It is of a power conceived in this manner that we may well say, In illo vivimus, movemur, et sumus (in it we live, and move, and are).
The conditions indispensable to becoming the object of a religion are thus found in the Unknowable, as well as in the Eternal, the Absolute, the Self-Existent, the Most High, the Only Pure, or whatever other qualifications men may have made the equivalent of the divine. The last word of Evolution agrees with the definitions of the most refined theologists, which, transcending vulgar symbolism, have constantly recognized God in the double character of reality and incomprehensibility. We may add that, before becoming the scientific faith of Spencer, Huxley, and even of Haeckel, this religious conception has sufficed for men of the highest mind and the most pious imagination, such as Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Kant, Goethe, Shelley, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Emerson, and even M. Rénan, It can lead not to religion only, but even to mysticism, however little, like some Neoplatonists and certain Hindoo philosophers, one may become absorbed in the conception of the supreme unity.[1] Under this relation, the danger is not that it will remain without influence, but that it will communicate to its adepts a kind of vertigo more formidable than the fascination of the abyss, either by the contrast of its incommensurable grandeur with the insignificance of our being, or by the opposition of its immutable Unity with the unlimited Variety and perpetual expansion of the material Universe. These sentiments, as Mr. Spencer remarks, can only increase in frequency as well as in intensity as the human mind becomes more capable in seizing the comprehensiveness of things and their complex relations.
Certainly, it is no longer possible to attribute to that Supreme Reality goodness, consciousness, and personality, as we conceive them. But do our conceptions exhaust the modes of the infinite? Mr. Harrison will see only the negative side of the Unknowable. Whether you employ, he tells us, the term existence or energy, you never have anything but a scientific generalization, a dumb, blind, insensible entity, without common attributes, and consequently without possible
- ↑ We cite, for example, the following passage from an address made by the great mystic of the Bramo Somaj, Keshub Chunder Sen, at a time when no one accused him of having transgressed the most strict rationalism: "(For the true Yogui) forms become informal, the informal takes form. Mind discovers itself in matter, matter transforms itself into mind. In the glorious sun is revealed the glory of glories. In the serene moon mind imbibes of all serenities. In the reverberation of the thunder is the Voice of the Lord which makes itself heard afar. All things are full of Him. Open your eyes, behold he is without; shut them, he is found within. Then your asceticism (yoga), disciple, will be complete; aspire constantly to this plenitude." There is not a word in these exalted conceptions in contradiction with the religious conceptions of Mr. Spencer. Haeckel himself has said in his "Morphology": "The philosophy which sees the mind and force of God acting in all the phenomena of Nature is alone worthy of the grandeur of the Being who embraces all. . . . In him. we live, and act, and are. The philosophy of nature becomes theology." All depends on the mental angle under which the disciple of Spencer contemplates Nature, or the manifestations of the Unknowable.
