pleadings, modulates too little in the transcendental key, sometimes
he does so too much. For instance, at p. 69, sec. 35, we find him
half calling upon Protestantism to account for her belief in God;
how then? Is this belief special to Protestants? Are Roman Catholics,
are those of the Greek, the Armenian, and other Christian churches,
atheistically given? We used to be told that there is no royal
road to geometry. I don't know whether there is or not; but I am
sure there is no Protestant by-road, no Reformation short-cut, to
the demonstration of Deity. It is true that _Phil._ exonerates
his philosophic scholar, when throwing himself in Protestant freedom
upon pure intellectual aids, from the vain labor of such an effort.
He consigns him, however philosophic, to the evidence of 'inevitable
assumptions, upon axiomatic postulates, which the reflecting mind
is compelled to accept, and which no more admit of doubt and cavil
than of establishment by formal proof.' I am not sure whether I
understand _Phil._ in this section. Apparently he is glancing
at Kant. Kant was the first person, and perhaps the last, that ever
undertook formally to demonstrate the indemonstrability of God.
He showed that the three great arguments for the existence of the
Deity were virtually one, inasmuch as the two weaker borrowed their
value and _vis apodeictica_ from the more rigorous metaphysical
argument. The physico-theological argument he forced to back, as it
were, into the cosmological, and _that_ into the ontological.
After this reluctant _regressus_ of the three into one, shutting
up like a spying-glass, which (with the iron hand of Hercules forcing
Cerberus up to daylight) the stern man of Koenigsberg resolutely
dragged to the front of the arena, nothing remained, now that
he had this pet scholastic argument driven up into a corner, than
to break its neck--which he did. Kant took the conceit out of all
the three arguments; but, if this is what _Phil._ alludes to,