The summing up of certain reflections with which this chapter opens, concludes thus: "But that when our symbolic conceptions are such that no cumulative or indirect processes of thought can enable us to ascertain that there are corresponding actualities, nor any predictions be made whose fulfilment can prove this, then they are altogether vicious and illusive, and in no way distinguishable from pure fictions,"--p. 29. So far very good; but his use of it is utterly unsound. "And now to consider the bearings of this general truth on our immediate topic--Ultimate Religious Ideas." But this "general truth" has _no_ bearings upon "ultimate religious ideas"; how then can you consider them? _No_ ideas, and most of all religious ideas, are conceptions, or the results of conceptions--or are the products of "cumulative or indirect processes of thought." They are not results or products _at all_. They are organic, are the spontaneous presentation of what is inborn, and so must be directly seen to be known at all. Man might pile up "cumulative processes of thought" for unnumbered ages, and might form most exact conceptions of objects of Sense,--conceptions are not possible of others,--and he could never creep up to the least and faintest religious idea. On the next page, speaking of "suppositions respecting the origin of the Universe," Mr. Spencer says, "The deeper question is, whether any one of them is even conceivable in the true sense of that word. Let us successively test them." This is not necessary. It has already been _demonstrated_ that a conception, or any effort of the Understanding, cannot touch, or have relation to such topics. But it does not follow, therefore, that no one of them is cognizable at all; which he implies. Take the abstract notion of self-existence, for example. No "vague symbolic conceptions," or any conception at all, of it _can be formed_. A conception is possible only "under relation, difference, and plurality." _This_ is a pure, simple idea, and so can only be known in itself by a seeing--an immediate intuition. It is seen by itself, as out of all relation. It is seen as simple, and so is learned by no difference. It is seen as a unit, and so out of all plurality. The discursive faculty cannot pass over it, because there are in it no various points upon which that faculty may fasten. It may, perhaps, better be expressed by the words pure independence. Again, it is _not_ properly "existence without a beginning," but rather, existence out of all relation to beginning; and so it is an idea, out of all relation to those faculties which are confined to objects that did begin. Because we can "by no mental effort" "form a conception of existence without a beginning," it does not follow that we cannot _see_ that a Being existing out of all relation to beginning _is_. "To this let us add" that the intuition of such a Being is a complete "explanation of the Universe," and does make it "easier to understand" "that it existed an