Of course I do not mean to say that, even to a pure agnostic, reason should not be guided in part by antecedent presumption--e.g. in ordinary life, the _prima facie_ case, motive, &c., counts for evidence in a court of law--and where there is a strong antecedent improbability a proportionately greater weight of evidence _a posteriori_ is needed to counterbalance it: so that, e.g. better evidence would be needed to convict the Archbishop of Canterbury than a vagabond of pocket-picking. And so it is with speculative philosophy. But in both cases our only guide is known analogy; therefore, the further we are removed from possible experience--i.e. the more remote from experience the sphere contemplated--the less value attaches to antecedent presumptions[43]. _Maximum_ remoteness from possible experience is reached in the sphere of the final mystery of things with which religion has to do; so that here all presumption has faded away into a vanishing point, and pure agnosticism is our only rational attitude. In other words, here we should all alike be pure agnostics as far as reason is concerned; and, if any of us are to attain to any information, it can only be by means of some super-added faculty of our minds. The questions as to whether there are any such super-added faculties; if so, whether they ever appear to have been acted upon from without; if they have, in what manner they have; what is their report; how far they are trustworthy in that report, and so on--these are the questions with which this treatise is to be mainly concerned. My own attitude may be here stated. I do not claim any [religious] certainty of an intuitive kind myself; but am nevertheless able to investigate the abstract logic of the matter. And, although this may seem but barren dialectic, it may, I hope, be of practical service if it secures a fair hearing to the reports given by the vast majority of mankind who unquestionably believe them to emanate from some such super-added faculties--numerous and diverse though their religions be. Besides, in my youth I published an essay (the _Candid Examination_) which excited a good deal of interest at the time, and has been long out of print. In that treatise I have since come to see that I was wrong touching what I constituted the basal argument for my negative conclusion. Therefore I now feel it obligatory on me to publish the following results of my maturer thought, from the same stand-point of pure reason. Even though I have obtained no further light from the side of intuition, I have from that of intellect. So that, if there be in truth any such intuition, I occupy with regard to the organ of it the same position as that of the blind lecturer on optics. But on this very account I cannot be accused of partiality towards it.