226 Forms of Thought were CHAP. 



reason to believe in any really existing Infinite ex- 

 ternal to ourselves. And if this is true of the world 

 of nature, how much more certainly true is it of 

 spiritual and Divine things ! " 



I reply, that granting to the utmost the unreality, 

 or merely phenomenal character, of our knowledge of 

 the natural world, this in no degree diminishes the 

 certainty, and the absolute (as opposed to the merely 

 relative) character of our knowledge of our fellow- 

 men as resembling ourselves ; and our knowledge of 

 God, as I have endeavoured to show, is allied, not to 

 our knowledge of Nature, but to our knowledge of 

 Man. 



But I do not admit the doctrine of the unreality 

 of our knowledge of the external universe. In order 

 to consider this subject, we must go back to what has 

 been said of Kant's views on Space and Time. 



I have endeavoured to show that belief in the 

 reality of self and of the external world is not only 

 instinctive but logical ; that their truth is involved in 

 that of those logical principles which are implied in 

 all assertion. The same, however, is not true of the 

 reality of Space and Time. These are forms of 

 thought ; and there is no logical absurdity no self- 

 contradiction in maintaining, with Kant, that they 

 are nothing more than forms of thought; in other 

 words, that by the constitution of our faculties we 

 necessarily perceive sensations as succeeding each 

 other in Time, and external objects as having position 

 in Space, while we have no reason to believe that 



