The religious sentiments in all minds, and in all ages, have resulted from the union of _thought_ and _feeling_--the living and harmonious relation of reason and sensibility; and a philosophy which disregards either is inadequate to the explanation of the phenomena. IV. The fourth hypothesis is, _that religion has had its outbirth in the spontaneous apperceptions of_ REASON; that is, in the necessary, à priori ideas of the infinite, the perfect, the unconditioned Cause, the Eternal Being, which are evoked into consciousness in presence of the changeful, contingent phenomena of the world. This will at once be recognized by the intelligent reader as the doctrine of Cousin, by whom _pure reason_ is regarded as the grand faculty or organ of religion. Religion, in the estimation of Cousin, is grounded on _cognition_ rather than upon feeling. It is the knowledge of God, and the knowledge of duty in its relation to God and to human happiness; and as reason is the general faculty of all knowing, it must be the faculty of religion. "In its most elevated point of view, religion is the relation of absolute truth to absolute Being," and as absolute truth is apprehended by the reason alone, reason "is the veridical and religious part of the nature of man."[66] By "reason," however, as we shall see presently, Cousin does not mean the discursive or reflective reason, but the spontaneous or intuitive reason. That act of the mind by which we attain to religious knowledge is not a _process of reasoning_, but a pure appreciation, an instinctive and involuntary movement of the soul. [Footnote 66: Henry's Cousin, p. 510.] The especial function of reason, therefore, is to reveal to us the invisible, the supersensuous, the Divine. "It was bestowed upon us for this very purpose of going, without any circuit of reasoning, from the visible to the invisible, from the finite to the infinite, from the imperfect to the perfect, and from necessary and eternal truths, to the eternal and necessary principle" that is God.[67] Reason is thus, as it were, the bridge between consciousness and being; it rests, at the same time, on both; it descends from God, and approaches man; it makes its appearance in consciousness as a guest which brings intelligence of another world of real Being which lies beyond the world of sense.