self to the description and arrangement of religious phenomena and to justify religion by the practical value of its effects on social life. The objective truth of its articles of faith must, it is claimed, be left undecided. However well meaning such counsel may sound, weighty considerations may be urged against it. The fact seems to be overlooked that the religious man necessarily postulates the truth of his beliefs, and that without this presupposition his faith would lose all significance and power, and consequently all practical value, and become merely a beautiful aesthetical semblance, an illusion. Agnosticism, indeed, does not mean to deny directly the truth of a belief in God, but simply to hold it in suspense as unknowable. Yet experience has always shown that the passage from this timid scepticism to radical negation is but a small and easy step. And that we can readily understand. We naturally judge concerning the truth of an idea according to the readiness with which it may be connected with the orderly coherency of our entire conscious content. Whatever may be united with such a train of ideas, without contradiction, we regard as thinkable, and its reality as possible. Whatever is demanded by this complex we regard as a necessity of our thought, and consequently its reality as an assured certainty. Hence, an idea which is without all recognized relation to the content of our rationally connected consciousness (to our known world) seems to us to be unthinkable and consequently without truth. Agnosticism usually reaches its logical consequences in the popular consciousness in the following way: the unknowable divinity has at first neither meaning nor interest for it, and then what is practically indifferent is at last completely given up in theory also.
But has not Kant proved the impossibility of all metaphysical knowledge which transcends experience, and in particular has he not shown irrefutably, once for all, the insufficiency of the so-called proofs of the existence of God? Kant has doubtless destroyed the dogmatism of the old theological metaphysics and overthrown forever that gnosticism which presumed to comprehend the inner essence of divinity in its formulæ. He
