Sceptical criticism of this sort has found expression in the searching minute philosophy of a later day than Berkeley’s and Alciphron’s; as in David Hume and Voltaire, and in the agnosticism of the nineteenth century. Was not Euphranor too ready to yield to the demand for a visible God, whose character had accordingly to be determined by what appears in nature and man, under the conditions of our limited and contingent experience? Do we not need to look below data of sensuous experience, and among the presuppositions which must consciously or unconsciously be taken for granted in all man’s dealings with the environment in which he finds himself, for the root of _trustworthy_ experience? On merely physical reasoning, like that of Euphranor, the righteous love of God is an unwarranted inference, and it even seems to be contradicted by visible facts presented in the history of the world. But if Omnipotent Goodness must _a priori_ be attributed to the Universal Mind, as an indispensable condition for man’s having reliable intercourse of any sort with nature; if this is the primary postulate necessary to the existence of truth of any kind—then the “religious hypothesis” that God is Good, according to the highest conception of goodness, is no groundless fancy, but the fundamental faith-venture in which man has to live. It _must_ stand in reason; unless it can be _demonstrated_ that the mixture of good and evil which the universe presents, necessarily contradicts this fundamental presupposition: and if so, man is lost in pessimistic Pyrrhonism, and can assert nothing about anything(24).