The report was accepted and the Committee discharged. The Committee on Nominations reported through their chairman, Rev. Dr. Morrow. Their report was accepted, the Committee discharged, and Mr. Joseph A. Hallock, of Newark, N. J., was directed by a vote of the Institute to cast a ballot for officers. The following officers were elected: President: Charles F. Deems, D.D., LL.D. Vice-Presidents: Connecticut, Noah Porter, D.D., LL.D. Delaware, Hon. Thomas F. Bayard, Secretary of State, U. S. Illinois, Rev. Bishop Charles E. Cheney, LL.D. Kentucky, Ormund Beatty, LL.D. Maine, Wm. DeWitt Hyde, D.D. Maryland, Edward J. Drinkhouse, M.D., D.D. Mississippi, Rt. Rev. Wm. M. Green, D.D., LL.D. New York, Ransom B. Welch, D.D., LL.D. Ohio, Rt. Rev. Gregory T. Bedell, D.D. Pennsylvania, William C. Cattell, D.D., LL.D. South Carolina, Gilbert R. Brackett, D.D. Tennessee, Rev. Bishop Holland N. McTyeire, D.D. Vermont, Rev. Samuel W. Dike, A.B. Virginia, Gen. G. W. Custis Lee. Wisconsin, John Bascom, D.D., LL.D. Trustees: Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Mr. William O. McDowell, Gen. Clinton B. Fisk, Mr. Owen O. Schimmel, Mr. John H. Osborne. Secretary Mr. Charles M. Davis, 4 Winthrop Place, New York. On motion of Hon. A. B. Conger, it was Resolved, That the sincerest acknowledgments of the Institute, be and the same are hereby gratefully tendered to the ladies, its members and friends who have given so uniformly their presence at its meetings, and especially to those who have graced its tented hall with floral decorations of such exquisite taste. On motion by Prof. Ransom B. Welch, seconded by the Secretary, the following resolutions in memory of Sylvester Willard, M.D., who died at Auburn, N. Y., Friday, March 12th, 1886, were passed unanimously by a rising vote of the members: Resolved, That the American Institute of Christian Philosophy has heard, with profound sadness and regret, the news of the decease, since our last anniversary, of Sylvester Willard, M.D., of Auburn, N. Y., a member of the Board of Trustees. Resolved, That as an Institute of Christian Philosophy, we would recognize the noble Christian character of this honored. officer, and his loyal devotion and generosity toward the Institute. Resolved, That this memorial of sincere respect for our deceased Trustee be duly placed on the records of the American Institute of Christian Philosophy; and that an official copy thereof be transmitted to the family of the deceased as a token of our sympathy and regard. The Rev. Dr. Howard Henderson announced the death on the 17th of August, of James W. Dodd, LL.D., late Professor in Vanderbilt University, and a member of the Institute. Eulogistic remarks on the character and the attainments of the deceased were made by Dr. Henderson and the President. On Thursday, August 26th, the last day of the Summer School, the devotional exercises were led by the President, Dr. Deems. The regular paper of the day was by Rev. James W. Lee, of Atlanta, Georgia, whose subject was, "The Conservation of Spiritual Force." After religious exercises appropriate to the occasion and conducted by the President, the school adjourned. "ABOUT BOOKS."-In type, notices of "Our Country," Dr. Leighton's "Gospel Commended to Common Sense," "Royal Gallery of Poetry and Art," Jevon's "History of Greek Literature," etc. They are crowded over to next number. CHRISTIAN THOUGHT. THE ORIGIN OF MORAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEAS, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO MODERN AGNOSTICISM AND IDEALISM. [A Lecture delivered before the American Institute of Christian Philosophy, 19th August, 1886.] BY REV. W. D. WILSON, D.D., LL.D., Cornell University. E are met here for an earnest religious purpose. It is no less than the presentation of Christian Thought, and a vindication of the ground on which we profess to hold it, with special reference to the Metaphysical Questions of the day. It is my misfortune that my subject is not one that can be made interesting to the mass of mankind. They do not study Philosophy. But, nevertheless, they gladly avail themselves of the assumptions and the sayings of men who claim to be regarded as philosophers, as a justification for pursuing the course that their tastes, their interests, their inclinations-or perhaps even their lust and grosser feelings, incline them to follow. We cannot, of course, hope to reach such persons by any discussions of the questions of Philosophy that we have here. But we must meet these questions somewhere. We must stop the current from which they flow, if we can; and although the subject cannot be made popular or widely interesting, nevertheless it must be treated by