576 INTELLECTUAL SYMBOLISM. 
has enabled us to approach so nearly to a unity of force, compels us to mount still higher, 
until we attain to the conception of the Necessary, Supreme Being, who is absolutely 
knowable, so far as the reality of His existence is concerned, and at the same time abso- 
lutely incomprehensible, and only faintly shadowed forth under such relations as He sees 
fit to employ in His revelation to His intelligent creatures. 
458. But while Reason thus ascends through the analogies of Spontaneity to the Great- 
est, and after the successive abstraction of all subordinate relations, finally abstracts rela- 
tion itself, and thus forms the conception of the Absolute, there are other needs of our 
nature that equally demand supreme satisfaction. In all the impulses of Motivity, there 
is an underlying idea of good, which points to some infallible Best, and in Intelligence, 
whose especial province it is to know how to accomplish ends, we see a like pointing to 
some Wisest, whose purposes could not be thwarted by any inferior Intelligence. 
459. Following these pointings of its co-ordinate faculties, Rationality discovers that 
the Absolute must also be the Best, Greatest, and Wisest. The Supreme Being must be 
self-impelling, or active solely for subjective reasons, otherwise He would be subordinate 
to a higher power ; self-acting, or He would not be Supreme; intelligent, or He could not 
be self-acting.* | 
460. Necessity is but another name for accordance with the eternal and unchangeable 
Divine Will, and so far as necessity becomes evident, we are able to perceive Divine 
*determination. Philosophy, resting on revelation, may use all the facts and teachings of 
faith as the materials of its deductions, and it should verify its results by comparing them 
with the well-recognized truths of revelation. By making such a comparison, it will 
ascertain that there is not only an Absolute, which is in itself entirely independent of all 
external relation, and therefore entirely aloof from all possible human conception, except 
* « Aided by instruments which the necessities of reason itself have called into existence, man, in these last 
times, has well demonstrated the homogeneousness of his mind with the Supreme Creative Mind, and he has done 
so on a field not narrow, for it is as wide as the stellar universe. There can be no irreverence,—there can be no 
presumption in plainly stating a fact which rests upon evidence so clear and sure. Kvyen if this same averment 
were made in terms still stronger and more comprehensive, we need not fear a rebuke on the part of Christian 
piety, for what we so affirm does but illustrate and attest the Biblical doctrine, that ‘ God made man in his own 
image.” Taylor: World of Mind, p. 167. 
“Tn the prosecution of the modern Physical Sciences, the human mind has demonstrated the congruity of the 
human Reason with that REASON of which the material universe is the product; for when we say that (within 
certain limits) we understand the scheme of the world as to its structure and as to its dynamics, we affirm that 
the mind which understands and the Minp which has produced this scheme of things are in unison, or that they 
are convertible, the one into the other.” Jb. p. 327. 
