THE RELIGIOUS VALUE OF THE UNKNOWABLE. 785 



gence of all our tlioughts and all our acts toward the service of 

 humanity. How much stronger and more efficacious would this state 

 of spiritual unity become if, instead of resting exclusively on the neces- 

 sary relations of men, it based itself on the sum of our relations with 

 the Universe, and if, while retaining as its object the reign of justice 

 or happiness in human society, it enveloped that object in the broader 

 end of the conformity of our conduct with the action of the power 

 " other than ourselves, which labors to put order into the world," or, 

 as Matthew Arnold defines it in his felicitous and celebrated formula, 

 " the Power not ourselves, that makes for righteousness " ! 



But is not this to attribute to the Unknowable an object, a design, a 

 will— attributes absolutely incompatible with the unconditioned and 

 the infinite ? Is it not, in short, to return to the doctrine of final 

 causes which has been proscribed by Evolution ? 



We may answer that, if modern science has cast discredit on the 

 old system of final causes, it has not, it appears, prohibited us from 

 assigning a certain end to the evolution of the Universe taken as a 

 whole ; that the tendency toward this end, aside from knowing 

 whether it is conscious or not, intelligent or not, is easily substan- 

 tiated by the numberless indications of a gradual progress in the de- 

 velopment of nature as well as of humanity ; and that this tendency 

 toward a determined end contradicts the system of evolution only in 

 so far as it may be copied after the manifestations of our volitional 

 activity. If a person holds that the notions of object, end, tendency, 

 and predetermination are derived from our subjective experiences, we 

 should observe — as Mr, Spencer has done of our notion of force, de- 

 duced from the muscular effort — that we are constrained to think of 

 external energy in terms borrowed from our consciousness of internal 

 energy, and that there is nothing to prevent our seeing equally in the 

 notions thus formed the simple symbol of the reality. The essential 

 point is not to forget that here also the Unknowable should be su- 

 perior and not inferior to our broadest conception of the human 

 faculties. 



We have, however, no need at this time to go beyond Mr. Spen- 

 cer's written thought. He affirms that the laws of Nature are the 

 modes of action of the Unknowable, and that the most important of 

 them, the law of evolution, tends, in the existing Universe, to equilib- 

 rium, harmony, and co-ordination, which is interpreted in the moral 

 world by a more complete submission to the injunctions of duty, by 

 the introduction of more justice into the relations of men ; in short, 

 by the gradual realization of the conditions necessary to the constant 

 progress of the individual and of society. The more, then, man is 

 conscious of his relations with the Unknowable, and the more he com- 

 prehends the solidarity that binds all parts of the Universe, chiefly the 

 members of humanity, the more he will grasp the importance of his 

 modest part in the great drama of Evolution, and the more he will 



TOL. XXTI. — 50 