somebody; and it may perhaps be done as well by one who cannot very satisfactorily do anything else. In this discussion, we use language that we have derived from the common theory of Knowledge, which regards knowledge as a collective whole, made up of ideas of things, just as the universe is a whole made up of the things themselves. The ideas are considered as being in the mind, and as representing there, not only all the objects that exist in nature, so far as we have cognized them, or thought of them, but also the endless creations of fancy-factitious ideas of Descartes, "that may have occupied our thoughts." Now, just as the objects in the material Universe-innumerable and endless in variety as they are-are, nevertheless, made up of a very few elements, some sixty-four or five, I believe, so those ideas of things which are supposed to be in the mind, are really made up of comparatively few elements. Thus "whiteness" is one such element; "hardness" is another. But whiteness and hardness are properties of innumerable objects about us, as common as properties of objects, as oxygen, iron, sulphur and hydrogen are as chemical elements. And the same, with proper modifications, may be said of all the elementary ideas of which the complex ideas of things are composed. The origin, nature, and extent of human knowledge, have been the subject of inquiry and interest ever since the beginnings of human speculation. In the fourth century B.C. Plato proposed his famous theory of knowledge, as consisting of ideas in the mind, put there by the Creator of man before his birth into this world. In 1641 Descartes began a new era in speculative Philosophy. He thought that a part of our ideas are derived by cognition from the objects in the external world. And in 1690 Locke published his "Essay on Human Understanding" in which he denied the reality of innate ideas altogether, and taught that all the elements or "matter" of them are derived by experience or actual cognition; a part of them by senseperception from material objects around us; the other part by consciousness, or as he called it, "the perception of the operations of our own mind within us." To the first source he ascribed such ideas as those we have of "yellow, white, heat, cold, hard, bitter, sweet, and all other things which we call sensible qualities." And to the latter source he assigned such ideas as we have of "perception, thinking, doubting, believing, knowing, willing, and all the different actings of our minds." (Essay B. II., chap. i., §§ 2-6.) Here are clearly two classes or categories of ideas—the one representing material objects, and the other representing mind and spiritual objects. But the fundamental principle underlying the whole is that we have no elementary ideas, and can get no ideas, except by actual cognition of the substantial object or reality, whether mind or body, whose properties are actually represented by those ideas. Locke himself, though very confident in asserting his theory, does not seem to have very fully seen and appreciated its scope, and, like most of his followers, he omitted or rather neglected to make full use of the class of ideas derived by consciousness from the mind itself. But I think that Locke was right; and I think, too, that if he had seen its full scope and all the consequences of his fundamental principles, and had made the use of them which his undertaking called for, or for which, at least, it afforded an opportunity, the course of speculation in modern Europe, from that time onward, would have been entirely different from what it has been. We should not have had the "idealism" of Berkeley, the "scepticism" of Hume or the "agnosticism" of our modern scientists. In Germany, too, Philosophy would have taken quite a different course. Kant would have seen no reason to deny our knowledge of "things in themselves," nor would he have seen "antinomies" and contradictions underlying all our knowledge. Fichte would have seen no reason to doubt the substantial existence of things, and the world would never have seen the vexatious paradoxes of Hegel or the sickening pessimism of Schopenhauer. The agnostics thus neglect, as Locke himself had done, or fail to recognize and use the elementary ideas of Locke's second class. And they sometimes ignore, and sometimes accept, his fundamental position that all our ideas of each class are obtained by cognition-one or the other as it pleases them-for they are fond of using Kant's doctrine that we know phenomena only and not reality at all. The idealists neglect his fundamental principle altogether. Hence they fail to see any resemblance between ideas and external objects or any certainty of the reality of external |