390 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



actually existing thus or thus without committing ourselves to alterna- 

 tive absurdities ; yet questions are put implying that I must hold one 

 or other hypothesis concerning these actual existences, and I am sup- 

 posed to be involved in all the difficulties which arise. 



Another work devoted to the refutation of my views is that of 

 Professor Birks "Modern Physical Fatalism and the Doctrine of 

 Evolution, including an Examination of Mr. H. Spencer's First Prin- 

 ciples." Having dealt with the work of Mr. Guthrie, I can not pass 

 by that of Professor Birks without raising the suspicion that I find 

 some difficulty in dealing with it. Indeed, I do find a difficulty a dif- 

 ficulty illustrated by that found in disentangling a skein of silk which 

 has been pulled about by a child for half an hour. And just as the 

 patience of a bystander would fail were he asked to look on until, by 

 unraveling the tangled skein, its continuity was proved, so would the 

 reader's attention be exhausted before I had rectified one tenth part 

 of the meshes and knots into which Professor Birks has twisted my 

 statements. 



Abundant warrant for this assertion is furnished by the very first 

 paragraph succeeding the one in which Professor Birks announces that 

 he is about to take "First Principles" as representative of the "fatal- 

 istic theory." In this paragraph he represents me as asserting that 

 ultimate religious ideas are " incapable of being conceived." He fur- 

 ther says that ultimate scientific ideas are by me " pronounced equally 

 inconceivable." Now, any clear-headed reader who accepted Professor 

 Birks's version of my views would be led to debit me with the absurd- 

 ity of saying that certain things which are j)ut together in conscious- 

 ness (ideas) can not be put together in consciousness (conceived). To 

 conceive is to frame in thought ; and as every idea is framed in thought, 

 it is nonsense to say of any idea that it can not be conceived non- 

 sense which I have nowhere uttered. My statement is that " ultimate 

 scientific ideas, then, are all representative of realities that can not 

 be comprehended" ; and the like is alleged of ultimate religious ideas. 

 The things which I say can not be comprehended or conceived, are not 

 the ideas, but the realities beyond consciousness for which the ideas 

 in consciousness stand. In Professor Birks's statement, however, in- 

 conceivableness of the realities is transformed into inconceivableness 

 of the answering ideas ! Further, at the end of this first paragraph 

 which deals with me, I am represented as teaching that religion " is 

 equivalent to nescience or ignorance alone." This statement is as far 

 removed from the truth as the others. I have argued at considerable 

 length, and in such various ways that I thought it impossible to mis- 

 understand me, that though the Power universally manifest to us 

 through phenomena, alike in the surrounding world and in ourselves 

 the Power " in which we live and move and have our being " is, and 

 must ever remain, inscrutable ; yet that the existence of this inscru- 



