supports himself in this assertion, but on a psychology to which only a profound reflection can attain.

Can there be any fact of consciousness without some attention? Our thoughts, if we do not attend to them, become confused, fall into indistinct reveries, very soon vanish away, and become for us as though they were not. Even the perceptions of our senses, without attention, degenerate into mere organic impressions. An organ is struck, and even with force, but the mind, if engaged elsewhere, does not perceive it; there is then no sensation, and, if no sensation, of course no consciousness. In every fact of the consciousness, therefore, the attention does and must intervene.

Now is not every act of the attention more or less voluntary? Is not every voluntary act marked with this character, that we consider ourselves its cause? And is it not this cause, whose effects may vary while it remains itself unvaried, this power, which its acts alone reveal to us, and which its acts du not exhaust, is it not this cause, power, force, that we call I, me, our individuality, our personality, that personality of which we never doubt, which we never confound with any other, because we never refer to any other the voluntary acts which give us an intimate sentiment and an unalterable conviction of it? The I, the personality, is then given us in every fact of consciousness. There can be no fact of consciousness without a conception of our own existence.

We find ourselves then, in the fact of consciousness, and we find ourselves a cause, a creative force. This is the radical idea which we have of ourselves. We know ourselves under no other character than that of a cause, and we exist for ourselves no farther than we are a cause. The bounds of our causality are the bounds of our existence. Can this cause, which we are, do whatever it will? Meets it no resistance, no obstacles? It does, at every step, and of every kind. To the sentiment of our strength is ever added that of our weakness. Thousands of impressions from without continually assail us. If we do not attend to them, they come not to the consciousness; but, as soon as we attend to them, sensation begins. Now, here is the intervention of a new element. We refer to ourselves the act of attending to the impressions made upon our organs of sense, but we do not, and we cannot, refer to ourselves, as their cause, the impressions to which we attend. We receive sensations, we do not cause them. But, if we

-sensa

cannot refer them to ourselves as their cause, we cannot help referring them to some cause, and necessarily to a cause which is out of us, exterior. The existence of this exterior cause is as certain to us as our own existence; for the phenomenon,tion, which suggests it, is as certain to us, as the phenomeact of attention,—which suggests to us our existence. Both too, are given together, in the same phenomenon. There is then, in every fact of consciousness, not only a conception of our own existence, of our personality, but also a conception of something which is not ourselves, something independent of our personality and exterior to it, external nature.

non,

If any one should doubt this, he is required to conceive of himself without also conceiving of that which is not himself, or of that which is not himself without conceiving of himself. I cannot have a clear conception of myself without distintinguishing myself from all other existences. To assert that I exist, is to assert that I am, and that I am myself and not another. In the complex phenomena of consciousness, we have seen there necessarily intervene activity and sensibility. There are the impressions from a cause which we are not, and attention, which is our act, applied to those impressions, giving us a consciousness of them. These two causes, one of which we are, the other of which we are not, external nature, are then unquestionable in every fact of consciousness, and both equally certain. But with what characters do we find these two causes? Certainly they appear as relative, imperfect, bounded, finite. The cause, which we are, meets resistance, obstacles, bounds, in that variety of causes to which we refer the phenomena of which we are conscious, which we do not produce and which are purely affective and involuntary; and these causes themselves are limited and bounded by that voluntary cause which we are. We resist them as they resist us, and, to a certain extent, limit their action as they limit ours. It is only in the meeting, the clashing of the two causes, it is only in their conflict, that either is revealed to us. There is no question that we always conceive of them, and cannot help conceiving of them, as relative and as finite causes. Now, what is it to conceive of these two causes, as relative and finite? It is to distinguish them in our minds as such; it is to assert that they are not absolute, infinite causes, but relative and finite causes. If, then, whenever these two causes are in the consciousness, they are there as relative, as finite, they must be

there as contrasted with the infinite, the absolute. But they cannot be contrasted with, or distinguished from, the infinite and the absolute, without a conception of the infinite and the absolute; and, without being so contrasted or distinguished, they cannot be conceived as relative and finite. In every fact of consciousness, then, there is a conception of ourselves, or of personality, and of something which is not ourselves, external nature, both as relative, finite causes; and of the infinite, the absolute, to which they are by the reason necessarily referred, and with which they must be contrasted in order to be conceived.

The reason, which is developed in the consciousness, and which perceives there at the same time attention and sensation, as soon as it has the apperception of them, makes us conceive immediately of the two sorts of distinct, but correlative and reciprocally finite causes to which they are referred. But the reason does not stop here. The notion of finite and limited causes once given, we cannot help conceiving of a superior, absolute, and infinite cause, which is itself the first and last cause of all causes. The internal and personal cause which we are, and the exterior causes which we call nature, are undeniably causes in relation to their own effects; but the same reason which gives them as causes, giving them as relative and limited causes, prevents us from stopping with them as causes which are sufficient for themselves, and forces us to refer them to a supreme Cause, which produces and sustains them, which is relatively to them what they are relatively to their own phenomena, and which, being the Cause of all cause, and Being of all being, is sufficient for itself, and for the reason which seeks nothing and finds nothing beyond.

