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it can not be made the subject of judgments, at least, of those which limit it under finite analogies. And why should we expect it to be? Do we not antecedently see and say, that this process must be destructive to the very nature of the notion? Why then proceed to allege the fact against it? We can do this rationally only by involving the assertion, that the judgment and imagination are our exclusive faculties of knowledge; and this begs the question at issue. To reject the reason because it does not do the very superfluous work of giving an idea capable, by likeness and relation, of falling into the list of previous ideas, is to misunderstand the object of the faculty, or to assume that its existence is impossible. We might as well object to the validity of our knowledge of an odor, because it is not thinkable, or, forsooth, conceivable under color or sound. In this sense, then, we admit the infinite is not thinkable; but all thinking is not under limitations and conditions. Sometimes it is quite the reverse. To say that God is infinite is to deny conditions of Him. To say that The Infinite is, that He is free, that He is holy, is not to condition, to limit God, rather the reverse. The fact that we cannot go farther, and conceive the acts in and by which His liberty and holiness express themselves, except under a finite form, does not destroy the meaning or significance of the antecedent assertion, it merely presents another case of a familiar difficulty, that of getting from one province of knowledge to another. Different tracts of cognition do not lie together, like the provinces of one empire, the transition one of movement only.

Here springs up another modification of this theory, that of Herbert Spencer. He regards the notion of the infinite as of an illusory character, shown by the very fact that every effort to give proportion and definiteness to it, baffles us, and results in driving it into more remote regions.