THE INFINITE AS A FAITH. 337 



will not bear the light of day. Its very statement 

 is involved in all sorts of insuperable difficulties. 

 It declares, e.o-., that our minds cannot grasp the 

 Infinite, and yet, in the same breath, goes on to 

 assert what it had asserted to be impossible. Just 

 as the very assertion of the Unknowable involved 

 its knowableness (ch. ii. § 3), so the very assertion 

 of the Infinite involves either its finiteness or the 

 infinity of the mind which somehow claims to be 

 conscious of its existence. For if the Finite could 

 not really grasp the Infinite, it could not so much as 

 become aware of its existence. We must dismiss, 

 then, the absurd contention that our minds cannot 

 grasp the Infinite. If it had been true, they would 

 assuredly never have formed so troublesome a con- 

 ception as that of the Infinite. But the inquiry into 

 how the human mind arrives at the idea of the 

 Infinite is no less perplexing. We may suppose the 

 mind itself to be either finite or infinite. Now if the 

 mind is finite, and if the whole phenomenal world is 

 finite also, there can be no ground either in thought 

 or in things for assuming an infinite, and the saying 

 that the Finite cannot understand the Infinite is 

 true merely because there is nothing to understand, 

 because the Infinite is an utterly gratuitous fiction. 

 In order, therefore, to infer the existence of a real 

 ^^nfinite, either thought or things must in a way be 

 ^Bnfinite. Now, as has been shown (ch. ix. § 5), the 

 ^■nfinity cannot lie in things, for if Space and Time 

 ^Kire ultimately infinite, the world is unknowable. It 

 ^Remains that the mind is infinite, that the so-called 

 ^■Finite is of like nature with the '' Infinite," and that 

 ^■there is no difference in kind between them. But if 

 ^Bthe mind forms the conception of the Infinite in 

 ^"virtue of its infinitude, that conception also must 



R. of S. 7 



