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Such is the judgment de

fended by Gioberti in his 'Introduzione allo Studio della Filosofia,' and on the basis of which he proceeds, in his Della Filosofia della Rivelazione,' in which latter it is again maintained that l'Ente crea l'esistente (p. 18). Theistic philosophy, so far from having found man's knowledge of God to be such plain sailing or effortless motion as Gioberti's nonidealistic theory of an all-comprehending object supposes, has rejected the hypothesis of this suggestive writer as utterly at variance with the nature and experience of man, to say nothing of its lack of selfconsistency. Other thinkers have here arisen who have held to the direct intuition of the Infinite as being natural to man's mind, only pursuing a modified path from Gioberti in regarding the idea of the Infinite as, though born with us, formed out and filled only in the course of reflection and the educative processes of life. We turn to the great Rosmini, trained at Padua. Rosmini, with the abstract ideality which characterises him, maintains in his Theosophy' (Teosofia ') what we may perhaps be allowed for the moment to call a softened form. of Ontologism when he propounds, in his quasiMalebranchian fashion, that the idea of being, which, with him, is really innate, can only be the idea of the Creative One by Whom finite beings have been called into life. Not indeed that Rosmini postulates for man the direct perception or vision of God, but only that self-subsistence,

or reality, is to Rosmini an essential attribute of Deity, for he cannot admit that God can be thought save as real. The nature of that reality of God Rosmini very strongly held to be something which only in God's light could by us be clearly seen. But he gave reasoning and reflection place, and not simply natural intuition, in the way we come to know the Infinite Reality called God. Reality was, with him, the object of all our knowledge, and the notion of being was fundamental in his philosophy, in which it becomes, in fact, the womb of all knowledge, the spring of all truth. In the three books of his instructive 'Theodicy' (Teodicea'), the Divine attributes and the dependence of the creature (limitazioni dell' umana ragione) are by him developed (p. 39). It is no small philosophical merit of Rosmini that he deals so suggestively with the logic of Hegel, and its problems in the sphere of being. The idealistic-realist philosopher Mamiani, who is not without intellectual kinship to Galuppi, has been able, in his metaphysical confessions, to approve an ontological position not unlike that of Anselm, and to maintain for us ideas that are immediately connected with the Absolute Reality-the most real Being (Ente realissimo). Mamiani posits the being of God on the basis of primitive intuition, but finds room for reflection as that through which alone we come to know the Infinite Reality. Religion he works out in its subsequent bearings in his interesting Religion of the Future' (La Re

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ligione dell' Avvenire '), in which he again professes to proceed in a manner "severo ontologico," and to rise at once to the cause and reason of all things (la suprema ragione e cagione di tutte le cose—p. 52). Interesting and ably sustained as such outgrowths of Italian thought undoubtedly are, it cannot be said, after the attentions which Kleutgen, Stöckl, and other writers have given to the positions involved, that recent theistic philosophy has found, in the ontologistic hypothesis, any firm resting-place for the sole of its foot. It has, in fact, more decisively proved how far we are from having found any psychological basis for the notion that the spiritual things hidden from sense-perception-among which must be reckoned the immediate vision of Godcan by any manner of man's thinking be directly intuited and immediately known, as things are perceived in primitive acts of perception by the senses.

In Britain not only has Ferrier, in his acute and forcible manner, given speculative thought an ontological cast by his setting forth of the one necessary Absolute Existence, which is the External Mind "in synthesis with all things"; but Principal Caird, maintaining that "we cannot think save on the presupposition of a thought or consciousness which is the unity of thought and being, or on which all individual thought and existence rest," has, in his own powerful way, presented us with that modified form of the ontological argument in which it appears as an inference from

thought to being. The ontological proof has, on his interpretation, the meaning that "as spiritual beings our whole conscious life is based on a universal self-consciousness, an absolute spiritual life, which is not a mere subjective notion or conception, but which carries with it the proof of its necessary existence or reality." For our own part, hardly any portion of Principal Caird's work has for us more interest than the rare ability and skill with which he presents and endeavours to sustain this view, in which we rise to "a universal point of view, from which our individuality is of

more account than the individuality of any other object." At the same time we record, in passing, our emphatic dissent from the way in which it is here sought to depersonalise man and make him no more than an aspect of Deity like "any other object" in Nature. Man has then no more than a phantom personality-personality becomes an appearance and nothing more in a system with such tendency. To it, as we shall later see, the Universal or Divine Self is really all in all.

Of the Ontological Argument, Thompson, Tulloch, and Cazenove are among those who have thought favourably. We find R. A. Thompson, in his two-volumed work on Christian Theism,' able to regard Kant's treatment of pure reason as unwarrantable and unsatisfactory. Tulloch was able to put the position so lucidly as to call it one in

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which the infinite was "not logically but instinctively given," apprehended indeed "as a fact in the truthful mirror of intuition," and not in a set of mere abstract ideas or as a mere logical necessity. Dr Cazenove, in his 'Being and Attributes of God,' claims a high value for the ontological line of proof, more almost than is claimed for it by Dr Flint, whom, in the main, he seems to follow. Flint has, with his accustomed acuteness, shown the Anselmic position to be by no means so wanting in residual truth as has often been imagined. It is Professor Flint, indeed, who has said that this proof has "at least succeeded in showing that, unless there exists an eternal, infinite, and unconditioned Being, the human mind is in its ultimate principles self-contradictory and delusive." It may not be too much, we think, to say that recent philosophy of theism has rendered it more evident that the theory which supposes the existence of the particular thought or idea of God here involved to be due to its existence "in re," is that which best accounts for the appearance of the idea itself, when the true nature of that idea is in the solitariness and uniqueness for which Anselm contended-completely remembered. It can hardly be questioned that no faultiness of this argument in its progress as a logical evolution, no defectiveness of it as a demonstration, has kept the philosophy of theism from more keenly discerning how God is necessary-necessary existence as