cry out, with a sense of being sold,
"call you that backing of your friends?"

Pride of intellect is the next cause of Atheism. Don Juan sells himself
to perdition for a liberal share of pleasure, but Faust hankers only
after forbidden knowledge. This is of various kinds; but "of all kinds,
that which has long had the most evil reputation of begetting Atheism
is Physical Science." Again does the fervid Professor set lance in rest,
and dash against this new foe to Theism, much as Don Quixote charged the
famous windmill. But science, like the windmill, is too big and strong
to suffer from such assaults. The "father of this sort of nonsense," in
modern times was David Hume, who, we are elegantly informed, was "a very
clever fellow, a very agreeable, gentlemanly fellow too." His "nonsense
about causation" is to be traced to a want of reverence in his
character. Indeed, it seems that all persons who adhere to a philosophy
alien to Professor Blackie's have something radically wrong with them.
Let this Edinburgh Professor rail as he may, David Hume's theory of
causation will suffer no harm, and his contrast of human architecture,
which is mechanism, with natural architecture, which is growth, will
still form an insuperable obstacle to that "natural theology" which,
as Garth Wilkinson says with grim humor, seeks to elicit, or rather
"construct," "a scientific abstraction answering to the concrete figure
of the Vulcan of the Greeks--that is to say a universal Smith"!

Eventually Professor Blackie gets so sick of philosophers, that he
turns from them to poets, who may more safely be trusted "in matters of
healthy human sentiment." But here fresh difficulties arise. Although
"a poet is naturally a religious animal," we find that the greatest
of Roman poets Lucretius, was an Atheist, while even "some of our most
brilliant notorieties in the modern world of song are not the most
notable for piety." But our versatile Professor easily accounts for this
by assuming that there "may be an idolatry of the imaginative, as well
as of the knowing faculty." Never did natural historian so jauntily
provide for every fact contravening his theories. Professor Blackie will
never understand Atheism, or write profitably upon it, while he pursues
this course. Let him restrain his discursive propensities, and deal
scientifically with this one fact, which explodes his whole theory of
Atheism. The supreme glory of our modern poetry is Shelley, and if