Is there in this any violation of the true law of thought? Does the relation between our past experience and the experience which we forecast for the future fade into a dim symbol of a relation? On the contrary, both are equally capable of mental representation; for we are mentally so constituted that the consciousness of what has happened to us in the past--the unending succession of new discoveries, the constant accumulation of knowledge, which we have experienced here--gives us the conception of the same endless progress hereafter, compels us to believe in it, and enables us to grasp it as a product of true thought. Mr. Spencer has much to say of "the imbecility of human intelligence when brought to bear on the ultimate question." What is the ultimate question? The ultimate question with which science and philosophy are concerned is the existence of the Supreme Being. It is of the utmost consequence for us to understand wherein consists the imbecility of human intelligence when brought to bear upon this question of the existence of God. How does our imbecility manifest itself? What is the point beyond which thought can not go? We become conscious of the existence of the being called man, because, from the phenomena which we know that he produces by the exercise of his will and power, and which we know must have had an author and producer, we deduce an existence beyond the phenomena, an actor in their production. What more, or what that is different, do we do or undertake to do, when, from the phenomena of nature which we know that man did not produce, we think of another existence beyond the phenomena? In both cases, we study the phenomena by our senses and powers of observation; in both cases we reason that there is an actor who produces the phenomena; yet the existence of the actor who produces the phenomena is inscrutable in the case of the Deity in the same sense and for the same reason that it is inscrutable in the case of man. How the human mind came to exist, by what process it was made to exist, by what means it was created, what was the genesis of the human intellect, is just as inscrutable, no more and no less so, as the mode in which the Deity came to exist. In both cases the existence of a being is what we think of; and when we think of either being we think of that which is beyond phenomena but which we deduce from phenomena. In neither case do we "accept a formless consciousness of the inscrutable"; for what we accept is the consciousness of a being, and it is not a consciousness of the mode in which he came to exist. The latter consciousness is the inscrutable problem. The existence is what we think of, and we think of it by a perfectly true process of thought, deducing it from the simple truth that the phenomena must have had an actor in their production. We do not undertake to think of the process by which man was created, or of the mode in which that other existence came to be without beginning and without end.