identity (as is always the case in dreams) was blended with other experiences. Under these circumstances his general experience would place itself in the category of dream-thoughts, and would have no particular relevancy to waking phenomena of consciousness. We ourselves had in some respects a similar experience, but in the main, an entirely dissimilar experience from that of Sir Humphry Davy; which experience, although three years have since elapsed, remains at this moment as vivid as when it occurred. Here, under penalty, otherwise, of rendering the account of it ridiculous, we must drop for awhile the editorial "we."

In a brief phase following complete unconsciousness from the inhalation of nitrous oxide gas, I experienced complete restoration of consciousness, with one exception-memory. Momentarily, therefore, I was without knowledge of personal identity. Consciousness, without personal identity, for a brief period (known afterwards through witnesses to have been brief), broke into bright day, penetrated with a vast sense of potentiality, needing only the whereon to become power, brooding with majestic calm and clearness amid void. Subjectivity and objectivity were lost in the inseparable, I-think-exist. Next to the dominant sense described, was what Dr. Carpenter, the physiologist, terms “expectant attention." If it can be said that thought contemplated existence, then, equally, existence may be said to have contemplated thought. They were the same, and into the abstract ego both were resolvable. It was both, and they were one, and of other essence there was nothing. Solitarily, in space, I had for a few brief moments, experience that would have proved to me, had I needed proof, that although Descartes could not logically say, "I think, therefore I am;" nor Balmez, "this thought is my soul, I am;" yet, that the principle is true, with a higher truth than any formulary can express. This perception, derived from what I have justly called an exceptional experience, overrides the imperfection of logical forms, grown out of the daily needs of life, and unequal to expressing the sublime truth of existence. I regard as doubly proved, in my own experience, the belief of mankind generally, that the abstract ego, knowing that it thinks, knows that it exists as it believes itself to exist. In this experience was no self-consciousness. It would be answering speciously to assert that self-consciousness was present because I myself was present in myself. Philosophically, self can have no existence without its knowledge of the presence of self. I was conscious, not of my individual self, but of thought and existence, one and indivisible. As the effect of the gas passed away, then I myself rose upon my horizon, out of the abstract and greater self. "I think, therefore I exist; I exist, therefore I think,"

are to me convertible propositions, having significance far beyond the petty forms in which the ideas are illogically clothed.

As before indicated, the question remaining with some men would be: Is, or is not, this consciousness, which mankind generally regard as spiritual, solely a bodily function? We cannot prove that it is not solely a bodily function, neither can it be proved that it is. Mankind generally, convinced of the truth of the teaching of intuition, believe it to be spiritual. If consciousness— thought, mind, soul (call it what one will)-be not spiritual, then we do not exist as mankind generally believe that we exist. We have been first of all confronted with expressed doubt as to our existence, and now, if existence be granted, with doubt as to the character of the existence. If the latter doubt, as formulated materialistically, represents truth, then all that has been said here, and all that may be urged in the same direction, falls to the ground. The conclusion, then, to which we are forced, is that the ego and existence the latter as to very existence, the former as to essence —are thinkable, believable, but not demonstrable. But we may well hold, with mankind generally, that these belong to a higher order of truths than man is capable of testing with ratiocination. Here we must all rest, for we have reached the foundation of reasoning. If we have not in intuition, from self-consciousness,—the consciousness of consciousness,-knowledge of existence, of its essence, of its significance, certain it is that the knowledge can be derived from no source, physiological or psychological, or both, through discursion. Nay, more, if it could be so derived, the result could not be expressed in forms of language as they now exist, because language has not grown by dealing with fundamental thought, but by accepting fundamental thought, and expressing the needs of life upon the assumption of postulates derived from intuition and experience.

A

THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRAYER.

S there never was a time when the world found itself without a religion, so there never was a time when prayer was unknown, or when men did not practise it. Prayer is an active element in the religious economy of the world, whatever form religion may assume. Even Comte found a place for it in the machinery of that curious form of religion which is connected with his name, and in which all his positivist disciples worship humanity personified as the only being to which man owes homage. Not less wonderful, it has even the approval of Professor Tyndall, provided, however, that a form of it be devised "in which the heart might express itself without putting the intellect to shame," whatever that means. Presumably he means by it that, whilst prayer, considered as a power in the physical or moral world, is a superstition from which the intellect revolts, it may be useful as a kind of safety-valve by which the feelings of the heart may be poured out, and that this outpouring may have a reactionary influence whereby the heart is purified and the sentiment stirred up. In other words, prayer may be tolerated on the principle on which some parents nowadays send their children to Sunday-school; because, although of course religion is only a fancy, it does "the little ones" good; it keeps them together; it teaches their "little steps of stairs be neat and tidy.

