RELATION OF THE FINITE TO THE INFINITE. 75 



from nothing as it is for us to prove that a whole is not greater than 

 any of its parts, for it is a self-contradiction. The reader will bear in 

 mind that we are not discussing the facts of the creation, but the in- 

 competency of the human mind to grasp the facts, whatever they may 

 be. However humiliating, then, it may be to the pride of human in- 

 tellect, we are forced to the conclusion that there is a vast field of 

 thought, open to anxious inquiry it is true, over the gateway of whose 

 entrance we may well inscribe, " The Unknowable." Somewhere 

 within this vast field, from which the human intellect is excluded, lie 

 absolute time and space, and all we call creation, or primary causa- 

 tion. It is the futile attempt to explore this field that has brought 

 philosophers and theologians alike into deserved contempt the old 

 folly of perpetual motion by the construction of a clock that shall 

 wind up itself. 



It is now time for science to define, in some way, the limitations of 

 human knowledge, and thus confine all research strictly within the 

 sphere of the knowable. Is it not safe to assume that the finite mind 

 is so conditioned that it cannot possibly perceive or comprehend ulti- 

 mate antecedent causes ? To say that God was the first cause seems 

 at first an easy solution, but it is only another way of saying we do 

 not know, for we ask at once, " Had God a beginning ? and if not, 

 then for an infinite period of time he was alone, or else matter has been 

 coeternal with him, and we come back to the Hindoo idea that God is 

 the universe. Our conception of God must be the essence of our con- 

 ception of eternity, and of that the finite mind can of necessity form no 

 conception. There is a mathematical ratio between a second of time 

 and a million million centuries ; but there can be no ratio between 

 a million million centuries and eternity, hence our conception of an in- 

 finite and eternal God is impossible. The difficulty does not lie so 

 much in the vastness of the idea itself as in the seeming impossibilities 

 the idea involves. It is like attempting to show the necessity for 

 a sixth sense, by expressing this want or necessity in terms of the five 

 senses we already possess ; no such idea can by any possibility be con- 

 veyed. 



Let us compare an animal as low in the scale of existence as an 

 oyster with one of the highest known type, man, and note the points 

 of agreement and the points of divergence. An oyster, like man, is 

 evolved from a germ, advances to the climax of animal vigor, and then, 

 like him, declines and dies. An oyster's life is conditioned by the ele- 

 ments in which he lives, and so is man's. An oyster, like man, is prop- 

 agated by well-defined laws, and like him is subject to disease and 

 premature decay. Now, in all the conditions named, there is not only 

 no difference in kind, but, so far as we know, there is none in quality. 

 They are conditions expressed in universal laws to which the entire or- 

 ganic kingdom is subjected, and over which human agency has little or 

 no control. Let us now turn to those higher qualities in man which are 



