The effect, then, of such a clause in the Constitution would be to drive from public life all except the believers in this God, and this providence. The Government would be in fact a theocracy and would resort for its preservation to one of the old forms of religious persecution.
I took the ground in my article, and still maintain it, that all intelligent people know that no one knows whether there is a God or not. This cannot be answered by saying, "that nearly all intelligent men in every age, including our own, have believed in God and have held that they had rational grounds for such faith." This is what is called a departure in pleading—it is a shifting of the issue. I did not say that intelligent people do not believe in the existence of God. What I did say is, that intelligent people know that no one knows whether there is a God or not.
It is not true that we know the conditions of thought. Neither is it true that we know that these conditions are unconditioned. There is no such thing as the unconditioned conditional. We might as well say that the relative is unrelated—that the unrelated is the absolute—and therefore that there is no difference between the absolute and the relative.
The Bishop says we cannot know the relative without knowing the absolute. The probability is that he means that we cannot know the relative without admitting the existence of the absolute, and that we cannot know the phenomenal without taking the noumenal for granted. Still, we can neither know the absolute nor the noumenal for the reason that our mind is limited to relations.
CRIMES AGAINST CRIMINALS.
* "An Address delivered before the State Bar Association at
Albany, N. Y., January 1, 1890."
IN this brief address, the object is to suggest—there being no time to present arguments at length. The subject has been chosen for the reason that it is one that should interest the legal profession, because that profession to a certain extent controls and shapes the legislation of our country and fixes definitely the scope and meaning of all laws.
Lawyers ought to be foremost in legislative and judicial reform, and of all men they should understand the philosophy of mind, the causes of human action, and the real science of government.