Note 25 — FIVE POINTS OF CHRISTIAN FAITH.

Perhaps we should rather say, "they cannot be alien to our nature." The word personality is used by philosophical writers to denote that which is peculiar, as well as essential, to our individual self. In this strict sense the moral and spiritual affections are impersonal, according to the doctrine of the context, which treats them as constituting a participation in the Divine nature. The metaphysical reader will perhaps perceive here a resemblance to the theory of Victor Cousin, who maintains that the will—the free and voluntary activity—of the human being is the specific faculty in which alone consists his personality; and that the intuitive reason by which we have knowledge of the unlimited and absolute Cause, as well as of ourselves and the universe as related effects, is independent and impersonal,—a faculty not peculiar to the subject, but "from the bosom of consciousness extending to the Infinite, and reaching to the Being of beings." "Reason," observes this philosopher, "is intimately connected with personality and sensibility, but it is neither the one nor the other: and precisely because it is neither the one nor the other, because it is in us without being ourselves, does it reveal to us that which is not ourselves,—objects beside the subject itself, and which lie beyond its sphere." At the opposite pole to this doctrine, which makes the perceptions of "Reason" a part of the activity of God, lies the system of Kant and Fichte, which represents God as an ideal formation,—it may be, therefore, a fiction,—arising from the activity of the "Reason." This faculty is treated by these German philosophers as merely subjective and personal; its perceptions, even when they seem to go beyond itself, are known only as internal conditions and results of self-activity; its beliefs, though inevitable to itself, are simply relative, and have no objective validity. The faiths and affections which this system regards as purely human, are considered by the other as divine. The doctrine maintained above, though resembling that of Kant in one or two of its phrases, far more nearly approaches that of Cousin in its spirit. It is scarcely necessary to observe that, in this note, the word "Reason" is used, not as equivalent to "Understanding," but in the German sense so long rendered familiar to the English reader by the writings of Mr. Coleridge. It includes, therefore, (in its two senses of "Speculative" and "Practical,") the "Moral Perceptions" and "Primitive Faiths of the Conscience," spoken of in the text.