It will be sufficient for our purpose if we merely sketch a comprehensive outline of the subject, and select some of the more prominent points which have the most direct bearing on the grounds of our religious belief.

Thus much may be accomplished by considering, _first_, the statement of the problem, and, _secondly_, the solution of it.
In regard to the _statement_ of the problem, it is necessary, in the first instance, to ascertain its precise import, by determining the meaning of the term Certitude.

The programme of the Academy very properly places this question on the foreground, Is Certitude the same with the highest probability?
And it is the more necessary to give precedence to this part of the inquiry, because it is notorious that there is a wide difference between the philosophical and the popular sense of Certitude,--a difference which has often occasioned mutual misunderstanding between disputants, and a profitless warfare of words.
In the philosophical sense of the term, that only is said to be _certain_ which is either an axiomatic truth, intuitively discerned, or a demonstrated truth, derived from the former by rigorous deduction; while all that part of our knowledge which is gathered from experience and observation, however credible in itself and however surely believed, is characterized as _probable_ only.

In the popular sense of the term, Certitude belongs to all those truths, of whatever kind and in whatever way acquired, in regard to which we have no reason to be in doubt or suspense, and which rest on sufficient and satisfactory evidence.

A philosopher is _certain_, in his sense of the term, only of what he intuitively perceives or can logically demonstrate; a peasant is _certain_, in his sense of the term, of whatever he distinctly sees, or clearly remembers, or receives on authentic testimony.