OF THE SPIRIT. 



381 



and the importance of which seems hardly to have been 

 recognised by the several contributors to that discussion. 

 Indeed it took a good many years before what we may 

 term the new schools of Metaphysics and Ethics, which 

 date respectively from Green in Oxford and Sidgwick in 

 Cambridge, had sufficiently illuminated the old problems 

 by a new light to allow of a kind of summing-up such 

 as the literature of this country has from time to time 

 been destined to give on important points of contro- 

 versy ; a summing-up which, however, has in this case 

 remained inconclusive, as similar attempts had done 

 before. 



In the year 1895 there appeared Mr A. J. Balfour's 

 discussion of the religious problem under the title ' The 

 Foundations of Belief: being Notes Introductory to the 

 Study of Theology.' 1 In the lucid and interesting pages 



Balfour's 

 ' Founda- 

 tions of 

 Belief.' 



1 This work was preceded by two 

 other important works, one by the 

 same author entitled ' A Defence 

 of Philosophic Doubt : being an 

 Essay on the Foundations of Belief ' 

 (1879). It was much read and had 

 undoubtedly a great perhaps also 

 a perplexing influence on many 

 younger minds at the Universities ; 

 inasmuch, however, as the reason- 

 ing contained therein was absorbed 

 and carried further in the later 

 treatise, I have confined myself to 

 a discussion of the latter. But 

 equally important, and in its way 

 perhaps even more original as 

 coming from an entirely different 

 quarter, was John Henry Newman's 

 much earlier treatise with the title 

 ; An Essay in aid of a Grammar of 

 Assent' (1870). As the attention 

 given to it by Prof. Caldecott 

 (loc. cit., pp. 258-268) shows, this 

 work deserves to be classed along- 

 side of Martineau's two larger 



treatises as the most comprehensive 

 treatise on the philosophy of religion 

 in modern English literature. The 

 treatment of the religious problem 

 from a philosophical point of view 

 by these two thinkers may be con- 

 sidered complementary in a way 

 similar to its treatment by Schleier- 

 macher and Lotze respectively 

 in Germany. Schleiermacher, and 

 after him Newman, are original in 

 the psychological treatment of 

 religious belief ; in both, however, 

 the dialectics are unsatisfactory. 

 Lotze, and after him Martineau, 

 are original and impressive in the 

 dialectical presentment of the argu- 

 ments, metaphysical and ethical, 

 by which they try to define or 

 vindicate the attributes of the 

 Divine Being. But neither Lotze 

 nor Martineau has a really satis- 

 factory psychology of religion and 

 religious belief. The teaching of 

 Newman, however, is a very dis- 



