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istics as an absolute or universal experience — of no real
meaning aside from consciousness. If they are affirmed
as existing aside from consciousness they find for the
human mind no interpreting fact whatever, and the sym-
bol being lost under which experience writes down its
predications, the statements themselves as intelligible
propositions disappear with them. Nothing can be more
alien to human experience than reason which is not cog-
nizant of its own processes and conclusions, since reason
lies in this very cognition ; than knowledge which is not
known to itself, since this transparency within itself is its
essential idea. While the terms of experience do not
measure knowledge, they do furnish its necessary forms
of expression. The words of a language, as terms of
thought, have no fast limits, yet they remain none the
less the sole media of consideration and of statement.
So closely is the mind of man in its average activity
bound to this idea of personality that there is no religion,
as an extended faith among men, without it. It may be
obscured and modified, but is never wholly repressed.
If it disappears with the few it is likely to reappear in a
more prolific form with the many. To lack the notion
of personal, spiritual agents is, to the common mind, to
lack faith. TherQ may be a speculative term in religion,
as in the religion of China as derived from Confucius,
which sets aside personality in the controlling movement
of the universe, but a dogma of faith of this order will
remain a dead factor in the popular mind, provocative
only of unguided superstitions. In narrowing down
thought it may exclude other conceptions, but it can-
not have the popular force of a system of faith.
