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with the harmless, — it is not these, I say, who are really 
content at heart with the position of their own system. 
There is a latent feeling that all is not right ; or, at all events, 
one seems to see, amidst all these “ prave ’ords,” traces of a 
lurking dissatisfaction with their own method and their own 
conclusions. The most decided and intolerant unbeliever 
must see that he himself, in contravention of his own principles, 
asserts something, assents to something, believes something, 
while he censures others for assertion, assent, belief. In short, 
it must be one of the sorrows of Scepticism to see her despised 
adversary still standing fast, assailed at all points, but con- 
sistent and undismayed, while she is herself not altogether free 
from the fear of seeming self-condemned. 
IV. Sorrow from the absence of God . — There is a sorrow 
above sorrows for the sceptic ; not merely the disappoint- 
ment of his intellectual longings, but the blankness of 
severance from the ultimate end to which soul and spirit 
alike look upward, towards which the moral and intellectual 
alike desire to struggle. 
It is a hackneyed question, whether the mind does or 
does not habitually entertain a true conception of the absolute, 
the infinite, the unconditioned, as distinct from, and elevated 
above, the contingent, the finite, the conditioned. That there 
is some such notion present in the educated mind, the personal 
consciousness of every one probably testifies. We have a 
notion of that which is endless, and self-existent, and unlimited, 
differing in that very self-sufficiency from all that we experience 
in ourselves, or ai’e aware of in the phenomenal existence which 
surrounds us. But does this notion correspond to some 
exterior existence, or is it merely evolved by us by a mental 
removal of limit from that of which we have experience as 
limited ? Is our conception that of the Infinite, or of the 
Indefinite? This is, as I have said, a hackneyed question; 
but I must be pardoned if I touch on it in pursuance of 
my purpose. 
That every conception has some external object corresponding 
to it, so that it is not only true that “ cogito, ergo sum/’ 
but “ concipio, ergo est,” is well known as a bald statement 
of the doctrine of the realists : not that the realists probably 
ever maintained the doctrine in exactly the same form as 
it has been imputed to them. Doctrines are too often cari- 
catured in a ghastly manner by those who gainsay them : 
the lion painted by man is quite another creature from 
the lion as he would be painted by lions. We may take 
it, however, as a realistic form of argument, that if there 
