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300 With further consideration, we might come to accept some one of them again in the form, not of a demonstrable dogma, but of a practically unavoidable postulate, uncertain of course, but taken and to be taken on risk; just as every one of us goes through the world taking all sorts of risks day by day. Anything not contradictory may be a possible object of postulates ; although, again, every postulate is to be assumed only after careful criticism, and only because we cannot do better.

To do justice then to the proper office of postulates in our religious theory, we must sooner or later consider in what cases they naturally arise, what is the proper extent of their use, what is the basis upon which they can be made, in any special case, to rest; and, finally, whether, in view of all this, we can give them any important place in our religious doctrine. We confess at once that we want something much better than a postulate as the basis of our religion, in case we can get it. If postulates are to have any part in our religion, we want them to be justified by some ultimate religious certainty that is more than a postulate. We shall investigate all that in time. We shall see what we shall see. Meanwhile, what is the work of postulates in the actual daily life of human thought?

Popular belief about an external world is for the first an active assumption or acknowledgment of something: more than the data of consciousness. What is directly given in our minds is not external. All direct data are internal facts; and in the strictest sense all data are direct. Suppose a merely pas-