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then, is transcendent metaphysical thought and feeling but the designed and methodical culture of a break of circuit and the pernicious negation of the true method of knowledge? Instead of labouring patiently to make fit circuit in every case, and to restore it when interrupted, the transcendental metaphysician determinedly strains to break circuit by severing himself from the outward fact and relations; aims to make the interruption more and more complete by his convulsive inner straining; and hinders, by all the means in his power, the restoration of the natural condition. He does deliberately for himself, as a method, what prejudice, passion, and temper do unconsciously for the individual whose perceptions and reflections they disturb and vitiate; and he measures the height of his metaphysical faculty by the height of his success in such psycholeptic sleights of thought.*

* Although the opposition of subject and object is necessary from the individual standpoint, and it is impossible to think otherwise, yet the identity of subject and object is conceivably possible from a standpoint outside individual and object. We are wont to say of subjective experience, as distinguished from objective knowledge, that it is indubitable, immediate, ultimate, absolute, whereas objective knowledge is indirect, inferential, relative, and may be deceptive, and to regard that as its superior prerogative. But is not such supposed prerogative really the condemnation of subjective certainty? Absolute knowledge in a relative being cannot well be knowledge at all: the absolute certainty of a thought or feeling is the surest proof of its individuality or separateness from the whole, and therefore of its defect or falsity. The idealist justly declares the reality of an external world

However much he may esteem his method and its results-and inevitably the delightful sense of freedom and power in the stimulation of function without use leads him to overestimate it-the ecstasies of thought and feeling which he achieves, whether theological or metaphysical, are entirely personal; they have no authoritative value, no objective validity, for any other person; and it yet remains to be proved that his most strained achievements are of any more real worth to his own mind than the ecstatic, hysteric, cataleptic, and like raptures which they resemble are to the minds of those who are subject to them. Looking on man as an organic part of nature, nowise separable from it while he is in it, and as increasing in faculty only so far as he gains from it—as the nature-made mean by which nature is progressively modified—it is legitimate to view these transcendent functions of mind as functions gone astray, and to conclude the right method of mental culture to be, not to develop such malfunction by artificial internal means, but by natural external culture of large extent and varied character so to nourish, consolidate, and fortify the mind as to render such abnormal development difficult or impossible.

He must consent to relinquish the

to be unprovable, while at the same time he practically admits it: this is proof, not of the worth, but of the essential defect, of purely subjective knowledge, which must be always provisional and transitory.

vain quest for absolute truth, of which he is incapable, and be content to use the relative truth of which he is capable, for the humble purposes of a gradually progressive development.

STATEMENT OF THE CONCLUSION.

IF the facts and arguments set forth in the foregoing pages are soundly based and sound in themselves, they go a long way to show that malobservation and misinterpretation of nature have been the unsound foundations of theories of the supernatural; that its seeming phenomena have not ever been, nor are ever now, events of the external world, but have always been, and are, fables of the imagination; that the concern and interest of them are purely psychological, mankind, like one floating down a stream, having imagined its movements to be a movement of the unmoving land. Lacking, therefore, any vestige of solid support in sound observation and reasoning, they survive in modern thought only by virtue of their pretensions to a supernatural authority above all observation and reasoning. Poor, indeed, they were but for that pretension, and none so poor as to do them reverence. By bringing the phenomena within the compass of scientific investigation, and setting

forth the modes of their natural origin and growth, the need and credit of such authority are alike invalidated, at the same time that the obligations of scientific method are fulfilled. If it come to pass in the last days that a Spirit is poured out on all flesh, so that sons, and daughters, and servants, and handmaidens prophesy, and young men see visions and old men dream dreams, one may fairly anticipate that the strange events will be considered, not as evidences of supernatural influx, but as phenomena belonging to the domain of medical psychology.

Notwithstanding the long history and the large influence of supernatural beliefs in human thought, it is no more difficult to conceive their ceasing to be than to conceive their coming into being. The one may well happen just as inevitably as we have every reason to believe that the other happened; to die is as natural to a superstition as to be born. Certainly it has been, and still is, a disputed point whether there is now, or ever was anywhere, a savage nation devoid of some glimmering notions of religion; by which is always meant apparently some notions of spiritual beings, fine or coarse in quality, and of the continuance of the individual in the form-if form it has any-of a spirit after the death of its body. The evidence of travellers is contradictory, some of them declaring positively that they have encountered

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