782 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



It is of a power conceived in this manner that we may well say, In illo 

 vivimus, movemur, et sumus (in it we live, and move, and are). 



The conditions indispensable to becoming the object of a religion 

 are thus found in the Unknowable, as well as in the Eternal, the Abso- 

 lute, the Self-Existent, the Most High, the Only Pure, or whatever 

 other qualifications men may have made the equivalent of the divine. 

 The last word of Evolution agrees with the definitions of the most 

 refined theologists, which, transcending vulgar symbolism, have con- 

 stantly recognized God in the double character of reality and incom- 

 prehensibility. We may add that, before becoming the scientific faith 

 of Spencer, Huxley, and even of Haeckel, this religious conception has 

 sufficed for men of the highest mind and the most pious imagination, 

 such as Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Kant, Goethe, Shelley, Wordsworth, 

 Carlyle, Emerson, and even M. R6nan. It can lead not to religion 

 only, but even to mysticism, however little, like some Neoplatonists 

 and certain Hindoo philosophers, one may become absorbed in the 

 conception of the supreme unity.* Under this relation, the danger is 

 not that it will remain without influence, but that it will communicate 

 to its adepts a kind of vertigo more formidable than the fascination of 

 the abyss, either by the contrast of its incommensurable grandeur with 

 the insignificance of our being, or by the opposition of its immutable 

 Unity with the unlimited Variety and perpetual expansion of the ma- 

 terial Universe. These sentiments, as Mr. Spencer remarks, can only 

 increase in frequency as well as in intensity as the human mind be- 

 comes more capable in seizing the comprehensiveness of things and 

 their complex relations. 



Certainly, it is no longer possible to attribute to that Supreme 

 Reality goodness, consciousness, and personality, as we conceive them. 

 But do our conceptions exhaust the modes of the infinite ? Mr. Har- 

 rison will see only the negative side of the Unknowable. Whether 

 you employ, he tells us, the term existence or energy, you never have 

 anything but a scientific generalization, a dumb, blind, insensible 

 entity, without common attributes, and consequently without possible 



* We cite, for example, the following passage from an address made by the great 

 mystic of the Bramo Somaj, Keshub Chunder Sen, at a time when no one accused him of 

 havin" transgressed the most strict rationalism : " (For the true Yogui) forms become 

 informal, the^informal takes form. Mind discovers itself in matter, matter transforms 

 itself into mind. In the glorious sun is revealed the glory of glories. In the serene moon 

 mind imbibes of all serenities. In the reverberation of the thunder is the Voice of the 

 Lord which makes itself heard afar. All things are full of Him. Open your eyes, behold 

 he is without ; shut them, he is found within. Then your asceticism (yo^a), disciple, 

 will be complete ; aspire constantly to this plenitude." There is not a word in these ex- 

 alted conceptions in contradiction with the religious conceptions of Mr. Spencer. Haeckel 

 himself has said in his " Morphology" : " The philosophy which sees the mind and force 

 of God acting in all the phenomena of Nature is alone worthy of the grandeur of the 

 Being who embraces all. ... In him we live, and act, and are. The philosophy of na- 

 ture "becomes theology." All depends on the mental angle under which the disciple of 

 Spencer contemplates Nature, or the manifestations of the Unknowable. 



