RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 2/5 



a pure additioti to the facts, made by the spontaneous 

 instinct of our minds} In that case, what can save 

 it from the discredit of being a bare ideal of ours, 

 worthless for objective truth ? 



The considerate answer to this question, which 

 alone can at once explain the instinctive character 

 of the act of generalisation and at the same time 

 give it objective value, is that natural facts are not 

 to be thought of as things-in-themselves, things self- 

 subsistent as compared with us, and impinging upon 

 our waiting sensibility, but are simply parts or items 

 in our perceptive experience, and being organised by 

 the principles of our inner consciousness are there- 

 fore subject to these instinctive judgments of ours, 

 as the conditions under which alone they can exist. 

 In short, the answer consists in coming to an ideal- 

 istic view of the reality of Nature and of natural 

 things. We are committed by induction, if it is a 

 valid act, to the main propositions of Berkeley, re- 

 vised and vindicated by Kant, — that existence, pri- 

 marily and at core, is the existence of spirits or 

 minds or conscious centres, and that the existence 

 of material things is simply phenomenal, simply pres- 

 entation in the experience of minds. The latent 

 logic of the method of induction therefore leads us, 

 first of all and directly, not to the existence of a 

 personal God, nor even to that of the impersonal 



^ For some fuller statement of this, see p. t^t^ seq., above. 



