original ideas are here presented.  Indeed, I suppose it would nowadays be impossible to present any idea touching religion, which has not at some time or another been presented previously.  Still much may be done in the furthering of one’s thought by changing points of view, selecting and arranging ideas already more or less familiar, so that they may be built into new combinations; and this, I think, I have in no small degree accomplished as regards the microcosm of my own mind.  But I state this much only for the sake of adding a confession that, as far as introspection can carry one, it does not appear to me that the modifications which my views have undergone since the publication of my previous Candid Examination are due so much to purely logical processes of the intellect, as to the sub-conscious (and therefore more or less unanalyzable) influences due to the ripening experience of life.  The extent to which this is true [i.e. the extent to which experience modifies logic][36] is seldom, if ever, realized, although it is practically exemplified every day by the sobering caution which advancing age exercises upon the mind.  Not so much by any above-board play of syllogism as by some underhand cheating of consciousness, do the accumulating experiences of life and of thought slowly enrich the judgement.  And this, one need hardly say, is especially true in such regions of thought as present the most tenuous media for the progress of thought by the comparatively clumsy means of syllogistic locomotion.  For the further we ascend from the solid ground of verification, the less confidence should we place in our wings of speculation, while the more do we find the practical wisdom of such intellectual caution, or distrust of ratiocination, as can be given only by experience.  Therefore, most of all is this the case in those departments of thought which are furthest from the region of our sensuous life—­viz. metaphysics and religion.  And, as a matter of fact, it is just in these departments of thought that we find the rashness of youth most amenable to the discipline in question by the experience of age.

However, in spite of this confession, I have no doubt that even in the matter of pure and conscious reason further thought has enabled me to detect serious errors, or rather oversights, in the very foundations of my Candid Examination of Theism.  I still think, indeed, that from the premises there laid down the conclusions result in due logical sequence, so that, as a matter of mere ratiocination, I am not likely ever to detect any serious flaws, especially as this has not been done by anybody else during the many years of its existence.  But I now clearly perceive two wellnigh fatal oversights which I then committed.  The first was undue confidence in merely syllogistic conclusions, even when derived from sound premises, in regions of such high abstraction.  The second was, in not being sufficiently careful in examining the foundations of my criticism, i.e. the validity of its premises.  I will here briefly consider these two points separately.