Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/505

480 that activity remains as before the proper object of a moral judgment. Only now we see that the highest form of our activity is likely to be the one most conforming to the truth. What remains true of the scientific postulates, remains true of the religious postulates. They are not superseded. For what they can still do for us is to insist that our idea of the Infinite shall not remain a cold, barren abstraction, but that we shall appeal to our experience for evidence of what is truly highest and best, and that we shall then say: “The highest conceptions that I get from experience of what goodness and beauty are, the noblest life that I can imagine, the completest blessedness that I can think of, all these things are but faint suggestions of a truth that is infinitely realized in the Divine, that knows all truth. Whatever perfection there is suggested in these things, that He must fully know and experience.” Therefore the religious postulates can accompany us everywhere, making all our experience appear to us as an ever-fresh lesson concerning the mind of God.

The postulates, then, we retain, with the insight. We abandon, however, the use of these postulates to demonstrate further special articles of faith as to supernatural powers or events of any sort. We know of no miracle save the Infinite himself. And so we have no interest in many of the forms of popular idealism. To prove that this world is the home of a Spiritual Life, many good people have been and are concerned to prove that certain phenomena which we see about us are in and of themselves direct evidences of the spiritual nature of things. To such