's existence before it is capable of
knowing God, and the veriest Atheist is certain of his own existence and
that of his fellow-men, even when he professes to doubt or to disbelieve
the existence of God. It may be true that the essential nature and
omniscient knowledge of God is the ultimate and eternal standard of
truth and certainty, or, in the words of Fenelon, that "il n'y a qu'une
seule verite, et qu'une seule maniere de bien juger, qui est, de juger
comme Dieu meme;"[237] and yet it may not be true that all our knowledge
is derived by deduction from our idea of God, or that its entire
certainty is dependent on our religious belief. Surely we may be
certainly assured of the facts of consciousness, of the phenomena of
Nature, and of many truths, both necessary and contingent, before we
have made any attempt to explain the _rationale_ of our knowledge, or to
connect it with the idea of the great First Cause; nay, it may be, and
we believe it is, by _means_ of these inferior and subordinate truths
that we rise to the belief of a supreme, omniscient Mind.

Some writers seem to confound Certitude with _Infallibility,_ or at
least to hold that there can be no Certitude without it. The _impersonal
reason_ of Cousin, the _common sense_ or _generic reason_ of Lamennais,
and the _authoritative tradition_ of the Church, have all been severally
resorted to, for the purpose of obtaining a ground of Certitude in the
matters both of Philosophy and Faith, such as is supposed to be
unattainable by the exercise of our own proper faculties, or by the most
careful study of evidence. According to these theories, Certitude
belongs to our knowledge, only because that knowledge is derived from a
reason superior to our own,--a reason not personal, but universal; not
individual, but generic. When they are applied, as they have been, to
undermine the authority of private judgment, and to supersede the
exercise of free inquiry; when they are urged as a reason why we should
defer to the authority of the Race in matters of Philosophy and to the
authority of the Church in matters of Faith; when we are told that the
certainty of our own existence depends on our knowledge of God, and that
our knowledge of God depends on the _common consent_ or _invariable
traditions_ of mankind,--we do feel that the grounds of Certitude, so
far from being strengthened, are sapped and weakened by such
speculations, and that we have here a new and most unexpected
a