302 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



discussion we can hardly mistake him, and they justify my saying that 

 they form a gigantic paradox. Mr. Spencer maintains that : 



1. The proper object of Religion is a Something which can never 

 be known, or conceived, or understood ; to which we can not apjDly 

 the terms emotion, will, intelligence ; of which we can not affirm or 

 deny that it is either person, or being, or mind, or matter, or indeed 

 anything else. 



2. All that we can say of it is, that it is an Inscrutable Existence 

 or an Unknowable Cause : we can neither know nor conceive what it 

 is, nor how it came about, nor how it operates. It is, notwithstand- 

 ing, the Ultimate Cause, the All-Being, the Creative Power. 



3. The essential business of religion, so understood, is to keep alive 

 the consciousness of a mystery that can not be fathomed. 



4. We are not concerned with the question, "What effect this 

 religion will have as a moral agent ? " or, " Whether it will make 

 good men and women ? " Religion has to do with mystery, not with 

 morals. 



These are the paradoxes to which my fanaticism refuses to assent. 



Now these were the views about Religion which I found in Mr. 

 Silencer's first article, and they certainly are repeated in his second. 

 He says : " The Power which transcends phenomena can not be brought 

 within the forms of our finite thought " *' The Ultimate Power is 

 not representable in terms of human consciousness." " The attributes 

 of personality can not be conceived by us as attributes of the Unknown 

 Cause of things." " The nature of the Reality transcending appear- 

 ances can not be knov/n, yet its existence is necessarily implied." " No 

 conception of this Reality can be framed by us." " This Inscrutable 

 Existence which Science, in the last resort, is compelled to recognise 

 as unreached by its deepest analyses of matter, motion, thought, and 

 feeling." "In ascribing to the Unknowable Cause of things such 

 human attributes as emotion, will, intelligence, we are using words 

 which, when thus applied, have no corresponding ideas. There can be 

 no kind of doubt about all this. I said Mi*. Spencer jDroi^oses, as the 

 object of religion, an absti^action which we cannot conceive, or present 

 in thought, or regard as having personality, or as capable of feeling, 

 purpose, or thought — in familiar words, I said it was "a sort of a 

 something, about which we can know nothing." 



Mr. Spencer complains that I called this Something a negation, an 

 All-Nothingness, an (a;"), and an Everlasting No. He now says that 

 this Something is the All-Being. The Unknowable is the Ultimate 

 Reality — the sole existence ; — the entire Cosmos, as we are conscious 

 of it, being a mere show. In familiar words : — " Everything is nought, 

 and the Unknowable is the only real Thing." I quite agree that this 

 is Mr. Spencer's position as a metaphysician. It is not at all new to 

 me, for it is worked out in his "First Principles" most distinctly. 

 Ten years ago, when I reviewed Mr. Lewes's "Problems of Life and 



