Throughout, as we have already remarked, there is a want of unity and universality in his philosophy, as there necessarily must be in his Protestant theology, and a sad lack of logical consistency and order, or co-ordination. His world is a chaos, as is and must be the Protestant world. Herbert Spencer undertakes to explain the universe without God, or, what is the same thing, with an absolutely unknowable God, which is of course an impossibility; but he has a far profounder intellect and a far more logical mind than Dr. McCosh. He is heaven-wide from the truth, yet nearer to it than his Presbyterian critic. His logic is good; his principles being granted, his 11 conclusions, though absurd, cannot be denied. His error lies in his premises, and, if you correct them, your work is done. He will correct all details, and arrive at just conclusions without further assistance. But Dr. McCosh is one who, however much he may talk about them, never reduces his doctrines to their generic principles, or reasons from principles. He is a genuine Protestant, and cannot be refuted in refuting his principles, which vary with the exigencies of his argument, and are really no principles at all, but must be refuted in detail; and when you have convinced him twice three are six, you have still to prove that three times two are also six. Now, such a man--and he is, perhaps, above the average of Presbyterian divines--is the last man in the world to attempt the refutation of positivism. No Protestant can do it. Indeed, all the avowed Positivists we have known regard Protestant Christianity as too insignificant a matter to be counted. It is too vague and fluctuating, too uncertain and indefinite, too unsubstantial and intangible, too unsystematic and illogical, to command the least respect from them. They see at a glance that it is too little to be a religion and too much to be no-religion. It cannot, with its half affirmations and its whole denials, stand a moment before an intelligent Positivist who has a scientific cast of mind. The Positivist rejects the church, of course, but he respects Catholicity as a logical system, consistent with itself, coherent in all its parts, and for him there is no _via media_ between it and positivism. If he were not a Positivist, he says openly, he would be a Catholic, by no means a Protestant, which he looks upon as neither one thing nor another; and we respond that, could we cease to be a Catholic, we should be a Positivist, for to a logical mind there is no medium between the church and atheism. The middle systems, as Protestantism, Rationalism, Deism, etc., are divided against themselves, and cannot stand, any more than a house divided against itself. Their denials vitiate their affirmations and their affirmations vitiate their denials. They are all too much or too little.