bt: but with years and prosperity the normal
habits of inference which he had so acutely analysed asserted themselves
in his own person and he yielded to the "tendency to feign" so far at
least as to believe languidly in the histories he wrote, the compliments
he received, and the succulent dinners he devoured. There is a kind of
courtesy in scepticism. It would be an offence against polite
conventions to press our doubts too far and question the permanence of
our estates, our neighbours' independent existence, or even the
justification of a good bishop's faith and income. Against
metaphysicians, and even against bishops, sarcasm was not without its
savour; but the line must be drawn somewhere by a gentleman and a man of
the world. Hume found no obstacle in his speculations to the adoption of
all necessary and useful conceptions in the sphere to which he limited
his mature interests. That he never extended this liberty to believe
into more speculative and comprehensive regions was due simply to a
voluntary superficiality in his thought. Had he been interested in the
rationality of things he would have laboured to discover it, as he
laboured to discover that historical truth or that political utility to
which his interests happened to attach.

[Sidenote: Kant's substitute for knowledge.]

Kant, like Berkeley, had a private mysticism in reserve to raise upon
the ruins of science and common-sense. Knowledge was to be removed to
make way for faith. This task is ambiguous, and the equivocation
involved in it is perhaps the deepest of those confusions with which
German metaphysics has since struggled, and which have made it waver
between the deepest introspection and the dreariest mythology. To
substitute faith for knowledge might mean to teach the intellect
humility, to make it aware of its theoretic and transitive function as a
faculty for hypothesis and rational fiction, building a bridge of
methodical inferences and ideal unities between fact and fact, between
endeavour and satisfaction. It might be to remind us, sprinkling over
us, as it were, the Lenten ashes of an intellectual contrition, that our
thoughts are air even as our bodies are dust, momentary vehicles and
products of an immortal vitality in God and in nature, which fosters and
illumines us for a moment before it lapses into other forms.

Had Kant proposed to humble and concentrate into a practical faith _the
same natural ideas_ which had previously been tak