AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 301 



opposite poles in what relates to the work of religion on man and on 

 life. In all he has written, he treats religion as mainly a thing of the 

 mind, and concerned essentially with mystery. I say — and here I am 

 on my own ground — that religion is mainly a thing of feeling and of 

 conduct, and is concerned essentially with duty. I agree that reli- 

 gion has also an intellectual base ; but here I insist that this intellect- 

 ual basis must rest on something that can be known and conceived 

 and at least partly understood ; and that it can not be found at all in 

 what is unknowable, inconceivable, and in no way whatever to be 

 understood. 



Now, in maintaining this, I have with me almost the whole of the 

 competent minds which have dealt with this question. Mr. Spencer 

 puts it rather as if it were merely fanaticism on my part which pre- 

 vents me from accepting his theory of Religion ; as if Sir James Ste- 

 phen's difficulties would disappear if he could be induced to read the 

 " Principles of Sociology " and the rest. Mr. Spencer must remember 

 that in his Religion of the Unknowable he stands almost alone. He 

 is, in fact, insisting to mankind, in a matter where all men have some 

 opinion, on one of the most gigantic paradoxes in the history of thought. 

 I know myself of no single thinker in Europe who has come forward 

 to support this religion of an Unknowable Cause, which can not be 

 presented in terms of consciousness, to which the words emotion, will, 

 intelligence can not be applied with any meaning, and yet which 

 stands in the place of a supposed anthropomorphic Creator. Mr. 

 George H. Lewes, who of all modern philosophers was the closest to 

 Mr. Spencer, and of recent English philosophers the most nearly his 

 equal, wrote ten years ago : " Deeply as we may feel the mystery of 

 the universe and the limitations of our faculties, the foundations of a 

 creed can only rest on the Knoion and the Knoxoahle.'''' With that I 

 I believe every school of thought but a few dreamy mystics has 

 agreed. Every religious teacher, movement, or body, has equally 

 started from that. For myself, I feel that I stand alongside of the 

 religious spirits of every time and of every church in claiming for 

 religion some intelligible object of reverence, and the field of feeling 

 and of conduct, as well as that of awe. Every notice of my criticism 

 of Mr. Spencer which has fallen under my eye adopted my view of the 

 hollowness of the Unknowable as a basis of Religion. So say Agnos- 

 tics, Materialists, Sceptics, Christians, Catholics, Theists, and Positiv- 

 ists. All with one consent disclaim making a Religion of the Un- 

 knowable. Mr. Herbert Spencer may construct an Athanasian Creed 

 of the "Inscrutable Existence" — which is neither God nor being — 

 but he stands as yet Athanasiiis contra miindum. It is not, there- 

 fore, through the hardness of my heart and the stiffness of my neck 

 that I can not follow him here. 



Let us now sum up the various positions which Mr, Spencer would 

 impose on us as to Religion, After his two articles and the recent 



