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ridiculously superfluous to add, that the results sought by a 
true philosophy will not disagree with the facts of internal and 
external experience, since, the rather, the former must be an 
expression of the underlying truth of experience, what experi- 
enced fact should suggest and in its measure illustrate, and in 
which the various experimental sciences should find their con- 
necting lmk and the element of their life. I argued, further in 
the paper alluded to, that the surest elements of our real know- 
ledge are furnished by self-consciousness, in the cognition of 
ourselves as spiritual agents. In the present paper, it will he 
necessary to bear these principles constantly in mind, usin°- 
them as the touchstone of truth or falsehood in theory 
What is now to be discussed is the theory of unconscious 
reason, spirit, or intelligence (otherwise denominated also or 
denommable as, force, rational power), as accounting in part 
or in whole for the facts of the universe. In what sense is the 
theory rationally intelligible? In what measure may it be 
objechvely possible ? What is the testimony of fact with regard 
to it . \\ hat place, if any, is, or may be, granted to it in the 
philosophy of Christian idealism ? 
Let us glance first at the history of the doctrine in question, 
picmismg, however, that the two following applications of the 
term ‘unconscious” are to be kept carefully distinct; first as 
denoting the principle or being on which man and nature are 
supposed partly or wholly to depend ; second, as covering those 
states, powers, possessions, or processes in the human mind (or 
the animal soul) of which the individual possessing them is 
not, but under appropriate conditions may become, conscious, 
the conditions, extrinsic and intrinsic, of self-conscious, spi- 
ritual existence, of conscious knowledge and will, have been a 
subject of study and discussion pre-eminently in modern times, 
lhe result has been an intensified, if not always a clarified and 
more adequate sense of the reality and nature of those con- 
ditions as exhibited in the mental life of man. Traces of a 
theory ot unconscious rational power in the history of ancient 
thought may therefore be expected not to present themselves in 
that definite form, or with that distinct reference to the stand- 
pomt ot human consciousness, as now more fully understood 
which is found in modern hypotheses. The traces, however 
are unmistakable and numerous, amounting often in form to 
distinct statement, and confirming anew, in the matter of spe- 
culative theory, the dictum that there is no fundamentally-new 
thing under the sun. All the systems of strict pantheism or 
naturalism must necessarily contain, virtually, the doctrine of 
unconscious reason. The so-called God of modern pantheism 
