While one of John Henry Newman's principal aims in the Grammar of Assent is to explain how men can give a ‘real assent’ to the existence of God, the major part of the actual phenomenology of religious belief in the work is concentrated in the fifth of its ten chapters. Unfortunately, this section of the essay has been overshadowed by the preliminary distinction between real and notional apprehension and by the later invocation of the illative sense; but perhaps the time is now ripe for a closer examination of this central part of Newman's philosophy of religion, which is in many ways the key to the successes and failures of Newman's new method in philosophical theology.

Miquel de Unamuno, a thinker perhaps too large and passionate to yield to easy labelling, has been characterised in different ways by many of his most brilliant compatriots. Julian Marias spoke of him as a man obsessed by the proud thirst to know, a passionate man who in spite of a ‘problematic intellectual adherence’ was nonetheless able to live and think within a vital Catholic tradition. Ortega y Gasset wrote that all of Unamuno's work was dominated by one theme, that of death; it was one monumental meditatio mortis. It was Madariaga, not an original philosopher but undoubtedly as penetrating a critic as either Marias or Ortega, however, who most faithfully portrayed the often convoluted but always profound man Unamuno was. In most if not all of the main characters of his novels and short stories, he rightly observes, ‘we can trace the dominant passion which is their whole being to a mere variety of the one and only passion which obsesses Unamuno, the hunger for life, a full life, here and after’. This passion, assailed as it was by the constant probings of his critical intellect ought to have made his existence precarious at best.

Hegel's treatment of the Sublime is both self-consistent and distinctive. He not only defines sublimity, but discovers and ranks its types or stages from one select point of view—the viewpoint of God-world relation; and the way he does this, on the one hand, distinguishes him from many others who have contributed to an understanding of the concept, and, on the other hand, enables him to suggest, if but implicitly, a criterion for distinguishing the sublime from allied concepts. Besides, he discusses the matter in the wide context of diverse cultures, making quite a few insightful references to Eastern literature; and, consistently with his own conception of philosophy, also from the viewpoint of historical necessity, so that the sublime appears, in his Aesthetik, as a specific stage which the evolving story of art must in fact traverse.

Appeal to experience for rational justification of religious belief is probably as old as the question whether religious belief has any rational support. The issues relevant to such appeal range widely, and I will have to be content to deal with only a few of them.

Kaufman's God The Problem is a stimulating and important book in so far as it raises for us the problem ‘God’ has become for modern theology (theologians, believers, etc.). In its attempt to bring clarity and precision to our understanding of ‘God’ however, I am much less sure as to its value. Indeed, it seems to me that Kaufman more often confuses the issues than clarifying them—although he does so in a very stimulating manner. The inconsistencies in his argument and the tensions between earlier and later pieces of work are more than trivial as Kaufman suggests in the preface (xi). For example, in his discussion of ‘God as symbol’ he claims that it is possible to conceive God as living and active, one to whom men can pray with conviction and to whom they can cry in their hour of need (113 f). Yet in his discussion of the meaning of ‘act of God’ he denies the same. As he puts it in the latter essay, God is not one who,

‘“walks with me and talks with me” in close interpersonal communion, giving his full attention to my complaints, miraculously extracting me from difficulties into which I have gotten myself, by invading nature and history with ad hoc rescue operations from on high.’ (196)

The next contrast, like that between grammatical beliefs and non-grammatical beliefs, has to do with what is believed. My labels for the contrast may be misleading, but I have not found better ones. Some beliefs are ‘existential’, others are ‘non-existential’. You will be misled if the labels suggest my earlier contrasts between intentional and non-intentional or attitudinal and non-attitudinal, or the contrast often made between what exists and what is non-existent. The existential/non-existential contrast is a contrast made in terms of conditions of understanding. By an ‘existential’ belief I mean a belief where what is believed can only be understood to the extent that one has fulfilled certain existential conditions—that is, conditions which existentialist philosophers emphasise, conditions having to do with the personal depth and authenticity of one's commitments, attitudes and general life-experience. A non-existential belief is one which has no such conditions for understanding (though it is often a belief concerning what exists).

In ‘The Turning Point in Philosophy’ Moritz Schlick expressed the following view: ‘Everything is knowable which can be expressed, and this is the total subject matter concerning which meaningful questions can be raised. There are consequently no questions which are in principle unanswerable, no problems which are in principle insoluble.’ (page 56 in Logical Positivism edited by A. J. Ayer.) I will refer to this as Schlick's principle, although it is shared by many others. What it amounts to is the view that all meaningful questions can be answered by rational procedures, that is by logical argument or appeal to evidence. It is this view which I wish to challenge, at the same time relating what I have to say to belief in God. For it follows from Schlick's principle that provided the question ‘Does God exist?’ can be meaningfully asked, it is in principle possible to answer it either affirmatively or negatively. Having done so, we would then know, and not merely believe, that God does or does not exist. I will try to show that provided the question ‘Does God exist?’ can be meaningfully asked, no such consequence need be taken to follow.

The purpose of the present paper is to formulate and (hopefully) resolve a certain puzzle surrounding God's existence and the standard attributes traditionally assigned to God (omnipotence, perfect goodness, omniscience, and the like).

Mircea Eliade's book Yoga: Immortality and Freedom has deservedly become a classic, and has reached, as he intended, a far wider audience than the narrow circle of Indologists. The book's popularity may justify the following remarks. It was originally published in French in 1936, then in an enlarged French version in 1954, and in English translation in 1958. There has thus been ample opportunity for revision, and indeed in the second English edition (1969), which we are taking as our text, Eliade notes (p. xi) that he has made ‘numerous minor corrections’. However, the accuracy of his observations on early Buddhism still leaves much to be desired. Let us try to set the record straight.