nly that which is never an object of
sense or experience can be the root and principle of experience and
sense. Only the invisible and changeless can be the substance of a
moving show. God could now be apprehended and believed in precisely
because he was essentially invisible: had he anywhere appeared he could
not be the principle of all appearance; had he had a body and a _locus_
in the universe, he could not have been its spiritual creator. The
ultimate objects of human knowledge were accordingly ideas, not things;
principles reached by the intellect, not objects by any possibility
offered to sense. The methodological concepts of science, by which we
pass from fact to fact and from past perception to future, did not
attract Augustine's attention. He admitted, it is true, that there was a
subordinate, and to him apparently uninteresting, region governed by
"_certissima ratione vel experientia_," and he even wished science to be
allowed a free hand within that empirical and logical sphere. A mystic
and allegorical interpretation of Scripture was to be invoked to avoid
the puerilities into which any literal interpretation--of the creation
in six days, for instance--would be sure to run. Unbelievers would thus
not be scandalised by mythical dogmas "concerning things which they
might have actually experienced, or discovered by sure calculation."

Science was to have its way in the field of calculable experience; that
region could be the more readily surrendered by Augustine because his
attention was henceforth held by those ideal objects which he had so
laboriously come to conceive. These were concepts of the contemplative
reason or imagination, which envisages natures and eternal essences
behind the variations of experience, essences which at first receive
names, becoming thus the centres of rational discourse, then acquire
values, becoming guides to action and measures of achievement, and
finally attract unconditional worship, being regarded as the first
causes and ultimate goals of all existence and aspiration.

[Sidenote: He identifies it with Christianity.]

This purely Platonic philosophy, however, was not to stand alone. Like
every phase of Saint Augustine's speculation, it came, as we have said,
to buttress or express some religious belief. But it is a proof of his
depth and purity of soul that his searching philosophic intuition did
more to spiritualise the dogmas he accepted from others than these
dogmas could