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Rh he emphasizes the mental activity of discrimination and judgment. At the same time, our knowledge is wholly relative, and cannot attain the unrelated; the Absolute is, therefore, inaccessible to our knowledge, and can be reached only by faith. Masson says of him that, "when affirming some cardinal belief from the logical demonstration of which he was precluded by his metaphysical Agnosticism, he was wont to say: If this is not so, God is a deceiver, and the root of our being a lie." Mansel attracted the suspicious attention of his clerical brethren by his advocacy of the relativity of our knowledge and our utter incompetency to reach the Unconditioned intellectually; at the same time, he incurred a severe attack from Mill for combining with this frank intellectual Agnosticism the elaborate Christian description of the Deity. Thus it is rather among Protestant divines than in the Roman Catholic Church (contrary to a very wide impression) that we meet the opposition of faith and reason. Catholic philosophers entirely condemn the criterion of the Scotch school. Hamiltonianism was also vigorously attacked by Ferrier, who takes an Idealistic standpoint. Dr. J. Martineau and a few other isolated thinkers have endeavoured to support Theistic positions on the more traditional arguments; but the majority of orthodox philosophers have either adopted some form of Hamiltonianism, or have accepted the teaching of Kant or Hegel. In the second half of the century the struggle lies chiefly between Spencerism and Kantism or Hegelianism (or a combination of the two), hence something must be said of the German philosophy.

To describe the series of philosophical systems which were put forward in Germany from Kant to Von Hartmann and Feuerbach would be a long and fruitless task. Kant was aroused, by Hume's idea of causality, to a train of thought which took form in the famous "Critique of Pure Reason" in 1781, and the "Critique of Practical Reason" in 1788. The empirical school had rejected the time-honoured distinction between sense and intellect. Kant, founding the transcendental school, retained it, and contended for an a priori element in thought, and even in sensibility. Time and space he thought to be structural habits or forms of the inner and outer sense. The categories, the notions of existence and non-existence, unity,