happen as he expects them. The world must not only be coherent as a whole when he looks at it, but coherent as a process. If he has seen that a certain cause produces a certain effect, he must be assured that this is not a mere accident. In other words, he must gradually exclude chance from every portion of his experience; there must be no such thing theoretically possible. All must move on fixed and certain principles, without jerks or unevenness or surprise. Chance means the intrusion of an alien and unintelligible principle; and every such intrusion means that man has failed so far in his aim. He must, at all costs, therefore, eliminate chance. Broadly speaking, chance may enter either at the beginning of the process of the formation of the world, or during its progress, or in relation to its end. That is, there may have been no prime cause upon which the whole necessarily depends; the world may have been the result of a fortuitous concourse of atoms: or there may be still in the course of things an incalculable element, tending to vitiate and limit our reasonings : or there may be no final purpose to which the whole scheme of things is moving. Any one of these positions is possible, and any one of them is fatal to the possession of a complete and satisfactory ideal of thought. This is the expanded statement of the expectation of which much has been already said. Practically it takes the form of a belief in a First Cause, in a uniform law of causation in the world, and a rational purpose' served by and in the lives and actions of the countless individual elements which go to make the world. At this point we come directly in contact with Theology again. For these beliefs are precisely the principles known in philosophical Theology as the Cosmological and Teleo

logical Proofs of the Existence of God. The belief in the First Cause and a uniform law of causation, when expressed as a philosophical necessity, form the cosmological proof: the proof from the order and uniformity of the world that a God exists who creates and governs it. And the other-the conviction of a firm and constant purpose running through all the particular events in life, is the teleological proof: the proof which rests upon the signs in nature of a rational and intelligent design. These proofs are old in the history of thought. The latter dates back at least as far as Socrates, the former at least as far as Aristotle. And they have had a chequered. career. They have not always found favour; at times they have been regarded as positively misleading.

It does not fall within our purpose to enter upon their history in detail; it would necessarily be both obscure and technical. We must pass on to a third conviction or belief, which in its turn is presented philosophically as a further proof. poses of argument, that man does really acquire the convictions as to the necessity of order, which take shape in the proofs mentioned above, let us ask the question, Why does he thus acquire them? What right

has he to act upon them?

Assuming, for pur

Why does man acquire these convictions? He does so because he claims to interpret the nature outside him on the analogy of his own. We have seen that man assumes his right to combine and harmonize the reports of his various senses. This fact may be expressed in other words by saying that he imposes unity upon the variety which meets his senses. Now the unity which he thus imposes upon nature is modelled upon his knowledge of himself. As he is one and the same throughout the whole of his

experience, so he expects nature to be one in a similar way. Its various moods and manifestations are not single and separate in their own right; they pass and vanish, but the underlying reality remains the same. In fact there is a rooted anthropomorphism in all his dealings with nature. He goes to it not as to a thing which is finally and irreconcileably foreign to himself, but as expecting to find in it the reflexion of a mind like his own. is the reason why in early days he saw divine presences in sun and air and sea; why, when he has grown out of these fancies, he still expects that nature will answer to his demands, and reveal itself as a Thought not wholly dissimilar to such as he can form, unfolded in many parts and in many fashions.

This

The crudest mythologies, then, as well as the most advanced thought represent this one claim-to interpret nature by the analogies which thought provides. And this in the technical language of philosophy becomes the Ontological Proof of the Existence of God; the proof, that is, which rests upon the belief that a condition which is absolutely necessary in order that thought may be true and valid is necessary to the existence of the world. We reach here the most fiercely controverted district of Natural Theology. The ontological proof more than any other has met with the severest criticism. Much of this confusion has arisen, we are sure, from inadequate accounts of the argument as it was presented by Anselm, who first invented it. His argument, as any one may see who cares, consists of three parts: (1) a demonstration of the necessity to thought of a being than whom no greater can be conceived; (2) the identification of this with God; (3) the proof that such a being

1 See references on p. 48.

exists necessarily also in fact. The form in which the argument occurs is no doubt scholastic and subtle, but the central fact of it is true-that if there be any condition which we can discover necessary to the truth and certainty of our thought, that condition must either be satisfied in nature, or our thought must fall short of truth altogether. Now we have seen that the one condition of the success of man in dealing with the world is that he should be able to interpret it on the analogy of his own nature. Unless it means something real and definite for him, which will go into his language; unless its order is something like what he means by rational order, nature is simply unintelligible nonsense. Unless, in a word, its uniformity and its firmness of purpose mean that a rational Thought underlies it all, it is mere chaos, and his speculations about it are simply delusive.

It is of the highest importance in this connexion to observe (1) that this claim is an assumed claim—it cannot be proved; (2) that it is an ideal, philosophically speaking, and cannot be realized. (1) It cannot be proved. For man can never so completely escape out of the regular conditions of life as to see whether nature without him corresponds to that which it seems to be when he looks at it. We believe, no doubt, that things remain the same whether we happen to be looking at them or not; and we are doubtless right in believing this. But we cannot see the proof of it with our own eyes, from the very nature of the case. And (2) the expectation that there is a complete rational unity in nature is an ideal and cannot be realized. Because to realize it would be to know all things-to think over again the whole creative Thought of God in response to

which the world sprang into being,-to think it in all its wide scope and narrowness of detail. Towards this man can only gradually move. Every access to his scientific knowledge, every new uniformity perceived and noted and combined into the general scheme, is a step forwards. But the end is not yet.

To speak metaphorically, the world from this point of view is like an orchestra playing a symphony of God's composing, conducted by the mind of man. Apart from man's mind, if it can be conceived, it would lie dead and unmeaning, like the printed score. In contact with man's mind, its meaning is evoked. The parts of the several instruments combine for the general purpose of the whole, and man hears gradually and in time the thoughts which flashed upon the composer in a moment.1 All depends upon an ultimate sympathy and similarity between the mind which composes and those which listen. Without this the symphony becomes a mere babble of meaningless sounds.

II. So far there is no fully personal result attained. It is true that the Power behind nature is most naturally thought of, even at this stage, as a personal being; but still the conditions required are satisfied by the bare assumption of a rational thought-the question of the thinker being left undecided. We now come to con

1 Cf. Jahn's Mozart, Bd. III. pp. 423-425, quoted in Von Hartmann, Phil. d. Unbewussten, Bd. I. p. 242. Mozart, speaking of the way in which a musical subject grows in his mind, writes: "This fires my soul, if I am not disturbed: the subject grows bigger, I extend it and make it clearer, and the whole piece (das Ding) becomes actually complete in my head, even though it be long, so that afterwards I survey it at a glance, like a beautiful picture, or a fine figure, and I do not hear it in my imagination successively, as it must afterwards appear, but, as it were, all at once. That is a treat! all the invention and construction goes on in me as in a beautiful dream: but to hear it over-all at once (Alles zusammen), that is the best.'