A full exposition of Sir William Hamilton's views of _Faith_ in its connection with Philosophy would have been deeply interesting to us, and it would have filled up a gap in the interpretation of his system. The question naturally presents itself, how would he have discriminated between faith and knowledge, so as to assign to each its province? If our notion of the Infinite Being rests entirely upon faith, then upon what ultimate ground does faith itself rest? On the authority of Scripture, of the Church, or of reason? The only explicit statement of his view which has fallen in our way is a note in his edition of Reid.[344] "We _know_ what rests upon reason; we _believe_ what rests upon authority. But reason itself must rest at last upon authority; for the original data of reason do not rest upon reason, but are necessarily accepted by reason on the authority of what is beyond itself. These data are, therefore, in rigid propriety, Beliefs or Trusts. Thus it is that, in the last resort, we must, per force, philosophically admit that belief is the primary condition of reason, and not reason the ultimate ground of belief." [Footnote 344: P. 760; also Philosophy of Sir William Hamilton, p. 61.] Here we have, first, an attempted distinction between faith and knowledge. "We _know_ what rests upon reason;" that is, whatever we obtain by deduction or induction, whatever is capable of explication and proof, is _knowledge_. "We _believe_ what rests upon authority;" that is, whatever we obtain by intellectual intuition or pure apperception, and is incapable of explication and of proof, is "a _belief or trust_." These instinctive beliefs, which are, as it were, the first principles upon which all knowledge rests, are, however, indiscriminately called by Hamilton "cognitions," "beliefs," "judgments." He declares most explicitly "that the principles of our knowledge must themselves be _knowledges_;"[345] and these first principles, which are "the primary condition of reason," are elsewhere called "_à priori cognitions_;" also "native, pure, or transcendental _knowledge_," in contradistinction to "_à posteriori cognitions_," or that knowledge which is obtained in the exercise of reason.[346] All this confusion results from an attempt to put asunder what God has joined together. As Clemens of Alexandria has said, "Neither is faith without knowledge, nor knowledge without faith." All faith implies knowledge, and all knowledge implies faith. They are mingled in the one operation of the human mind, by which we apprehend first principles or ultimate truths. These have their light and dark side, as Hamilton has remarked. They afford enough light to show _that_ they are and must be, and thus communicate knowledge; they furnish no light to show _how_ they are and _why_ they are, and under that aspect demand the exercise of faith. There must, therefore, first be something _known_ before there can be any _faith_.[347] [Footnote 345: Ibid., p. 69.]