We have called Emerson poet and have spoken of his vision. and his gift of penetration. May it not be well to ask what value attaches to the dream of the poet and the vision of the seer? How is philosophy furthered by poetic insight? How are truth and beauty related to each other? What is the relation of seer and reasoner? Reality, it may be answered, is one. In the last analysis, truth, beauty, and the good are one. All truth is beautiful, and all beauty is good. These are only different ways in which the Primal Essence appears to the mind of man. The poet beholds reality, and it assumes graceful form and radiant color; the philosopher beholds the same reality, and his cold gaze crystallizes it into a law, a principle, a thought; the righteous will and trustful heart meet the same reality and find it perfect will and loving heart. The reality is never thoroughly construed to the finite life until it has been clothed with beauty, perceived as law, and incorporated into righteous conduct and communion. Shall the soul, then, refuse to respond to the vision of the seer while it accepts the logic of the reasoner? Shall we cast out of philosophy the moral and æsthetic ideals just because they cannot be reduced by the intellect to rigid law? Surely the soul has no deeper need than that which urges it to posit for itself an ideally good and beautiful universe. The ineffable essence is as frequently realized through the feelings as through the intellect. In fact, after the logician has cautiously and painfully reasoned through his theories and his laws he finds himself at the same goal which the poet has reached at a bound before him. They both trust that they have arrived at the proper goal; they both feel elated and satisfied with their perception of ultimate reality. And what is, after all, the supreme test of knowledge? It is not sensation. It is not alone rational intuition or the veracity of God. It is, in fact, no externally imposed standard whatsoever. The ultimate criterion of knowledge arises from the innermost life, and from that life in its unity and completeness. It is, in short, a self-realization akin to moral or æsthetic satisfaction.

It is important that a slight critical comment be made before Emerson's thought is considered from a strictly rational standpoint. The limits of this paper forbid adequate discussion of the significance of Kant's doctrine for the development of thought since his time; but we maintain that the center of

gravity of all metaphysical questioning should be shifted in accordance with his doctrine of the primacy of the practical reason. Life, as a whole, is the ultimate problem with which man is most interested; and whatever real explanations are reached will be reached by excursions from this standpoint, rather than by an attempt to construct the universe by pure reason. We repeat that man's deepest and most pressing problem is life, of which knowledge is only a part sought in isolation from the rest. Nothing is known that has not been lived. No cognitive function can be separated from the attendant functions of feeling and conation. Even if we could trace back the threads of life and thought to their sources, arrived there we could only bow reverently and trust. mate problem with which we have to deal is a progressive one; it is the problem of conscious becoming, and in this process knowledge is only a phase. If we busy ourselves too exclusively with this single aspect of our expanding life we lose our bearings and see all things out of focus. Life is its own interpreter; and it is quite as important, as human, and, from the standpoint of the individual, as much the discovery of the real to will, to feel, to trust, and to aspire as to know.

So the ulti

Emerson was among the first in America to emphasize Kant's doctrine that through the postulates of the practical reason we have access to the realms of moral freedom, immortality, and God. It is much to his credit that he bent his energies toward the practical and the positive, rather than the theoretical, aspect of the great German's doctrine. Emerson struck the first high, clear note to the prelude of the nobler philosophy that is only now beginning to pervade the lives of our best American thinkers. No one saw more clearly than he the shortcomings of philosophy as it then prevailed, the barrenness of soulless metaphysical inquiry, and the hopelessness of reaching any satisfactory results unless the traditional methods of thought were abandoned. He attempted no critical statement of his views; he entered into no polemic; yet he fearlessly departed from the beaten pathway of philosophy and shocked the reflective world into life and hope by his originality and his genius. He appealed to the lives, and not merely to the intellect, of his readers. From the depths of his own consciousness he spoke to the consciousness of others; he revealed God to them through

reflection. To-day comparatively few will question the truth of his statements that spontaneity and fullness of life, rather than a metaphysical system or a theory of knowledge, are man's greatest needs; that digested and completed systems at once become dead and worthless; that endeavor, not rest, is the soul's richest heritage; and that awareness is a more attainable, if not more desirable, state than certainty.

Frank C Lockwood.

ART. III.-PAUL'S PSYCHOLOGY.

WHAT may be the use and limitation of reason in the realm of religion is a question much in need of settlement in these days of independent thought. Paul has furnished the base lines from which a settlement may be made; but this paper proposes only to take a few field notes. Character is the basis of spiritual knowledge. The natural, animal man has no ability to understand spiritual things; they do not lie in his plane of thought; he catalogues them among the foolish things; they are not intelligible to him, because they are spiritually discerned and are to be examined by spiritual powers which the animal man does not possess.

Our age is skeptical; its very philosophy is without certitude. Religion has begun to doubt its own beliefs; there is a tendency to swing away from the old landmarks, from old beliefs and old methods of thought, and to push intellect over the old border land into the realm of doubt. Speculative thought is putting forth its greatest activity in order to clear up the field of consciousness and remove the fog line between logical inference and spiritual intuition. Popular authors, popular colleges, and some popular pulpits are attempting to fix the horizon of mind and crowd the field that lies beyond the logical powers full of the unknowable. But how can the mere logical powers know that there is an unknowable? The pride of knowledge puts out the spiritual eyes. It is the spiritual man that realizes his inability, that longs to know the spiritual things, and desires to examine them with spiritual powers; the mere animal man has no such desires. Had God committed to the natural man abili ties to discover essential religious truths he could not have given to the race a revelation of himself. If the mere philosopher could ascertain spiritual truth, as Pythagoras discovered the triangle, holy men of God would not have been moved by the Holy Ghost to write the Holy Scriptures.

There are but three possible methods of obtaining truth by the natural power of the mind. These fix the limits of the natural man: 1. The empirical method, limited to the facts known through the senses by observation and experiment; the truths obtained are scientific truths. 2. The logical method,

the mental process by which all healthy mind comes into possession of new relations of truth by inference. There are forms of inference. Induction is the inference of truths from known facts. Mind may construct new truths from known facts, as men construct houses from the raw material by putting it in new relations. Deduction is the inference of other truths from truths which are known, the process of constructing new forms of truth out of individual forms. When the truths discussed are purely abstract the field is mathematical and the new truths are all demonstrable. When the constructive form of truth is speculative we have the unfenced field of metaphysics. 3. The intuitional method, if method it may be called, when both facts and truths are known to consciousness without any known process, without experiment, induction, or deduction. Such knowledge is absolute, not a notion or a belief resting upon the conscious fact that it cannot be otherwise; but it is positive knowing, such a knowledge as excludes all doubt and admits of no augmentation, is more emphatic than demonstration, is self evident, supersensible. Through this gateway mind receives all primary or first truths-axioms of mathematics, notions of time and space, the beautiful and true in art, the ethical ideas of right and wrong, self-consciousness, personal freedom, Godconsciousness, or the realization of God as a personal Being.

The primary knowledge belongs to all men, all responsible being; it is without any process; it is spontaneous insight, soul vision, apocalyptic. This seems to be God's method of revealing spiritual truth to spiritual men. If God can reveal his own personality to the natural man, then why may not the truth of the incarnation, atonement, immortality, and the resurrection of the dead be revealed to the spiritual man? Over the doorway of the Academy of Plato was written, "Let none but geometricians enter here." Over the gateway to the realm of religion let the proud philosopher, the worldwide scholar, the keen, skeptical critic read the inscription from a greater Master than Plato, "I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes."

I. THE LIMITATION OF REASON IN RELIGION.-Mere reason cannot by its logical powers discover God, or apprehend him when revealed. It is not to blame, for it was not intended for