To this assertion that the connection of things visible and things invisible, finite and infinite, objects of sense and objects of faith, is utterly imperceptible to human thought, we might reply by quoting the words of that Sacred Book whose supreme authority our author is seeking, by this argument, to establish. "The _invisible_ things of God, even his eternal power and god-head, from the creation, are clearly _seen_, being _understood by the things which are made_." We may also point to the fact that in every age and in every land the human mind has spontaneously and instinctively recognized the existence of an invisible Power and Presence pervading nature and controlling the destinies of man, and that religious worship--prayer, and praise, and sacrifice--offered to that unseen yet omnipresent Power is an universal fact of human nature. The recognition of an _immediate_ and a _necessary_ "connection" between the visible and the invisible, the objects of sense and the objects of faith, is one of the most obvious facts of consciousness--of universal consciousness as revealed in history, and of individual consciousness as developed in every rational mind. That this connection is "not perceptible to human observation," if by this our author means "not perceptible to sense," we readily admit. No one ever asserted it was perceptible to human observation. We say that this connection is perceptible to human _reason_, and is revealed in every attempt to think about, and seek an explanation of, the phenomenal world. The Phenomenal and the Real, Genesis and Being, Space and Extension, Succession and Duration, Time and Eternity, the Finite and the Infinite, are correlatives which are given in one and the same indivisible act of thought. "The conception of one term of a relation necessarily implies that of the other; it being the very nature of a correlative to be thinkable only through the conjunct thought of its correlative; for a relation is, in truth, a thought one and indivisible; and whilst the thinking of one relation necessarily involves the thought of its two terms, so it is, with equal necessity, itself involved in the thought of either."[367] Finite, dependent, contingent, temporal existence, therefore, necessarily supposes infinite, self-existent, independent, eternal Being; the Conditioned and Relative implies the Unconditioned and Absolute--one is known only in and through the other. But inasmuch as the unconditioned is cognized solely _à priori_, and the conditioned solely _à posteriori_, the recognition by the human mind of their necessary correlation becomes the bridge whereby the chasm between the subjective and the objective may be spanned, and whereby Thought may be brought face to face with Existence. [Footnote 367: Hamilton's "Metaphysics," vol. ii. pp. 536, 537.]