182 W. L. COURTNEY, M.A., LL.D., ON 
is the speculative reason which must give way in this matter, 
not the reason exercised in morals, to which he unhesitatingly 
grants supremacy. And when thus, as it seems to me, in 
the spirit of his own teaching, we transfer ourselves from 
the sphere of logic to the sphere of ethics, what is the earliest 
thing which we discover? We find that no consideration 
of man’s nature can be said to be complete which does not 
start from the principles (1) that there is such a thing as an 
independent Self, free and unconstrained ; (2) that this self is 
a centre of force, being, in its essence, Will, the only absolute 
cause we can come across in existence; and (3) that the 
consideration of man as a moral, that is to say, an acting 
creature, brings us by inevitable steps to the conviction that 
the soul is immortal, and that God exists. And here, once 
again, let me discard the precise formule, the exact language 
in which Kant, in the Critigue of Practical Reason, attempts 
to establish verities of this kind. We can, perhaps, for our 
purpose, better extract what we desire by phrasing the 
matter in our own fashion. It can be done in several ways. 
We can say that the first, or rather the most important and 
most crucial question is not, * What is the world in which I 
live?” but, ‘* What am I, NO attempt to understand it?’ 
Or else, looking at one particular aspect of the matter, we 
can say that natural theology is a somewhat frail and 
unserviceable weapon, as compared with the intimations of 
the moral consciousness; or perhaps, best of alll, ie can 
merely adopt for our purpose the words of Christ: “ Say not, 
Lo here, or lo there, for the Kingdom of God is are you,” 
Doubtless there are many indications to be gained by a 
purely objective investigation of natural phenomena, that 
the kosmos of things is incomplete without a divine intelli- 
gence running throughout the whole series from end to end. 
But it would be still truer to phrase the position in a slightly 
different manner; if,on other grounds, we have a reasonable 
evidence of the reality of Divine eovernment, then we can 
look at nature in a different fashion, and see how the whole 
concatenation of causes and effects 1s part and parcel of a 
rational and intelligible idea. But it may well be doubted 
whether, if we began at the other end, we could ever attain 
to such a conclusion. If we had nothing else but nature to 
go by, if we confined ourselves to a purely objective 
examination of phenomena, there would still remain the 
doubt—a doubt which could not be exorcised—as to whether 
the results we were witnessing were due to the fortuitous 
