Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/352

 arrange under categories. Here the stages of intellectual advance and the methods of life are of very many kinds, and the needs felt are very various. The highest need of the human spirit, however, is thought—the witness of the Spirit, which is not present only in the merely responsive form of a kind of primary sympathy, nor in that other form according to which such firm foundations and fundamental principles do exist in the spirit, and have reflective thought built upon them, firmly based presuppositions from which conclusions can be drawn and deductions made.

The witness of the Spirit in its highest form takes the form of philosophy, according to which the Notion, purely as such, and without the presence of any presupposition, develops the truth out of itself, and we recognise it as developing, and perceive the necessity of the development in and through the development itself.

Belief has often been opposed to Thought in such a way as to imply that we can have no true conviction regarding God and the truths of religion by any other method than that of Thought, and thus the proofs of the existence of God have been pointed to as supplying the only method by which we can know and be convinced of the truth.

The witness of the Spirit may, however, be present in manifold and various ways; we have no right to demand that the truth should in the case of all men be got at in a philosophical way. The spiritual necessities of men vary according to their culture and free development; and so, too, the demand, the conviction that we should believe on authority, varies according to the different stages of development reached.

Even miracles have their place here, and it is interesting to observe that they have been reduced down to this minimum. There is thus still something positive present in this form of the witness of the Spirit as well. Sympathy, which is immediate certainty, is itself