tion, as you apprehend it, can. We, poor prodigals, have
been feeding long enough upon husks that the swine do eat, and crave a
little nourishing food.--The answer we get is, that Revelation does not
propose to give us any such fare. Not any more than Philosophy does
Revelation disclose to us the Infinite. It only gives us finite
conceptions and formulas about the Infinite. The gulf between us and God
yawns wide as ever, and is eternal. We must worship still an unknown God,
as the heathen did. But we have this consolation,--that we have
creed-articles which we can get by heart, though ignorant of what they
mean, and under what these philosophers call a "regulative" religion
repeat our paternosters to the end of time.

"These be thy gods, O Philosophy!" exclaims Dr. Mansel to the German
Pantheists, pointing to the bloodless spectres which they have evoked in
place of Christianity. "These be thy gods, O Scotch Metaphysics!" the
Pantheists might reply, when called upon to worship the wooden images in
which avowedly no pulse of the Infinite and Absolute ever beats or ever
can beat.

Mr. James's whole argument, as he deals with the German and Scotch
philosophies, is profound and masterly. He uses two sets of weapons, both
of them with admirable skill. One set is awfully destructive. He clears
off the rubbish of the pseudo-metaphysics with a logic so remorseless that
we are tempted sometimes to cry for mercy. But, on the whole, Mr. James is
right here. If men pretending to add to the stock of human knowledge
treacherously knock away its foundations, and bring down the whole
structure into a heap of rubbish, leaving us, if not killed outright,
unhoused in a limbo of Atheism,--or if men pretending to hold the keys of
knowledge will not go in themselves, and shut the doors in our faces when
we seek to enter, no matter how sharply their treachery and charlatanry
are exposed, however famous are the names they bear.

But Mr. James is quite as much constructive as destructive. He shows not
only that there must be a philosophy of the Infinite, but that herein is
its high office and glory. Sense deals only with facts,--science deals
with relations, or groups phenomena; and when these usurp the place of
philosophy, they turn things exactly upside down, or mistake the centre
for the circumference. This is the glaring fault both of the German and
the Scotch metaphysicians, that they swamp philosophy in mere science; and
hence they grov