ce it
perceives, it may attempt to develop a religion wholly _a priori_,(107)
and assert its right to create as well as to verify. Also, when applying
itself to revealed religion, this type of thought necessarily makes its
last appeal to inward insight. It cannot, like sensationalism, or
subjective idealism, admit its own impotence, and receive on authority a
revelation, the contents of which it ventures not to criticise. It must
always appropriate that which it is to believe. Accordingly it will have a
tendency to render religion subjective in its character, uncertain in its
doctrines, individual in its constitution.

These general remarks, every one of which admits of historic
exemplification,(108) will suffice to illustrate the kind of influence
exercised by these respective tests of truth in forming the judgment or
moulding the character in relation to the belief or disbelief of natural
and revealed religion. These effects are not adduced as the necessary
results but as the ordinary tendencies of these respective theories. The
mind frequently stops short of the conclusions logically deducible from
its own principles. To measure precisely the effect of each view would be
impossible. In mental science analysis must be qualitative, not
quantitative.

It will hardly be expected that we should arbitrate among these theories,
inasmuch as our purpose is not to test the comparative truthfulness of
metaphysical opinions, but to refer sceptical opinions in religion to
their true scientific and metaphysical parentage. Truth is probably to be
found in a selection from all; and historical investigation is the chief
means of discovering the mode of conducting the process. It is at least
certain, that if history be the form which science necessarily takes in
the study of that which is subject to laws of life and organic growth, it
must be the preliminary inquiry in any investigation in reference to
mental phenomena. The history of philosophy must be the approach to
philosophy.(109) The great problem of philosophy is method; and if there
be a hope that the true method can ever be found it must be by uniting the
historical analysis of the development of the universal mind with the
psychological analysis of the individual. The history of thought indicates
not only fact but truth; not only shows what has been, but, by exhibiting
the proportions which different faculties contribute toward the
construction of truth, and indicating tend