It only gives us finite conceptions and formulas about the Infinite.  The gulf between us and God yawns wide as ever, and is eternal.  We must worship still an unknown God, as the heathen did.  But we have this consolation,—­that we have creed-articles which we can get by heart, though ignorant of what they mean, and under what these philosophers call a “regulative” religion repeat our paternosters to the end of time.

“These be thy gods, O Philosophy!” exclaims Dr. Mansel to the German Pantheists, pointing to the bloodless spectres which they have evoked in place of Christianity.  “These be thy gods, O Scotch Metaphysics!” the Pantheists might reply, when called upon to worship the wooden images in which avowedly no pulse of the Infinite and Absolute ever beats or ever can beat.

Mr. James’s whole argument, as he deals with the German and Scotch philosophies, is profound and masterly.  He uses two sets of weapons, both of them with admirable skill.  One set is awfully destructive.  He clears off the rubbish of the pseudo-metaphysics with a logic so remorseless that we are tempted sometimes to cry for mercy.  But, on the whole, Mr. James is right here.  If men pretending to add to the stock of human knowledge treacherously knock away its foundations, and bring down the whole structure into a heap of rubbish, leaving us, if not killed outright, unhoused in a limbo of Atheism,—­or if men pretending to hold the keys of knowledge will not go in themselves, and shut the doors in our faces when we seek to enter, no matter how sharply their treachery and charlatanry are exposed, however famous are the names they bear.

But Mr. James is quite as much constructive as destructive.  He shows not only that there must be a philosophy of the Infinite, but that herein is its high office and glory.  Sense deals only with facts,—­science deals with relations, or groups phenomena; and when these usurp the place of philosophy, they turn things exactly upside down, or mistake the centre for the circumference.  This is the glaring fault both of the German and the Scotch metaphysicians, that they swamp philosophy in mere science; and hence they grovel in the Finite, and muddle everything they touch even there.  Revelation, on the other hand, does unfold to us a true philosophy of the Infinite.  It shows how the Infinite is contained in the Finite, the Absolute in the Relative, not spatially or by continuation, but by exact correspondency, as the soul is contained in the body.  Mr. James demonstrates the supreme absurdity of the notion of noumenal existence, or of any created existence which has life in se.  God alone has life in Himself.  All things else are only forms and receptacles of life, sheerly phenomenal, except so far forth as He is their substance.  The notion of Creation as something made out of nothing, having life afterwards in se, and so holding an external relation to Deity, falsifies all the theologies, and degrades them into mere natural religions.”