disregards
either is inadequate to the explanation of the phenomena.

IV. The fourth hypothesis is, _that religion has had its outbirth in the
spontaneous apperceptions of_ REASON; that is, in the necessary, a
priori ideas of the infinite, the perfect, the unconditioned Cause, the
Eternal Being, which are evoked into consciousness in presence of the
changeful, contingent phenomena of the world.

This will at once be recognized by the intelligent reader as the
doctrine of Cousin, by whom _pure reason_ is regarded as the grand
faculty or organ of religion.

Religion, in the estimation of Cousin, is grounded on _cognition_ rather
than upon feeling. It is the knowledge of God, and the knowledge of duty
in its relation to God and to human happiness; and as reason is the
general faculty of all knowing, it must be the faculty of religion. "In
its most elevated point of view, religion is the relation of absolute
truth to absolute Being," and as absolute truth is apprehended by the
reason alone, reason "is the veridical and religious part of the nature
of man."[66] By "reason," however, as we shall see presently, Cousin
does not mean the discursive or reflective reason, but the spontaneous
or intuitive reason. That act of the mind by which we attain to
religious knowledge is not a _process of reasoning_, but a pure
appreciation, an instinctive and involuntary movement of the soul.

[Footnote 66: Henry's Cousin, p. 510.]

The especial function of reason, therefore, is to reveal to us the
invisible, the supersensuous, the Divine. "It was bestowed upon us for
this very purpose of going, without any circuit of reasoning, from the
visible to the invisible, from the finite to the infinite, from the
imperfect to the perfect, and from necessary and eternal truths, to the
eternal and necessary principle" that is God.[67] Reason is thus, as it
were, the bridge between consciousness and being; it rests, at the same
time, on both; it descends from God, and approaches man; it makes its
appearance in consciousness as a guest which brings intelligence of
another world of real Being which lies beyond the world of sense.

Reason does not, however, attain to the Absolute Being directly and
immediately, without any intervening medium. To assert this would be to
fall into the error of Plotinus, and the Alexandrian Mystics. Reason is
the offspring of God, a ray of the Eternal Reason, but it is not to be
identified with God. Reason attains to t