XII.J THEOLOGY AND EVOLUTION. 307 



of His attributes, so that our minds can, as it were, only 

 apprehend, in a most fragmentary and imperfect manner 

 (as through a glass darkly), dim perceptions of infinitesimal 

 portions of His inconceivable perfection. In this way the 

 partial glimpses obtained by us in various modes differ 

 from each other ; not that God is anything but the most 

 perfect unity, but that apparently conflicting views arise 

 from our inability to apprehend Him, except in this im- 

 perfect manner, i. c. by successive slight approximations 

 along different lines of approach. Sir William Hamilton 

 has said : ^ " Nature conceals God, and man reveals Him." 

 It is not, according to the teaching above mentioned, ex- 

 actly thus ; but rather that physical nature reveals to us 

 one side, one aspect of the Deity, while the moral and 

 religious worlds brino- us in contact with another, and at 

 first, to our apprehension, a very different one. The differ- 

 ence and discrepancy, however, which are at first perceived, 

 is soon found to proceed not from the reason but from a 

 want of flexibility in the imagination. This want is far 

 from surprising. Not only may a man be expected, as a 

 matter of course, to be an adept in his own art, but at the 

 same time to show an incapacity for a very different mode 

 of activity.2 We rarely find an artist who takes much 



1 ." Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic," vol. i. Lecture ii., p. 40. 



- In the same way tliat an undue cultivation of any one kind of know- 

 ledge is prejiulicial to philosophy. Mr. James Martineau well observes : 

 " Nothing is more common than to see maxims, which are unexceptionahle 

 as the assumptions of particular sciences, coerced into the service of a uni- 

 versal philosophy, and so turned into instrilknents of mischief and distortion. 

 That 'we can know nothing but phenoiuena,' — that 'causation is simply 

 constant priority,' — that 'men are governed invarial)ly by their interests,' 

 are examples of rules allowable as dominant hyjiotheses in ]diysics or 

 political economy, but exercising a desolating tyranny when tlirust on to 

 the throne of universal empire. He who seizes upon these and similar 



X 2 



