Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/146

Rh — and it is I who am the authority, and the only direct authority, for the connexion put between the reality of the ignorance or of the fallacious experience on the one hand and the reality of the implicated omniscience on the other. We can perhaps see the case more clearly as it is, if we notice that the argument is cast in the form of a conditional syllogism, and runs in this wise: If my ignorance is real, then Omniscience is real: but my ignorance assuredly is real; and, therefore, so also is Omniscience. Now we ask: Who is the authority for the truth of the hypothetical major premise, and who is the authority for the truth of the categorical minor? Who conjoins, in that clutch of adamant, the reality of the ignorance with the reality of the omniscience? And whose omniscience makes the assertion valid that my ignorance is real? Is it not plain that I, who am convincing myself by that syllogism, am the sole authority for both the premises? Though there were a myriad other omnisciences, they were of no avail to me, in the lone inward struggle to my own conviction through that argumentative form, unless they interpenetrated my judgment, and so became literally mine; or, if you prefer, unless my judgment vanished upward and was annulled into that Infinite Judgment. In using either premise as proof of the conclusion, and a fortiori in using both, I implicate myself in actual omniscience; I am verily guilty of that effrontery, if effrontery it really be. So must the great argument of this evening be read, it seems to me, or else it must mean nothing. In short, it is the introversive act of a reasoning being, discovering the real infinity