceptical position is possible, unless we are prepared to bring to the study of the world the presupposition that it was the work of a rational Being who made it intelligible, and at the same time made us, in however feeble a fashion, able to understand it. Theism, then, whether or not it can in the strict meaning of the word be described as proved by science, is a principle which science requires

requires for its own completion. (Foundations of Belief,' pp. 301, 302.)

This is, again, the true sense of the circular argument (a circulus when regarded as an argument) in which Descartes makes the veracity of God the primal condition of all certainty. If I do not first know that there is a God,' he says, 'I may suppose that I have been so constituted by mere nature as to be deceived, even in matters which I apprehend with the greatest seeming evidence and certitude;' so that without the knowledge of God it would be impossible ever to know anything else.' As Professor Fraser points out, Descartes is here simply giving reflective expression to the faith that is at the root of all other faith; the existence of God is presupposed in the reliableness of experience. It is in all essentials the same position at which Kant also arrives when he calls attention to the harmony which exists between the forms of our intelligence and the matter with which they are furnished by the world of reality. The Knowability of the world in any degree, would be impossible, he points out, but for a pre-established harmony between the knower and the world he comes to know.

On a higher plane Kant thus offers us the same thought of pre-established harmony which Professor Fraser has signalized in Hume, and to which he seeks to give a deeper and more farreaching interpretation. For if the belief in natural causation is not a conclusion from the facts, but a governing idea by the light of which we find the facts interpretable, other ideas may justify themselves on similar terms. It cannot then be an objection to the teleological interpretation of the world that the idea of purpose is brought with us to the facts, if the teleological point of view enables us to reach a better understanding of the whole. In that respect, it is exactly on the same footing as the belief in causal order. Why, in brief, should we stop short with a merely physical interpretation of the world, when there are moral or spiritual facts which are only interpretable if we regard the universe as 'at last the supernatural manifestation of supreme moral purpose'? The larger moral faith includes the more meagre physical faith, and though neither is in a strict sense proved, both are justified by their works. Such is the ethical teleology in which Professor Fraser, like Kant, finally casts anchor.

In reality, the orderly sequence of physical facts which we call Nature cannot stand by itself. It only becomes intelligible in the light reflected upon it from the conscious spirit of man. For natural causation does not explain anything finally; natural causes are only metaphorically called causes, if by cause

is meant agency, real power to originate the effect. The final meaning of cause is reached through conscience.' In our moral activity we are conscious of ourselves as the real agents in respect of all these acts for which we feel ourselves to be responsible. 'Man thus shows in his own personality what a cause is that is really a cause.' Power or real causality in this sense can belong only to persons; a free cause is the only true cause. So-called natural causes are only the established signs of changes, whose occurrence we are thereby enabled to predict. Natural causation is really sense-symbolism-a divinely instituted order of procedure, by deciphering which we are able with practical safety to direct our lives. The laws of Nature which science formulates are simply rules of connexion; the Agent in all natural changes must be a Power in the only sense of the word Power known to us. That is, all natural causation is really divine. This is Berkeley's vital thought, and, as may be supposed, it is expounded by Professor Fraser with peculiar authority and a loving sense of proprietorship.

'It pervades,' he says, 'the thought which I have given to the world in the last five-and-twenty years, for it is implied in six volumes of which Berkeley was the text, and in three in which I have essayed a critical reconstruction of Locke.'

This conception of the secondary or caused causes of natural science, it may be added, does not depend for its truth upon the too purely subjective idealism of the Berkeleian theory. It depends only upon the distinction between persons and things. Power and purpose can reside only in the former; they alone really act, that is to say, originate or create; and they alone therefore are responsible for their actions. The changing world of things can be no more than the instrument of active will or conscious purpose. In this sense,

'conscious life is the light of the world. . . . It is the revelation that is involved in the self-consciousness of man that supplies the key to this deeper or spiritual interpretation of nature. Apart from this the outer world, with all its laws and ends, is darkness; for external nature in itself, or apart from the contents of moral life in man, conceals the God whom it nevertheless reveals when it is looked at in the light of spiritual consciousness. (First Series, p. 247.)

The words which we have here italicized obviously refer to the famous saying of Jacobi which Sir William Hamilton was fond of quoting-Nature conceals God; man reveals God.' Taken by itself, the aphorism has the air of a paradox; for it would seem to make Ñature the expression of a wholly undivine and alien power. But a dualism of this kind is a philosophically

impossible