this case, instead of getting a true natural history of Atheism,
which would be of immense service to every thinker, we get only an
emphatic statement of the authors' hatred of it under different aspects.
Atheism is styled "a hollow absurdity," "that culmination of all
speculative absurdities," "a disease of the speculative faculty," "a
monstrous disease of the reasoning faculty," and so on.

The chapter on "Its Specific Varieties and General Root" is
significantly headed with that hackneyed declaration of the Psalmist,
"The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God," as though
impertinence were better from a Jew than from a Christian, or more
respectable for being three thousand years old. Perhaps Professor
Blackie has never heard of the sceptical critic who exonerated the
Psalmist on the ground that he was speaking jocosely, and really meant
that the man who said _in his heart_ only "There is no God," without
saying so _openly_, was the fool. But this interpretation is as profane
as the other is impertinent; and in fact does a great injustice to the
Atheist, who has never been accustomed to say "There is no God," an
assertion which involves the arrogance of infinite knowledge, since
nothing less than that is requisite to prove an universal negative: but
simply "I know not of such an existence," which is a modest statement
intellectually and morally, and quite unlike the presumption of certain
theologians who, as Mr. Arnold says, speak familiarly of God as though
he were a man living in the next street.

For his own sake Professor Blackie should a little curb his proneness to
the use of uncomplimentary epithets. He does himself injustice when he
condescends to describe David Hume's theory of causation as "wretched
cavil." Carlyle is more just to this great representative of an
antagonistic school of thought. He exempts him from the sweeping
condemnation of his contemporaries in Scottish prose literature, and
admits that he was "too rich a man to borrow" from France or elsewhere.
And surely Hume was no less honest than rich in thought. Jest and
captiousness were entirely foreign to his mind. Wincing under his
inexorable logic, the ontologist may try to console himself with the
thought that the great sceptic was playing with arguments like a
mere dialectician of wondrous skill; but in reality Hume was quite in
earnest, and always meant what he said. We may also observe that it is
Professor Blackie and not Darwin who