orthodox Romanism, shall we maintain that the main facts of religion, the foundations of theistic belief, have been demonstrated by the scholastic philosophy, confirming and supplementing the divine revelation which has also been given us? Or shall we, with Schleiermacher, abandon rationalism, both orthodox and unorthodox, and make religion a matter of pure feeling? Or, with some of the mystics, shall we affirm the existence of direct intuition, through a special organ, which puts us into immediate connection with God and the spiritual world? Or shall we follow the voluntarists, and make Faith an affair of choice, an act of the will? Or are the pragmatists right in treating it as a working hypothesis, determined by practical needs, and to be accepted, if we choose, at our own risk'? Or, lastly, is it founded solely on external revelation, a body of divine knowledge and precept dropped from the sky? These alleged grounds of Faith will all have to be considered in turn, though not in the order in which I have just named them. But I am constrained to regard them all as, at best, only secondary grounds of Faith. None of them singly, nor all of them collectively, are adequate to the idea of Faith. Faith is something deeper, more universal, more fundamental, than anything that can be assigned to the independent activities of the intellect, will, or feelings. Behind all these determinations lies the deep-seated religious instinct or impulse.

This innate instinct or impulse arises in the psychological necessity which obliges us to assign values to our experience.1 It is our nature to pass judgments, to call some things good, others bad, to acquit and condemn, accept and reject. We rearrange our world according to what we consider the worth of its ingredients to be. Objects, after passing through our minds, are no longer all on the same

1 So Lotze says, 'Faith is the feeling which is appreciative of value.' But I shall show that Faith is not only feeling, if 'feeling' excludes the will and intellect.

level. They are ranked and classified; a hierarchy of values is established.

It is impossible for the human mind to inhibit this native propensity to assign values. We may try to force ourselves to regard nature objectively, as a concatenation of facts upon which we forbear to pass judgment. But the most rigorous and detached scientist, unless he confines himself to pure mathematics, which are independent of existential truth, cannot abstain from some kind of valuation. (There are other values besides ethical values, as we shall shortly explain.) However rigidly we may confine ourselves to quantitative categories in the course of our investigations, we have set before ourselves a purpose-to establish the general laws to which the changes of phenomena conform ; and we could never embark on such an enterprise unless we believed that the knowledge of general laws has either an intrinsic or a practical value. In most cases the assumed value is intrinsic; the man of science seeks truth for its own sake. It is sometimes worth while to prove to the materialist (for the creed is not extinct, though the name is disavowed) that he has imported into his system a great deal that on his own principles he has no right to touch; that all sympathetic interest in the results of molecular movements is an intrusion of the value-judgment into a field from which it has been by hypothesis excluded; that he has no right to talk about' progress,' or ' degeneration,' or the survival of the fittest.' For the truth is, that to investigate the purely quantitative aspect of things without reference to the qualitative, to discard all reference to meaning, interest, or value, is to attempt an abstraction which is impossible to the human mind. These are aspects of reality which we cannot keep out of sight, even when we wish to ignore them.1

1 Cf. Miss Benson's Venture of Rational Faith:-'There is nothing in the scientific aspect of phenomena which can make anything in any possible way worth while; for even the idea of "worth" does not enter into the conceptions of science, and thus the essential nature of everything we care for is

The world, then, has values as well as existence. And I do not mean only values for ourselves, but intrinsic values -or, if this phrase be objected to, values which for all who can apprehend them are ends in themselves, not means to something else. We do not create or imagine these values; they are as much given to us as the existential aspect of things. We cannot prove that the world exists; and we cannot prove that our valuation is anything more than subjective; but Faith accepts these values, not as assigned by ourselves, but as objectively real. Somewhere, some day, or somehow, the real world is arranged according to their pattern.

