The term _Faith_ brings with it the special advantage of suggesting the faith of the Christian religion; it seems to include Christian faith, or perhaps even to coincide with it; and thus the Philosophy of Faith has a thoroughly orthodox and Christian look, on the strength of which it takes the liberty of uttering its arbitrary dicta with greater pretension and authority. But we must not let ourselves be deceived by the semblance surreptitiously secured by a merely verbal similarity. The two things are radically distinct. Firstly, the Christian faith comprises in it an authority of the Church: but the faith of Jacobi's philosophy has no other authority than that of a personal revelation. And, secondly, the Christian faith is a copious body of objective truth, a system of knowledge and doctrine: while the scope of the philosophic faith is so utterly indefinite, that, while it has room for the faith of the Christian, it equally admits a belief in the divinity of the Dalai-lama, the ox, or the monkey,--thus, so far as it goes, narrowing Deity down to its simplest terms, a 'Supreme Being.' Faith itself, taken in this professedly philosophical sense, is nothing but the sapless abstract of immediate knowledge,--a purely formal category applicable to very different facts; and it ought never to be confused or identified with the spiritual fulness of Christian faith, whether we look at that faith in the heart of the believer and the in-dwelling of the Holy Spirit, or in the system of theological doctrine. With what is here called faith or immediate knowledge must also be identified inspiration, the heart's revelations, the truths implanted in man by nature, and also in particular, healthy reason or Common Sense, as it is called. All these forms agree in adopting as their leading principle the immediacy, or self-evident way, in which a fact or body of truths is presented in consciousness. 84.] This immediate knowledge consists in knowing that the Infinite, the Eternal, the God which is in our idea, really _is_: or, it asserts that in our consciousness there is immediately and inseparably bound up with this idea the certainty of its actual being.