Dr. McCosh is not wholly insensible to this conclusion, and seeks to escape it by proving that there is a mind in man endowed with the capacity of knowing things as they are. But if the existence of the mind needs to be proved, with what can we prove it? By consciousness, the author answers; but that is a sheer paralogism, for consciousness is simply an act of the mind, and presupposes it. God can no more be an induction from the facts of consciousness than from the facts of nature. In either case, the God induced is a generalization; in the one case, the generalization of nature, and, in the other, the generalization of consciousness. The former usually goes by the name of atheism, the latter by the name of egoism. Dr. McCosh very properly rejects Hamilton’s and Mansel’s doctrine of the pure relativity of all knowledge, and Herbert Spencer’s doctrine that all knowledge is restricted to the knowledge of phenomena or appearances, though conceding that appearances are unthinkable without a reality beyond them, but that the reality beyond them, and which appears in them, is itself unknowable; and maintains truly that we know things themselves, both sensibles and supersensibles. We know them, he contends, by intuition, or a direct looking on or beholding them by the simple intellectual force of our minds. Of this we are not so certain, for we do not ourselves know by intuition why salt is bitter and sugar sweet, and we think the doctor knows things themselves only in so far as he excepts their essence or substance, and confounds the thing with its properties, or its accidents, as say the schoolmen, in which case he makes no appreciable advance on Mr. Herbert Spencer. I know the appearances and the sensible properties of bread, but I do not know its essence or substance. Has the Presbyterian doctor, who seems to have a holy horror of Catholicity, invented a philosophy for the express purpose of combating with apparent reason the mystery of transubstantiation, by making it conflict with the positive testimony of the senses and the human intellect?