Now that the belief which the moral and religious {223} feelings are said to yield of a personal God, is not one of the beliefs which are unprovable because they underlie all proof, is obvious. It needs but to remember that in works on Natural Theology, the existence of a personal God is _inferred_ from these moral and religious feelings, to show that it is not contained in these feelings themselves, or joined with them as an inseparable intuition. It is not a belief like the beliefs which I now have that this is daylight, and that there is open space before me—beliefs which cannot be proved because they are of equal simplicity with, and of no less certainty than, each step in a demonstration. Were it a belief of this most certain kind, argument would be superfluous: all races of men and every individual would have the belief in an inexpugnable form. Hence it is manifest that, confusing the two very different states of consciousness called beliefs, Sir W. Hamilton ascribes to the second a certainty that belongs only to the first. Again, neither Sir W. Hamilton nor Dr. Mansel has enabled us to distinguish those “facts of our moral and emotional consciousness” which imperatively demand the belief in a personal God, from those facts of our (or of men’s) “moral and emotional consciousness” which, in those having them, imperatively demand beliefs that Sir W. Hamilton would regard as untrue. A New Zealand chief, discovering his wife in an infidelity, killed the man; the wife then killed herself that she might join her lover in the other world; and the chief thereupon killed himself that he might go after them to defeat this intention. These two acts of suicide furnish tolerably strong evidence that these New Zealanders believed in another world to which, they could go at will, and fulfil their desires as they did here. If they were asked the justification for this belief, and if the arguments by which they sought to establish it were not admitted, they might still fall back on emotional {224} consciousness as yielding them an unshakeable foundation for it. I do not see why a Fiji Islander, adopting the Hamiltonian argument, should not justify by it his conviction that after being buried alive, his life in the other world, forthwith commencing at the age he has reached in this, will similarly supply him with the joys of conquest and the gratifications of cannibalism. That he has a conviction to this effect stronger than the religious convictions current among civilized people, is proved by the fact that he goes to be buried alive quite willingly. And as we may presume that his conviction is not the outcome of a demonstration, it must be the outcome of some state of feeling—some “emotional consciousness.” Why, then, should he not assign the “facts” of his “emotional consciousness” as “imperatively demanding” this belief? Manifestly, this principle that “consciousness must be accepted entire,” either obliges us to