The Philosophy of Sir W. Hamilton has become familiar to most people, so far as his theory of "the Conditioned" is concerned. They are aware that his mind dwelt on the speculative difficulties surrounding a knowledge of the Absolute, the self-subsisting First Cause, and true Ground of all things. Yet, to the veracity of God he appeals for the veraciousness of our primary beliefs. Over against a whole school of Idealists, he places, as the one fatal objection, this same veracity--"Either maintaining the veracity of God, they must surrender their hypothesis;--or, maintaining their hypothesis, they must surrender the veracity of God."[174] And, if the existence of a Deity is known, there can be no doubt that His truth is amongst the highest and clearest _to us_, of all His essential attributes. We cannot (as Sir William says) "suppose that we are created capable of intelligence, in order to be made the victims of delusion; that God is a deceiver, and the root of our nature a lie."[175] Therefore, he drew a wide distinction between, on the one hand, knowing the Absolute and the Supreme so as to examine and explain His nature, and, on the other hand, believing that He truly is, so as to affirm the fact of His being, and the necessary consequences of His existence. "When I deny," he writes, "that the Infinite can by us be _known_, I am far from denying that by us it is, must, and ought to be, _believed_!"[176]--In this belief, Sir William saw a sufficient reason for accepting, as Mr. Mill advises all to accept, "the inexplicable fact." And indeed the problem of truth perpetually does come, (evade the conclusion as we will), in one shape or another, to this same necessity of final acceptance. Mr. Coleridge's _Friend_ is one long investigation into this necessity, and he fairly closes his argument by saying that always,--start from whatever point we may,--"reason will find a chasm, which the moral being only, which the spirit and religion of man alone can fill up."[177] 3 For Sir W. Hamilton, Theism bridged the vast abyss! No one could more strongly estimate its vastness, and the poverty of our visual powers when we stand beside it;--the dim feeling which makes us shrink back from its awful verge. But Theism became to him the strength of a noble life;--a life of much self-sacrifice, and meagre earthly recompense.[ak] The next typical thinker we shall quote is one pre-eminent for his careful study of the constitution of _Man_, the course, the aims, and aptitudes of his _moral_ existence. It seems hardly necessary to add the name of Bishop Butler. The reader will find pleasure and instruction, if he peruses Butler's two sermons on the Love of God, from the second of which the following passages are cited:--