though this may
seem but barren dialectic, it may, I hope, be of practical service if it
secures a fair hearing to the reports given by the vast majority of
mankind who unquestionably believe them to emanate from some such
super-added faculties--numerous and diverse though their religions be.
Besides, in my youth I published an essay (the _Candid Examination_)
which excited a good deal of interest at the time, and has been long out
of print. In that treatise I have since come to see that I was wrong
touching what I constituted the basal argument for my negative
conclusion. Therefore I now feel it obligatory on me to publish the
following results of my maturer thought, from the same stand-point of
pure reason. Even though I have obtained no further light from the side
of intuition, I have from that of intellect. So that, if there be in
truth any such intuition, I occupy with regard to the organ of it the
same position as that of the blind lecturer on optics. But on this very
account I cannot be accused of partiality towards it.

It is generally assumed that when a man has clearly perceived
agnosticism to be the only legitimate attitude of reason to rest in with
regard to religion (as I will subsequently show that it is), he has
thereby finished with the matter; he can go no further. The main object
of this treatise is to show that such is by no means the case. He has
then only begun his enquiry into the grounds and justification of
religious belief. For reason is not the only attribute of man, nor is it
the only faculty which he habitually employs for the ascertainment of
truth. Moral and spiritual faculties are of no less importance in their
respective spheres even of everyday life; faith, trust, taste, &c., are
as needful in ascertaining truth as to character, beauty, &c., as is
reason. Indeed we may take it that reason is concerned in ascertaining
truth only where _causation_ is concerned; the appropriate organs for
its ascertainment where anything else is concerned belong to the moral
and spiritual region.

As Herbert Spencer says, 'men of science may be divided into two
classes, of which the one, well exemplified by Faraday, keeping their
religion and their science absolutely separate, are unperplexed by any
incongruities between them, and the other of which, occupying themselves
exclusively with the facts of science, never ask what implications they
have. Be it trilobite or be it double star, their thought about