sympathy with man. Mr. Spencer meets the objection in advance in his "First Principles." "Those who espouse this alternative position," he says, "make the erroneous assumption that the choice is between personality and something lower than personality; whereas the choice is rather between personality and something higher. Is it not just possible there is a mode of being as much transcending Intelligence and Will as these transcend mechanical motion? It is true that we are totally unable to conceive any such higher mode of being. But this is not a reason for questioning its existence; it is rather the reverse. Have we not seen how utterly incompetent our minds are to form even an approach to a conception of that which underlies all phenomena? Is it not proved that this incompetency is the incompetency of the Conditioned to grasp the Unconditioned? Does it not follow that the Ultimate Cause can not in any respect be conceived by us because it is in every respect greater than can be conceived?"
Energy is a word that has a bad sound to many ears. We apprehend in it the idea of brute, of material force. Here, again, Mr. Spencer is able to tell us that we let ourselves be carried away by the analogy of muscular effort. But all the languages of civilized peoples permit us to rise above this literal acceptation, and to interpret the term in a larger sense, as implying mental and moral activities. If the Universe, with its laws and harmonies, if man with his capacities and aspirations, proceed from the same Energy, it must be that that Energy contains in puissance whatever in our eyes goes to constitute the grandeur of Nature and the glory of the human mind. Further, as it should likewise include the germ of all its future, or even possible developments, it must necessarily represent a cause superior to all its known effects—that is, to the finest and highest manifestations of that which we regard as the rational order of things.
Mr. Harrison finally declares that the Unknowable can never have temples, rites, or ministers. We will not inquire here to what point these are indispensable elements of religion. The ascetic school of India, a fruit of the reaction against the excessive ritualism of the Brahmans, has always dispensed with external worship. We can easily conceive the religions of Mohammed and Confucius as without mosques or pagodas. Buddhism probably had convents long before it built temples. At Rome itself, seventeen centuries ago, there flourished a sect already numerous, whose partisans and adversaries agreed in saying that it had neither temples nor altars nor images.[1] So it was regarded as atheistical. It must be acknowledged that the sect has acquitted itself well since then. In any case, the affirmation of the Comtist writer is already contradicted by the facts. Not only have we Protestant theologians, more or less orthodox, who are endeavoring to reconcile the doctrine of evolution with faith in the Christian revelation, but we can point to liberal and even Unitarian congregations
- ↑ Minutius Felix, Octav, pp. 10, 32.
