A famous writer expands the same thought as follows:  “Doubt about things which it highly concerns us to know,” says Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “is a condition which does too great violence to the human mind; nor does it long bear up against it, but in spite of itself comes to a decision one way or another, and likes better to be mistaken than to believe nothing."[162] Such is the law.  We have met with the pretension to maintain the mind independent of God, without either denying or asserting His existence, and we have seen how completely this pretension fails in the presence of facts.  The sceptic makes vain efforts to continue in a state of doubt, but the ground fails him, and he slips into negation:  he affirms that humanity has been mistaken, and that God is not.  But neither does this negation succeed any the more in keeping its ground; it strikes too violently against all the instincts of our nature.  The human mind is under an imperious necessity to worship something; if God fails it, it sets itself to adore nature or humanity; atheism is transformed into idolatry.  Recollect the destinies of the critical school and of the positive philosophy!  Let us now examine, with serious attention, that attempt to eliminate God which is the starting-point in this course along which the mind is hurried so fatally.

God is not, I grant, an object of experience.  I grant it at least in this sense, that God is not an object of sensible experience.  The experience of God (if I may be allowed the expression), the feeling of His action upon the soul, is not a phenomenon open to the observation of all, and apart from determined spiritual conditions.  In order to be sensible of the action of God, we must draw near to Him.  In order to draw near to Him, we must, if not believe with firm faith in His existence, at least not deny Him.  The captives of Plato’s cavern can have no experience of light, so long as they heap their raillery on those who speak to them of the sun.  I grant again that God cannot possibly be the object of a demonstration such as the science of geometry requires; I grant it fully, I have already said so.  Every man who reasons, affirms God in one sense; and the foundation of all reasoning cannot be the conclusion of a demonstration.  God therefore, in the view of science formed according to our ordinary methods, is, I grant, an hypothesis.  And here, Gentlemen, allow me a passing word of explanation.

When I say that God is an hypothesis, I run the risk of exciting, in many of you, feelings of astonishment not unmixed with pain.  But I must beg you to remember the nature of these lectures.  We are here far from the calm retirement of the sanctuary, and from such words of solemn exhortation as flow from the lips of the religious teacher.  I have introduced you to the ardent conflicts of contemporary thought, and into the midst of the clamors of the schools.  The soul which is seeking to hold communion with God, and so from their fountain-head to be filled