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same field. We have given the imagination a work to it impossible and preposterous. Why are there these excursions of fancy into impracticable regions? Because overlooking the direct, intuitive grasp of the mind, and still haunted by the notion of the infinite, we put spurs to the steeds of the imagination to see if we may not in this way overtake it. The sober, plodding judgment turns aside from the thinkable to the unthinkable, in hunt of a ghostly conception which is real enough to bewilder the eye with strange appearances, but too unsubstantial to be grasped and handled in physical fashion. To pursue spirits or flee from spirits on horseback is of little avail, though, with man's belief in the spiritual world, the nature of the pursuit and its philosophy are sufficiently plain to the quiet looker-on.

A most fatal failure of this theory is to explain why we uniformly and certainly accept infinite space which has no advantage to the mind over the supposition of finite space. This embarrassment at once disappears, if we suppose the notion a positive one, provided by the mind to be placed in explanation and comprehension over against the finite. The theory of Hamilton succeeds in eliciting the perplexities of the subject, but brings to them no solution.

But it will be said, the intuitive theory has its own and yet more fatal difficulties. How can the infinite be a positive idea? Very easily, if we assign it to the right faculty, and make it simple and ultimate; as easily and intelligibly as red is red, or sweet, sweet. In neither case can we go beyond the ultimate fact, and we have fortunately learned in the more familiar instance to give up the effort. This objection may come in the form of a second theory of the infinite, to wit, that the notion is a negative not a positive one, involving a denial merely and not an affirmation. That the word is negative in form is a fact of no significance; so are inhuman and indecent. If the word infinite