3. The whole of this confusion in thought and expression results from the habit of confounding the sensuous imagination with the non-sensuous reason, and the consequent co-ordination of an imageable conception with an abstract idea. The objects of sense and the sensuous imagination may be characterized as extension, limitation, figure, position, etc.; the objects of the non-sensuous reason may be characterized as universality, eternity, infinity. I can form an _image_ of an extended and figured object, but I can not form an _image_ of space, time, or God; neither, indeed, can I form an image of Goodness, Justice, or Truth. But I can have a clear and precise idea of space, and time, and God, as I can of Justice, Goodness, and Truth. There are many things which I can most surely _know_ that I can not possibly _comprehend_, if to comprehend is to form a mental image of a thing. There is nothing which I more certainly know than that space is infinite, and eternity unbeginning and endless; but I can not comprehend the infinity of space or the illimitability of eternity. I know that God is, that he is a being of infinite perfection, but I can not throw my thoughts around and comprehend the infinity of God. (iv.) We come, lastly, to consider the position of the _Dogmatic Theologians_.[356] In their zeal to demonstrate the necessity of Divine Revelation, and to vindicate for it the honor of supplying to us all our knowledge of God, they assail every fundamental principle of reason, often by the very weapons which are supplied by an Atheistical philosophy. As a succinct presentation of the views of this school, we select the "_Theological Institutes_" of R. Watson. [Footnote 356: Ellis, Leland, Locke, and Horsley, whose writings are extensively quoted in Watson's "Institutes of Theology" (reprinted by Carlton & Lanahan, New York).] 1st. The invalidity of "_the principle of causality_" is asserted by this author. "We allow that the argument which proves that the _effects_ with which we are surrounded have been _caused_, and thus leads us up through a chain of subordinate causes to one First Cause, has a simplicity, an obviousness, and a force which, when we are previously furnished with the idea of God, makes it, at first sight, difficult to conceive that men, under any degree of cultivation, should be inadequate to it; yet if ever the human mind commenced such an inquiry at all, it is highly probable that it would rest in the notion of an _eternal succession of causes and effects_, rather than acquire the ideas of creation, in the proper sense, and of a Supreme Creator."[357] "We feel that our reason rests with full satisfaction in the doctrine that all things are created by one eternal and self-existent Being; but the Greek philosophers held that matter was eternally co-existent with God. This was the opinion of Plato, who has been called the Moses of philosophy."[358]