e Infinite and Perfect, to conceive the Unconditioned and
Ultimate Cause; whilst the Dogmatic Theologians are borrowing, and
recklessly brandishing, the weapons of all these antagonists, and, in
addition to all this, are endeavoring to show the insufficiency of "_the
principle of unity_" and the weakness and invalidity of "the _moral
principles_," which are regarded by us as relating man to a Moral
Personality, and as indicating to him the existence of a righteous God,
the ruler of the world. It is necessary, therefore, that we should
concentrate our attention yet more specifically on these separate lines
of attack, and attempt a minuter examination of the positions assumed by
each, and of the arguments by which they are seeking, directly or
indirectly, to invalidate the fundamental principles of Natural Theism.

(i.) _We commence with the Idealistic School_, of which John Stuart Mill
must be regarded as the ablest living representative.

The doctrine of this school is that all our knowledge is necessarily
confined to _mental_ phenomena; that is, "to _feelings_ or states of
consciousness," and "the succession and co-existence, the likeness and
unlikeness between these feelings or states of consciousness."[226] All
our general notions, all our abstract ideas, are generated out of these
feelings[227] by "_inseparable association_," which registers their
inter-relations of recurrence, co-existence, and resemblance. The
results of this inseparable association constitute at once the sum total
and the absolute limit of all possible cognition.

[Footnote 226: J. S. Mill, "Logic," vol. i. p. 83 (English edition).]

[Footnote 227: In the language of Mill, every thing of which we are
conscious is called "feeling." "Feeling, in the proper sense of the
term, is a genus of which Sensation, Emotion, and Thought are the
subordinate species."--"Logic," bk. i. ch. iii. Sec. 3.]

It is admitted by Mill that one _apparent_ element in this total result
is the general conviction that our own existence is really distinct from
the external world, and that the personal _ego_ has an essential
identity distinct from the fleeting phenomena of sensation. But this
persuasion is treated by him as a mere illusion--a leap beyond the
original datum for which we have no authority. Of a real substance or
substratum called Mind, of a real substance or substratum called Matter,
underlying the series of feelings--"the thread of consciousness"--we do
kno