and intelligently to what has been read in so clear a way, and yet is 
in itself so hard. The doctrine then with which the paper deals is 
probably new to a large number of people in this country. It ought 
not to be so, because it is a most important doctrine. It reminds us, 
that there is a large variety of mental operations which go on, like the 
circulation of the blood in our veins, without our will and almost with- 
out our knowledge, and it is out of the contemplation of these operations, 
approached from a metaphysical and not from a scientific point of view, 
that this theory of unconscious intelligence at the head of the universe 
would seem to have taken its origin. Let me put the subject in a simple 
form. 
Whoever begins to think at all, tries to compare his thinking with 
something external to himself. Every operation of the mind of an 
intelligent being ought to be rightly conducted ; and we aim therefore 
to compare our thoughts more or less consciously with something outside 
of ourselves which we take to be right. If it were a mere lesson, we 
should compare our thinking about that lesson with what had been put 
to us by the teacher or the book we had been studying; but if the subject 
were something more than a lesson learned by rote — if it engaged the 
actual operation of our own mind, of its own force — then we see at once 
that unless we set up every one an independent authority on every subject 
for himself, there arises a necessity for some standard external to the in- 
dividual, with which he shall compare his thinking. Such external or 
abstract truth is that “ absolute,” as philosophers call it, which exists 
always. In a treatise which I had the honour of reading here as a sort 
of foundation some years ago, I pointed out that this was the antecedent 
of all philosophical recognition of truth — viz. there is something abso- 
lutely certain, apart from ourselves. But, if eternal reason, necessai^ 
truth, the really good, with which we try to compare our own thinking 
and actions, be indeed absolute, then the first thought of the inquirer 
might be, “wherein does this ‘absolute’ reside?” I endeavoured to 
show (as I said in my Final Causes ) that eternal truth ultimately implied 
an eternal mind. For although unconscious intelligence may be predicated 
very truly as to the inferior and almost instinctive operations of an in- 
telligence, it cannot be the ultimate source of all the truths which enter 
into all the thinking in the universe. There must be some being ulti- 
mately in which the absolute is formally found. Just as we say, “if 
there always had been nothing, there never would have been a universe”; 
so we know' from the fact that there is a universe, and that we are beings 
in it, that something always has been. No one rejects the proposition, that 
because something is, something always has been. In the same v r ay, the 
existence of consciousness proves that consciousness of some kind always 
has been. We cannot suppose a distinct consciousness anyhow to have 
arisen out of unconsciousness ; as surely as we cannot suppose the uni- 
