ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the common faith of mankind that consciousness is good and trustworthy evidence of the reality of that of which the author's are conscious. For the optimistic philosopher, then, who refuses to begin by taking the difference between rights and wrong on faith, the problem is, granted the reality of material things and the uniformity of nature, to show that the moral law is simply one particular case of the uniformity of Nature. The religious consciousness is itself abstract; and as an abstraction, i.e. if taken to be the whole of what we know and feel and do, is capable of leading to false conclusions: no religious belief stand permanently which runs counter to the facts of science or moral faith of mankind. If that statement proved to be a logical consequence from the facts of science, then it indeed be proved that one article in the common creed of mankind was inconsistent with the rest.
