certain lines of conduct as moral; on the other hand, we have the consciousness of our connection with a society from which our life derives half its happiness, the knowledge that each immoral act and habit tends to undermine a state of society which it is our supreme interest to support and develop. A mind withdrawn from the influence of religion feels no more than this; but this covers the whole ground of the moral code, and it is all we have to explain in conscience. We need no higher legislator to classify our actions, and to impose upon us a sense of obligation to abstain from immorality.
Perhaps the most popular argument is drawn from the beauty and order and apparent purpose in the universe. In spite of the profound modification of the problem which evolution has effected, this remains the most familiar of all the proofs of the existence of God. Catholic philosophers are indeed abandoning it as a distinct proof, but preachers (who are rarely thinkers) still linger affectionately over the venerable argument, and poets and novelists with a taste for apologetics are ever putting our materialism to shame by their appeals to the glorious procession of worlds across the darkened stage of the heavens, to the thrilling panorama of earthly scenery, to the monuments of constructive wisdom in the organic worlds. But when we consign rhetoric and sentiment to their legitimate provinces we soon realize that all we can reasonably hope to discover are the efficient causes, not the final causes of the universe. It is only by postulating intelligence in the “First Cause” (after postulating the First Cause itself) that we can speak of a purpose or finality in the world-process. For when men speak of the necessity of a “controlling mind,” a “designer and ruler,” they are only substituting mystery for mystery at the best. How can we conceive matter to act in obedience to a lawgiver? It is easy and impressive to speak of the issue of an omnipotent Fiat, and the obedient movement and development that brought order out of chaos; but remember that obedience is a metaphor taken from the moral world. How can this dull, dead, inert matter we have so much depreciated carry out so faithfully the decree of its maker? How can unconscious atoms realize so sublime a conception?
There is only one conceivable meaning for the expression namely, that God implanted certain powers in matter, endowed it with certain active properties, through whose slow, inevitable action the universe was formed. If material forces do not suffice, add spiritual agencies; in the ultimate analysis you will have merely discovered that the universe is the product of certain factors, and, as far as this argument is concerned, the factors may have been themselves eternal and uncaused, or they may have been the unconscious evolution of a supreme principle in a Pantheistic sense. That they were created for the express purpose of realizing a definite plan cannot be proved à posteriori; we