This admission of prayer, as something worth retaining in some sense or for some purpose, is but a feeble echo of the voice of humanity coming down to us through all time. It is a want of our nature; a craving that comes out spontaneously from the soul. It is inborn in us, like religion, with which it is inseparably bound up. Religion may appear, nay, has appeared, under different forms. Grotesque, irrational, these forms may be; but there never yet has been a religion in which prayer of some kind has not been given an important place and admitted as an essential element. With Pagan and Christian, Jew and Gentile, it is all the same.

In one of his Notre Dame conferences Lacordaire says: "All religions have called sacrifices, ceremonies, and prayer to the help of the soul striving towards God. Homer immolates victims with the liturgy of Leviticus; Delphos commands expiations in the same language which Benares speaks; the Etruscan augury blesses the Roman hills as the Druid consecrated the forests of Gaul; and above all those living rites of invisible custom the sacrament of prayer rises towards God to demand miracles of Him in the name

of all grief that hopes and of all weakness that believes. Doubtless prayer has not always known God under the same name; it has not everywhere known His true and eternal history; but the want was everywhere the same, the aspiration similar, and when the heart was sincere prayer did not fail to be efficacious." The same author, speaking of the supernatural intercourse between God and man, says: "Those among the sages who, like Plato, have left a religious memory, were all penetrated with serious respect for the vestiges of a tradition whose history they ignored. They avowed the infirmity of human thought left to its own resources, and endeavored to raise themselves toward God by the irrational effort of prayer. They belonged to the party of saints by desire, to the party of sages by ignorance."

"Mahomet," the same author says elsewhere, "made prayer the practical foundation of his religious edifice." Who that has read ever so little of Greek or Roman literature, has not over and over again met with references to libations, vows, and prayers to the gods of paganism? Homer, writing of propitiatory sacrifices to the offended Deities, thus expresses his own belief and that of his time and race:

Let Pythagoras give evidence for the philosophers. He says:

"In all thou dost, first let thy prayers ascend,

And to the gods thy labors first commend;

From them implore success, and hope propitious end.”

Plutarch, writing against the Epicureans, says that nobody ever found a people who had not their gods to whom they offered sacrifices and prayers to obtain benefits and to avert evil.

Here, then, we have prayer running unmistakably through every form of religion, and forming an important element in each; and there never has been a people without a religion of some kind. A fact so universal, so constant, must be accounted for. Whence has it come? It cannot be attributed to the choice or caprice of individuals or peoples; and that, for the very reason of its universality and constant presence in the history of every religion, in every age. We must go back further, then, and search for the reason of it in the nature of man. We must see if it be not an office that springs directly and at once from his conscience, teaching him the duty of prayer apart from, and independently of, any positive revealed law.

It is necessary now to bear in mind that prayer implies more than its ordinarily received meaning. Praying is petitioning God,

as we commonly understand it. But it means, moreover, adoration and thanksgiving; and a petition to God may be either for the pardon of faults or the granting of favors. There is nothing more natural to us than to be enraptured by the beautiful, to admire the sublime, to honor goodness and wisdom, to reverence greatness and power. One instinctively regards with respect the genius of Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the other giant intellects that have arisen in the world's history from time to time, however he may differ from their teaching and principles. So it is with warriors, painters, sculptors, poets, etc.,-Alexander, Napoleon, Raphael, Michel-Angelo, Shakespeare, or Dante. A man may dislike the men, but he must admire their genius. Do not we not merely feel, but give spontaneous expression to our feelings, in the presence of the sublime or the beautiful in nature or in art? Clearly it was this that made men turn to the sun and moon, to rivers and mountains, and worship them, when, dulled by sin and passion, they had turned from and forgotten the one true God. It is not true, as it has been said, that by a law of indefinite progress, monotheism was the outcome of polytheism. The reverse is true; or, rather, it is true that polytheism stepped in where monotheism had died out. Men should have some form of religion, something to worship; and having lost their primitive faith in the one true God, they turned to other objects of worship, each according to his fancy or choice. It is under the same inborn influence that certain philosophers of our own day, who ignore a personal God, turn to humanity, and make it the object of their homage. All this unmistakably points to an instinctive craving in us for something to worship, and to the creation of feelings in us corresponding to the influence that objects are calculated to excite.

Now, we have our intellect, and it reasons back from effect to cause, and declares that there is a God. It cannot fathom the nature of God; it cannot comprehend Him; but it can and must know that a first cause there must be. It examines as far as it may into the nature and attributes of such a being, and it finds that a being existing of necessity must be infinitely perfect and the principle of all perfection; infinitely powerful and the principle of all power; infinitely wise and beautiful and the principle of all wisdom and beauty. It knows that itself, and everything we have, and everything that is, has come from God. Under this consciousness the intellect cannot remain unmoved. Having mounted up towards God, it bows down in homage before the Power, Wisdom, and Beauty from which all power, wisdom, and beauty spring; before the Creative Power from which everything that is has come. This is the prayer of adoration.