nomena. The history of speculative thought clearly attests that, in
all ages, the inquiry after the Ultimate Cause and Reason of all
existence--the arche, or First Principle of all things--has been the
inevitable and necessary tendency of the human mind; to resist which,
skepticism and positivism have been utterly impotent. The first
philosophers, of the Ionian school, had just as strong a faith in the
existence of a Supreme Reality--an Ultimate Cause--as Leibnitz and
Cousin. But when, by reflective thought, they attempted to render an
account to themselves of this instinctive faith, they imagined that its
object must be in some way appreciable to sense, and they sought it in
some physical element, or under some visible and tangible shrine. Still,
however imperfect and inadequate the method, and however unsatisfactory
the results, humanity has never lost its positive and ineradicable
confidence that the problem of existence could be solved. The resistless
tide of spontaneous and necessary thought has always borne the race
onward towards the recognition of a great First Cause; and though
philosophy may have erred, again and again, in tracing the logical order
of this inevitable thought, and exhibiting the necessary nexus between
the premises and conclusion, yet the human mind has never wavered in the
confidence which it has reposed in the natural logic of thought, and man
has never ceased to believe in a God.

We readily grant that all our empirical knowledge is confined to
phenomena in their orders of co-existence, succession, and resemblance.
"To our objective perception and comparison nothing is given but
qualities and changes; to our inductive generalization nothing but the
shifting and grouping of these in time and space." Were it, however, our
immediate concern to discuss the question, we could easily show that
sensationalism has never succeeded in tracing the genetic origin of our
ideas of space and time to observation and experience; and, without the
_a priori_ idea of _space_, as the place of bodies, and of _time_, as
the condition of succession, we can not conceive of phenomena at all.
If, therefore, we know any thing beyond phenomena and their mutual
relations; if we have any cognition of realities underlying phenomena,
and of the relations of phenomena to their objective ground, it must be
given by some faculty distinct from sense-perception, and in some
process distinct from inductive generalization. The know