APPENDIX. 595 



very first paragraph succeeding the one in which Prof. Birks 

 announces that he is about to take First Principles as repre- 

 sentative of the " fatalistic theory." In this paragraph he 

 represents me as asserting that ultimate religious ideas are 

 " incapable of being conceived." He further says that ulti- 

 mate scientific ideas are by me " pronounced equally incon- 

 ceivable." Now any clear-headed reader who accepted Prof. 

 Birks' version of my views, would be led to debit me with the 

 absurdity of saying that certain things which are put together 

 in consciousness (ideas) cannot be put together in conscious- 

 ness (conceived). To conceive is to frame in thought; and 

 as every idea is framed in thought, it is nonsense to say of any 

 idea that it cannot be conceived — nonsense which I have no- 

 where uttered. My statement is that " Ultimate Scientific 

 Ideas, then, are all representative of realities that cannot be 

 comprehended; " and the like is alleged of ultimate religious 

 ideas. The things which I say cannot be comprehended or 

 conceived, are not the ideas, but the realities beyond con- 

 sciousness for which the ideas in consciousness stand. In 

 Professor Birks' statement, however, inconceivableness of the 

 realities is transformed into inconceivableness of the answer- 

 ing ideas! Further, at the end of this first paragraph which 

 deals with me, I am represented as teaching that religion " is 

 equivalent to Nescience or Ignorance alone." This statement 

 is as far removed from the truth as the others. I have argued 

 at considerable length, and in such various ways that I thought 

 it impossible to misunderstand me, that though the Power 

 universally manifest to us through phenomena, alike in the 

 surrounding world and in ourselves, — the Power " in which 

 we live and move and have our being," — is, and must ever 

 remain, inscrutable; yet that the existence of this Inscruta- 

 ble Power is the most certain of all truths. I have contended 

 that while, to the intellectual consciousness, this Power, 

 though unknowable in nature, must be ever present as exist- 

 ing, it must be, to the emotional consciousness, an object to 

 the sentiment we call religious; since, in substance if not in 

 form, it answers to the creating and sustaining Power towards 

 which the religious sentiment is in other cases drawn out. 

 Yet though in the most emphatic way I have represented this 

 unknown and unknowable Power as the object-matter of re- 

 ligion, Prof. Birks represents me as saying that the unknow- 

 ableness of it is the object-matter of religion! Though I hold 

 that an Ultimate Being, known with absolute certainty as ex- 



