This is the only ground on which it can be abolished. If it were either unknown or negative it would already be abolished, it would never have appeared. The mind cannot be harassed by things not present to it, or which it has distinctly wiped away, not by a negation, but as negations. Mr. Mansel has presented in his Limits of Religious Thought fully and in a great variety of ways, the interior contradictions of the notion of the Infinite.

He defines the First Cause, the Infinite, the Absolute,* and then proceeds. "These three conceptions, the Cause, the Absolute, the Infinite, are equally indispensable; do they not imply contradictions to each other, when viewed in conjunction as attributes of one and the same being? A cause cannot as such, be absolute; the Absolute cannot as such, be a cause. The cause as such, exists only in relation to its effect: the cause is a cause of the effect the effect is an effect of the cause. On the other hand, the conception of the Absolute implies a possible existence out of all relation. We attempt to escape from this apparent contradiction, by introducing the idea of succession in time. The Absolute exists first by itself, and afterward becomes a cause. But here we are checked by the third conception, that of the Infinite. How can the Infinite become that which it was not from the first? If causation is a possible mode of existence, that which exists without causing is not infinite; that which becomes a cause has passed beyond its former limits * * * Consciousness is only conceivable as a relation.

* Limits of Religious Thought, p. 75.