Intimately connected with the foregoing is a question whose importance cannot be overstated. It is one which involves the very possibility of God's existence as a self-conscious person. To present it, we recur again to the extracts made just above from Sir William Hamilton. "Consciousness is only possible under the antithesis of a subject and object of thought known only in correlation, and mutually limiting each other." Subsequently, he makes the acknowledgment as logically following from this: "that we are unable to conceive the possibility of such knowledge," _i. e._ of the absolute, "even in the Deity himself." That is, God can be believed to be self-conscious only on the ground that the human intellect is a cheat. The theory which underlies this assertion of the logician--a theory not peculiar to the Limitists, but which has, perhaps, been hitherto universally maintained by philosophers--may be concisely stated thus. In every correlation of subject and object,--in every instance where they are to be contrasted,--the subject must be one, and the object must be _another and different_. Hamilton, in another place, utters it thus: "Look back for a moment into yourselves, and you will find, that what constitutes intelligence in our feeble consciousness, is, that there are there several terms, of which the one perceives the other, of which the other is perceived by the first; in this consists self-knowledge," &c. Mark the "several terms," and that the one can only see the other, never itself. This position is both a logical and psychological error. It is a logical error because it _assumes_, without argument, that there is involved in the terms subject and object such a logical contradiction and contradistinction that the subject cannot be object to itself. This assumption is groundless. As a matter of fact, it is _generally_ true that, so far as man is concerned, the subject is one, and the object another and different. But this by no means proves that it is _always_ so; it only raises the presumption that such may be the case. And when one comes to examine the question in itself, there is absolutely no logical ground for the assumption. It is found to be a question upon which no decision from logical considerations can have any validity, because _it is purely psychological_, and can only be decided by evidence upon a matter of fact. Furthermore, it is a psychological error, because a careful examination shows that, in some instances, the opposite is the fact; that, in certain experiences, the subject and object are identical.