Faith has usually connected this realm of values with the name of God. God-whether the God of theism, pantheism, agnostic monism, or deism-is the self-existent summum genus in whom we believe that our highest ideals are realised. Those who deny or doubt the existence of God, while retaining the conception of God as a regulative idea or ideal, seem to me to be, strictly speaking, nonreligious.1 If the idea of God is only a device, empirically discovered to be serviceable for strengthening our wills and straightening our aims-just as a man might use a pair of spectacles to correct his faults of vision, or a pair of dumb-bells to increase his muscular strength,-God is lowered to the position of an instrument; and this is an

entirely outside it. Science can analyse the production of sound, and ignore the soul of music; it can show the cause of colour, and miss the joy of beauty; it can show the genesis of all manner of social institutions, and miss the heart of love; it may even find the conditions of life, but cannot ask what life is; it may sweep the heavens with its telescope, and fail to find God.'

1 This limitation does not exclude Buddhism, though that religion believes. in no personal God. For in Buddhism the Nothing' to which all is reduced is (in spite of its name) a positive conception. It is the absolute worldground, the fact behind the illusions of the world; the absolute being, the static basis of all phenomena; it is the absolute world-aim, after which the world-process strives and in which it finds its deliverance; the bearer and producer of the religious and moral world-order, which brings out what alone is true and enduring in illusion, and turns the illusory world-process into an actual salvation process.'-Hartmann, Religion des Geistes, p. 5. Buddhism is not atheism; it only deifies the 'a-privative.'

irreligious Faith in God. Faith, we may perhaps say, is a realist, as ascribing reality to ideas, but an idealist, since it is ideas to which it ascribes reality.

Now on what principles do we construct our world of values? Why do we prefer some things above others? What qualities give or involve intrinsic worth? Our answers to these questions will determine the whole character of our Faith, and our whole judgment as to the meaning and content of Faith generally.

The simplest and lowest standard of valuation is that of pleasure and pain. This has very little to do with Faith, because it is almost entirely subjective and particular. Sensuous perceptions do not point to any universal beyond themselves. We are conscious of no contradiction, no problem clamouring for solution, when we acknowledge that tastes differ -even when they differ so much that one man's meat is another man's poison. We cannot argue with any confidence from pleasure and pain to the objective value or nature of things. All we can say is that pleasure is the frequent (not the universal) accompaniment of right action and of a healthy condition, and pain of wrong-doing and disease. Pleasure and pain have thus (in Kantian language, though in opposition to Kantian theory) some degree of regulative value; they have not a constitutive value. And their regulative value, their usefulness in apprising us whether we are doing well or badly, is not that of an infallible criterion.

If we reject the pleasure and pain calculus, not as worthless, but as belonging to an inferior, subsidiary class, we shall find, I think, that there are three attributes of things which have an absolute, intrinsic value. They are constitutive, not regulative principles of reality regarded as spiritual.

First, we value what is universally true, and we arrange our experience in order of value, according as it illustrates, more or less, universal truth. We value law above acci

dent, or what we call accident; we value the rule above the exception; more decidedly, we value fact above fiction, our waking life above our dreams. Our thoughts are valuable, or worthless, according as they correspond with, or contradict, the actual nature of things. A theory is valuable if it explains or accounts for a great number of phenomena. A religion or philosophy is valuable if it gives an intelligible explanation or a plausible theory of the constitution of the universe and the laws of human nature. Whenever we succeed in establishing the correspondence of idea with fact, we feel that we are enriched; we have gained something which is valuable for its own sake.

I shall have, in the course of these lectures, to defend this conception of truth against the sceptical subjectivism which denies that our thoughts can ever convey to us genuine knowledge of reality external to ourselves. I will not argue the question in this place, but will only say that my position is a ' moderate realism.' I believe that we are in contact with external reality, and that we may trust our faculties when they tell us (as they do with the utmost emphasis) that our knowledge is not merely of our own mental states, but of facts which exist independently of our mental states. At the same time, I hold that this confidence is a matter of reasonable Faith, and can never, from the nature of the case, be anything more.

Secondly, we attach an absolute, intrinsic value to what we call moral goodness. However we came by it, we are in possession of the category of the ought-to-be, the partly unrealised supplement of given experience. The greater part of our experience is capable of being arranged on a scale of ethical values. We may, if we choose, for the sake of greater clearness in ethical study, abstract from other aspects of reality, and regard the world simply as a place where some things are morally good, and others morally bad. We may picture to ourselves human life as simply and solely a school of character, a place of moral discipline.