ABSTRACT
The pages of a periodical intended for general reading may be thought scarcely fitted for the treatment of these highly abstract questions. Reason leads both inductively and deductively to the conclusion that the sphere of Reason is limited. It needs but to remember that in works on Natural Theology, the existence of a personal God is inferred from these moral and religious feelings, to show that it is not contained in these feelings themselves, or joined with them as an inseparable intuition. A New Zealand chief, discovering his wife in an infidelity, killed the man; the wife then killed herself that she might join her lover in the other world. Philosophical systems, like theological ones, following the law of evolution in general, severally become in course of time more rigid, while becoming more complex and more definite; and they similarly become less alterable—resist all compromise, and have to be replaced by the more plastic systems that descend from them.
