THE RELIGIOUS VALUE OF THE UNKNOWABLE. 781 



himself admits that we may accept with full confidence all that the 

 evolutionist philosophy affirms and contests with reference to the per- 

 manent indications of an ultimate energy. Now, is not this conces- 

 sion of Mr. Harrison's the complete refutation of his thesis relative to 

 the negative nature of the Unknowable ? 



He adds, indeed, that an existence of which we can know nothing 

 remains, in the religious point of view, as if it did not exist. To this 

 objection it may be replied that he consents himself to admit mystery as 

 an element of the religious sentiment. We will only add to this, with 

 Mr. Spencer, that it is an essential element of it, and in this respect 

 the Unknowable is susceptible of satisfying the most difficult imagina- 

 tions, for it is the mystery of mysteries, and something that we may 

 be sure will never be cleared up in this world, whatever may be the 

 progress of science. Mr. Harrison commits an error — especially strange 

 with a positivist — when he reproaches evolutionism for using the term 

 Unknowable instead of Unknown. The Unknown includes a know- 

 able part, the sum of the phenomena and laws which still escape our 

 perception, but which we may be able to know and doubtless will 

 know more and more. The Unknowable, on the other hand, repre- 

 sents what will always escape our knowledge by virtue of our intel- 

 lectual organization itself — the first cause, the Noumenon, the essence 

 of things — unless Mr. Harrison, urging the doctrine of positivism to 

 an extreme, prohibits us from mentioning all that transcends phe- 

 nomena and their relations, even in order to declare it Unknowable ! 

 As M. Littre admits : " Immensity, material as well as intellectual, 

 appears under its double character of reality and inaccessibility. It is 

 an ocean that beats against our shore, and for which we have neither 

 bark nor sail, but the clear vision of which is as salutary as formi- 

 dable ! » 



A second element, which every one agrees in declaring character- 

 istic of religion, is that feeling, of a complex nature, which is inter- 

 preted, according to circumstances, into wonder or fear, enthusiasm or 

 stupor, before the object of religious contemplation. Is not this one 

 of the impressions most easily engendered by the discovery of that 

 mysterious energy that rises, at the end of all our investigations, in 

 all the avenues of knowledge, as if by the conception of that substan- 

 tial stratum which remains when all else changes and passes away — 

 primordial foundation of Nature and consciousness, without which, if 

 we could only suppose it absent for a second, the whole Universe 

 would resolve itself into chaos or into nothing? 



Schleiermacher referred the essence of religion to a feeling of de- 

 pendence. Does not Evolution teach that the force of which we are 

 conscious whenever we produce a change by our own effort is coiTela- 

 tive to the power that transcends consciousness, and can we imagine a 

 closer dependence than this relation of the individual with the ulti- 

 mate Energy of which it is, like all of Nature, a transient production ? 



