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quite a relief to be informed by the son that bis father’s atheism 
was rather moral than intellectual. . 
6. I now proceed to examine some of the philosophic prin- 
ciples on which modern Pantheism and Atheism are based ; and, 
first, their principle of causation. It is an accepted dogma of 
the Positive philosophy that a cause is nothing but an invariable 
sequence between an antecedent and a consequent, and that the 
notion of any efficiency in the cause to produce its effect is a 
fancy which has been exploded by the discoveries of physical 
science. This opinion is the natural outcome of a philosophy 
which teaches that the whole of objective nature, and even the 
fundamental principles of the mind, are nothing else but a bare 
succession of phenomena ; and that a knowledge of any truth 
objectively valid for all time and space is unattainable by man. 
7. It strikes one at first sight as a strong objection against 
such a system of philosophy that language has been formed on 
the assumption that it is not true. Its forms embody the uni- 
versal experience of mankind, and have grown out of that expe- 
rience. Now, nothing is more certain than that whenever we 
use words denoting causation we mean by them something 
very different from the mere invariable following of a conse- 
quent on an antecedent. If this is the true idea of a cause, 
nothing is more misleading than human language ; lor it is 
impossible to express the conceptions of this philosophy in it 
except by using it in a non-natural sense. One ol the hrst 
duties which it owes to truth is to revolutionize human language 
for, in its present forms, it is incapable of being the vehicle ol 
accurate thought. If, therefore, this philosophy is a true repre- 
sentation of ultimate realities, one of its first duties is to attempt 
to construct a language capable of expressing them. At pre- 
sent it is a strong argument against the truth of this system of 
philosophy, that a few philosophers are committed to a parti- 
cular theory on the one side; and, on the contrary, is the 
universal experience of mankind, as testified by the fundamental 
structure and the forms of language. . 
8. This philosophy also carries out to its utmost limits the doc- 
trine of the relativity of human knowledge. . Of this Mr. Mill w 
one of the strongest advocates ; he even considers it possible that 
in some distant region of the universe, two and two may make five. 
Beyond this, it seems impossible to push the doctrine m question. 
Such an affirmation is a strange one to be made by a philosophy, 
which professes to ground all human knowledge on experience, for 
it certainly transcends all experience. Next, it is directly contra- 
dictory to the principles of at least one science. Astronomy 
has penetrated into regions of the universe immeasurably 
