298 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



meanings of the word belief. This word "is habitually applied to 

 dicta of consciousness for which no proof can be assigned : both those 

 which are unprovable because they underlie all proof, and those which 

 are unprovable because of the absence of evidence." ' In the pages 

 of this review for July, 1865, I exhibited this distinction as follows: 



" We commonly say, ' we believe ' a thing for which we can assign some pre- 

 ponderating evidence, or concerning which we have received some indefinable 

 impression. "We believe that the next House of Commons will not abolish 

 Church-rates ; or we believe that a person on whose face we look is good- 

 natured. That is, when we can give confessedly-inadequate proofs or no proofs 

 at all for the things we think, we call them ' beliefs.' And it is the peculiarity 

 of these beliefs, as contrasted with cognitions, that their connections with ante- 

 cedent states of consciousness may be easily severed, instead of being difficult 

 to sever. But, unhappily, the word 'belief is also applied to each of those 

 temporarily or permanently indissoluble connections in consciousness, for the 

 acceptance of which the only warrant is that it cannot be got rid of. Saying 

 that I feel a pain, or hear a sound, or see one line to be longer than another, is 

 saying that t^ere has occurred in me a certain change of state ; and it is impos- 

 sible for me to give a stronger evidence of this fact than that it is present to my 

 mind. . . . 'Belief having, as above pointed out, become the name of an im- 

 pression for which we can give only a confessedly-inadequate reason, or no 

 reason at all, it happens that, when pushed hard respecting the warrant for 

 any ultimate dictum of consciousness, we say, in the absence of all assignable 

 reason, that we believe it. Thus*the two opposite poles of knowledge go under 

 the same name ; and by the reverse connotations of this name, as used for the 

 most coherent and least coherent relations of thought, profound misconceptions 

 have been generated." 



Now, that the belief which the moral and religious feelings are 

 said to yield of a personal God is not one of the beliefs which are 

 unprovable because they underlie all proof, is obvious. It needs but 

 to remember that, in works on natural theology, the existence of a 

 personal God is inferred from these moral and religious feelings, to 

 show that it is not contained in these feelings themselves, or joined 

 with them as an inseparable intuition. It is not a belief like the be- 

 liefs which I now have that this is daylight, and that there is open space 

 before me — beliefs which cannot be proved because they are of equal 

 simplicity with, and of no less certainty than, each step in a demon- 

 stration. Were it a belief of this most certain kind, argument would 

 be superfluous : all races of men and every individual would have the 

 belief in an inexpugnable form. Hence it is manifest that, confusing 

 the two very different states of consciousness called belief, Sir W. Ham- 

 ilton ascribes to the second a certainty that belongs only to the first. 



Again, neither Sir W. Hamilton nor Dr. Mansel has enabled us to 

 distinguish those " facts of our moral and emotional consciousness " 

 which imperatively demand the belief in a personal God, from those 

 facts of our (or of men's) " moral and emotional consciousness " which, 



1 " Principles of Psychology " (second edition, § 425, note). 



