kinds of belief. There are men who believe and
others who disbelieve the Koran or the Bible; I can accept or reject
the historical existence of King Arthur or Napoleon; but, if I
understand them, I cannot disbelieve the demonstrations of Euclid, nor
the relations of subject and object, nor the formal laws of thought. No
sane man, acquainted with the properties of numbers, can believe that
twice three are ten, or that a thing can be thought as other than
itself. These truths that "we cannot help believing," I have defined in
the first chapter as absolute truths. They do not come to us through
testimony and induction, but through a process variously called
"immediate perception," "apprehension," or "intuition," a process long
known but never satisfactorily explained.

All such truths are analytic, that is, they are true, not merely for a
given time or place, but at all times and places conceivable, or, time
and space out of the question, they still remain formally true. Of
course, therefore, they cannot refer to historic occurrences nor
phenomena. The modern position, that truth lies in facts, must be
forsaken, and with the ancients, we must place it in ideas.

If we define inspiration as that condition of mind which is in the
highest degree sensitive to the presence of such truth, we have of it
the only worthy idea which it is possible to frame. The object of
scientific investigation is to reach a truth which can neither be denied
nor doubted. If religion is willing to content itself with any lower
form of truth, it cannot support its claims to respect, let alone
reverence.

It may be said that the subjects with which the religious sentiment
concerns itself are not such as are capable of this absolute expression.
This is, however, disclaimed by all great reformers, and by none more
emphatically than by him who said: "Heaven and earth shall pass away,
but my statements (~logoi~) shall not pass away." There is clear
reference here to absolute truths. If what we know of God, duty and
life, is not capable of expression except in historic narrative and
synthetic terms, the sooner we drop their consideration the better. That
form sufficed for a time, but can no longer, when a higher is generally
known. As the mathematical surpasses the historic truth, so the former
is in turn transcended by the purely logical, and in this, if anywhere,
religion must rest its claims for recognition. Here is the arena of the
theology of the f