It may be true that the essential nature and omniscient knowledge of God is the ultimate and eternal standard of truth and certainty, or, in the words of Fenelon, that "il n'y a qu'une seule verite, et qu'une seule maniere de bien juger, qui est, de juger comme Dieu meme;"[237] and yet it may not be true that all our knowledge is derived by deduction from our idea of God, or that its entire certainty is dependent on our religious belief.

Surely we may be certainly assured of the facts of consciousness, of the phenomena of Nature, and of many truths, both necessary and contingent, before we have made any attempt to explain the _rationale_ of our knowledge, or to connect it with the idea of the great First Cause; nay, it may be, and we believe it is, by _means_ of these inferior and subordinate truths that we rise to the belief of a supreme, omniscient Mind.
Some writers seem to confound Certitude with _Infallibility,_ or at least to hold that there can be no Certitude without it.

The _impersonal reason_ of Cousin, the _common sense_ or _generic reason_ of Lamennais, and the _authoritative tradition_ of the Church, have all been severally resorted to, for the purpose of obtaining a ground of Certitude in the matters both of Philosophy and Faith, such as is supposed to be unattainable by the exercise of our own proper faculties, or by the most careful study of evidence.

According to these theories, Certitude belongs to our knowledge, only because that knowledge is derived from a reason superior to our own,--a reason not personal, but universal; not individual, but generic.

When they are applied, as they have been, to undermine the authority of private judgment, and to supersede the exercise of free inquiry; when they are urged as a reason why we should defer to the authority of the Race in matters of Philosophy and to the authority of the Church in matters of Faith; when we are told that the certainty of our own existence depends on our knowledge of God, and that our knowledge of God depends on the _common consent_ or _invariable traditions_ of mankind,--we do feel that the grounds of Certitude, so far from being strengthened, are sapped and weakened by such speculations, and that we have here a new and most unexpected application of the Scottish doctrine of Common Sense, such as may be highly serviceable to the Church of Rome.