ognise as true. We are
thus taught the salutary lesson, that the capacity of thought is
not to be constituted into the measure of existence; and are warned
from recognising the domain of our knowledge as necessarily
co-extensive with the horizon of our faith. And by a wonderful
revelation, we are thus, in the very consciousness of our inability
to conceive aught above the relative and finite, inspired with a
belief in the existence of something unconditioned beyond the
sphere of all comprehensible reality."--_Discussions_, p. 15.

[K] It must be remembered that, to conceive a thing as
possible, we must conceive the manner in which it is
possible, but that we may believe in the fact without
being able to conceive the manner. Had Hamilton
distinctly expressed this, he might have avoided some
very groundless criticisms, with which he has been
assailed for maintaining a distinction between the
provinces of conception and belief.

Against Materialism, and virtually against Positivism in general, he
says:--

"If in man, intelligence be a free power,--in so far as its liberty
extends, intelligence must be independent of necessity and matter;
and a power independent of matter necessarily implies the existence
of an immaterial subject--that is, a spirit. If, then, the original
independence of intelligence on matter in the human
constitution--in other words, if the spirituality of mind in man be
supposed a datum of observation, in this datum is also given both
the condition and the proof of a God. For we have only to infer,
what analogy entitles us to do, that intelligence holds the same
relative supremacy in the universe which it holds in us, and the
first positive condition of a Deity is established, in the
establishment of the absolute priority of a free creative
intelligence. On the other hand, let us suppose the result of our
study of man to be, that intelligence is only a product of matter,
only a reflex of organization, such a doctrine would not only not
afford no basis on which to rest any argument for a God, but, on
the contrary, would positively warrant the atheist in denying His
existence. For if, as the materialist maintains, the only
intelligence of which we have any experience be a consequent of
matter,--on this hypothesis, he not only cannot assume this order
to be reversed in the relations of an intel