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write were to be frankly told at the outset what manner of man I am. Let that consideration, dubious though it be, outweigh every other.
My father was known as the leading American mathematician of his day; and as a child I had ample opportunities for a child's observation for of a great many distinguished persons of various kinds, and saw remarkably few commonplace people. It must have been in 1851, when I should have been twelve years old, that I remember
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picking up Whateley's Logic in my elder brother's room, and asking him what logic was. I next see myself stretched on his carpet, devouring the book; and subsequent tests showed that I must, in those days have mastered it. I have, ever since, had a strong passion for logic, although my training was particularly in the direction of mathematics, physics, and chemistry. In 1887, when I had attained a standing among American scientific men sufficient to satisfy a man of very little ambition, I retired to the wildest
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county of the Northern States, south of the Adirondacks and east of the Alleghenies, where I might have the least distraction from the study of logic.
How successful my studies have been is [a] question to be decided by my readers, as the court of final appeal.
From the time when I first began, as a boy, until now, to reflect upon the question of the being of God,—meaning by God, not some god, but that God in whom religious people of all creeds believe in proportion as they are truly religious,—it has
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always seemed to me reasonable to suppose that, if He really is, there must be some good reason for believing so, otherwise than on authority of any kind, which should appeal to the lowliest mind; and whether this be good reasoning or not, I am inclined to think that the majority of those humble minds who have become persuaded by reason, and in contradistinction to the weight of others' belief, that God is real, together with a large part of superior minds have, in fact, been so persuaded by the
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I am to describe. Yet this argument has seldom been much insisted upon by theologians for the reason that, persuasive as it is, it has not seemed to them to be logical. This I conceive has been due to a false theory of logic; and consequently the main substance of the present paper must be a brief abstract of a defence of a theory of logic according to which the theological argument in question is as logically sound as it certainly is persuasive.