od, or our philosophical speculations must fall into
open and avowed atheism.

[A] _Metaph._, xiv. 4.

But at this point the philosophical inquiry comes in contact with another
line of thought, suggested by a different class of the facts of
consciousness. As a religious and moral being, man is conscious of a
relation of a personal character, distinct from any suggested by the
phenomena of the material world,--a relation to a supreme Personal Being,
the object of his religious worship, and the source and judge of his
moral obligations and conduct. To adopt the name of God in an abstract
speculation merely as a conventional denomination for the highest link in
the chain of thought, and to believe in Him for the practical purposes of
worship and obedience, are two very different things; and for the latter,
though not for the former, the conception of God as a Person is
indispensable. Were man a being of pure intellect, the problem of the
Unconditioned would be divested of its chief difficulty; but he is also a
being of religious and moral faculties, and these also have a claim to be
satisfied by any valid solution of the problem. Hence the question
assumes another and a more complex form. How is the one absolute
existence, to which philosophy aspires, to be identified with the
personal God demanded by our religious feelings?

Shall we boldly assume that the problem is already solved, and that the
personal God is the very Unconditioned of which we were in search? This
is to beg the question, not to answer it. Our conception of a personal
being, derived as it is from the immediate consciousness of our own
personality, seems, on examination, to involve conditions incompatible
with the desired assumption. Personal agency, similar to our own, seems
to point to something very different from an absolutely first link in a
chain of phenomena. Our actions, if not determined, are at least
influenced by motives; and the motive is a prior link in the chain, and a
condition of the action. Our actions, moreover, take place in time; and
time, as we conceive it, cannot be regarded as an absolute blank, but as
a condition in which phenomena take place as past, present, and future.
Every act taking place in time implies something antecedent to itself;
and this something, be it what it may, hinders us from regarding the
subsequent act as absolute and unconditioned. Nay, even time itself,
apart from the phenomena which it implies, has the