magnificent Hegelian constructions he would probably have said, what he says of Samuel Clarke’s theological demonstration—‘These are the speculations of men of superior genius. But whether they be as solid as they are sublime, or whether they be the wanderings of imagination in a region beyond the limit of human understanding, I am unable to determine.’ The alternatives presented to this generation—either agnostic pessimist despair or universal science in which man is in some sense identified with God—final nescience _versus_ final omniscience—ultimate and universal problem of existence taking the place of a Reid’s science of human mind—represent the unending struggle between sceptical distrust of the Universal Power, ignorantly worshipped, and reasonable ethical faith in the Universal Power, with consequent hope for men. It is in Scotland a new form of the war with David Hume to which Reid’s life was given. It has been going on since Socrates argued with the Sophists at Athens, and since Job justified the morality of Providence among the Eastern emirs. The eighteenth-century question, ‘What is Matter?’ has risen in the nineteenth to the question, ‘What is God?’ The inspired Common Sense or Common Reason of Reid seems to be sublimated in universally necessitating dialectical Reason, in this Scoto-German way of resisting the agnostic. To fill the place of the ‘unknown and unknowable God’ of the Hamiltonian emphasis, human knowledge appears identified and co-extensive with the Divine, in an absolute idealism, presumed to be the only adequate refutation of all subverting doubt. The ‘_raison impuissante_,’ sustained by and culminating in ‘_la nature_,’ or inspired common sense, is exchanged for what looks like a pantheistic necessity that leaves no room for moral agency in man or God, and which scorns the incomplete knowledge that cannot dispense with a faith venture at its root.