Kant, the most illustrious opponent of Hume, in allusion to those who have appealed against him to our religious feelings, asks, what the man is doing that we should meddle with him; says he is but trying the strength of human reason, and bids us leave him to combat with those who are giving him specimens of the fabric on which to try his skill--tells us to wait and see who will produce one too strong to be broken to pieces--and not cry treason, and appeal to the angry multitude, who are strangers to these refined reasonings, to rush in. Shall we ask reason to give us lights, and prescribe beforehand what they are to show us?[88:1] "The observation of human blindness and weakness," says Hume himself, "is the result of all philosophy, and meets us at every turn, in spite of our endeavours to elude or avoid it." A solemn saying, and characteristic of one who has done more than any other man to show the feebleness of poor human reason, and to teach man that he is not all sufficient to himself. Those revelations in astronomy and geology, the first glimmerings of which made the timid if not doubting friends of their cause tremble, have enlarged year by year in rapid progression; but revealed religion is not less firm on her throne; and many of those who held that Hume's theory of Cause and Effect was inimical to revelation, lived to see how startlingly that argument could be turned against themselves. It has been well observed by Dugald Stewart, that this theory is the most effectual confutation of the gloomy materialism of Spinoza, "as it lays the axe to the very root from which Spinozism springs." "The cardinal principle," he says, "on which the whole of that system turns is, that all events, physical and moral, are _necessarily_ linked together as causes and effects; from which principle all the most alarming conclusions adopted by Spinoza follow as unavoidable and manifest corollaries. But if it be true, as Mr. Hume contends, and as most philosophers now admit, that physical causes and effects are known to us merely as _antecedents_ and _consequents_; still more if it be true that the word _necessity_, as employed in this discussion, is altogether unmeaning and insignificant, the whole system of Spinoza is nothing better than a rope of sand, and the very proposition which it professes to demonstrate is incomprehensible by our faculties."[89:1]