If this analysis of a fact of consciousness be accurate, we are authorized to say that no fact of consciousness is possible without the conception of our own existence, the existence of the world, and that of God. The ideas, of ourselves as a free personality, of nature, and of God as the substance, the cause, of both us and nature, constitute a single fact of the consciousness, are its inseparable elements, and without them consciousness is impossible. Ourselves, nature, and God are, then, necessarily asserted in every word, in every affirmation, in every thought. The skeptic who professes to doubt their existence, in that he can assert that he doubts, asserts that 3D S. VOL. III. NO. I.

VOL. XXI.

7

they exist. Atheism is, then, impossible; some men may want the term, the word, but all men believe in God.

The world and ourselves are found in the fact of consciousness as causes, and God is also found in the same fact, as a cause, the infinite, the absolute cause, which is the cause and substance of the relative and finite causes which we and nature are. God, then, exists to us under the character of a cause. A little reflection soon discovers the identity of cause and substance. We call ourselves and the world substances for the simple reason that they are causes, and in our conception the limits of their causality are the limits of their substantiality. God, being absolute cause, is absolute substance. If absolute, he must be one, for two absolutes are an absurdity. The relative, free, intentional causality, personality, which we are, implies absolute intentional causality, absolute personality; and, as the absolute can be found only in the absolute, it follows that God is not a blind, fatal causality, but a free, intentional cause, that is, a person. Descending again into the reason, we find there the absolute principles of the Just and the Beautiful. These principles, being absolute, belong to the absolute. Hence, from the absolute principles of Causality, Substance, Unity, Intentionality, the Just, and the Beautiful, we obtain the absolute God, Cause of causes, Being of beings, substance of substances, unity of unities, intentionality of intentionalities, morally just, beautiful, righteous, our Father.

It should be remarked, that we do not infer the Absolute from the relative, the Infinite from the finite, God from nature and humanity. The Absolute is no logical creation, no production of reasoning. It could not be deduced from the relative. No dialectic skill has ever yet been able to draw the infinite from the finite, the unconditioned from the conditioned. Both terms are given together, both are primitive data, without which no reasoning could possibly take place. Remove from man the idea of the infinite, or of the finite, and he would be incapable of a single intellectual act. A man, to reason, must assert something, and must assert that something to be either infinite or finite. But no man can say that a thing is finite without having at the same time the conception of the infinite; or that a thing is infinite without at the same time conceiving the finite. Neither, then, can be deduced from the other; both coexist in the intelligence as its fundamental elements, and not only coexist, but coexist as cause and effect. Hence the ideas of

the infinite, the finite and their relation, not of mere coexistence but as cause and effect, are inseparable and essential elements of all intellection. This being true, all three, embracing all existence, ourselves, God, and the world, must have existed in the understanding, before ever an intelligent act was possible. They are, then, so far from being inferred, some from the others, that all then must exist before an inference is possible. They are the primitive data of the intellect, the startingpoints of all reasoning. That is, when they are considered in relation to their logical origin, though in point of fact they are not developed in the understanding, till the understanding begins to act. All three, however, are developed simultaneously in the first fact of the intellectual life.

But if the absolute logically precedes the relative, and if the conceptions of the infinite, the finite, and their relation bet indispensable conditions of all reasoning, it follows of course that our belief in God, in nature, in our own existence, is the result of no reasoning. When we first turned our minds inward in the act of reflection, we found that belief. We had it, and every man has it, from the first dawn of the intellect. It does not proceed then from reflection; and, as reflection is the only intellectual act in which we have any agency, it follows that it does not exist in consequence of any thing we have willed or done. It is prior to our action, and independent of it. Whence then its origin? It must be a primitive, spontaneous belief, the result of the spontaneity of the reason. The reason sees by its own light, is itself active; and, being in relation with the objective and the absolute, it can and does of itself reveal to the consciousness God and the world, giving by its own vigor the belief in question. The reason, being in its nature independent, and in its spontaneity acting independently of us, and though developing itself in us, is a good and legitimate. witness for what lies beyond us, and exists independent of us.

Is this a legitimate passage from the subjective to the objective, from psychology to ontology, from the phenomenon to being, from the relative to the absolute, from the conditioned to the unconditioned? Is there here a verification of that law of our nature, which determines us to believe in God and an external world? Is there here a proof, that our belief in the existence of the world and of God has any objective reality to respond to it? The reason is independent, it is objective; therefore,