786 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



feel inclined to follow the elevated aspirations of his nature, regarded 

 as the expressions of the Eternal Energy, which, if the philosophy 

 of Mr. Spencer is not a vain illusion, is leading us toward a better 

 future. 



Thus the religion of the Unknowable assimilates to itself an ulti- 

 mate factor which is found in all religions ; the desire of uniting one's 

 self with the object of worship, or, at least, of conforming to the 

 rules that proceed from it. Mr. Spencer seems himself to have com- 

 prehended the necessity of this extension, if we may judge from a let- 

 ter which he addressed last year to one of his most earnest disciples in 

 the United States, the Rev. J. M. Savage, a Unitarian minister, in 

 which he felicitated him on having clearly brought out the religious 

 and ethical sides of evolutionary doctrines. 



On the other hand, the resources which the religious spirit discov- 

 ers in the doctrine of the Unknowable have struck even some of Mr. 

 Harrison's co-religionists, who, less bound, perhaps, to the letter of 

 Positivist tradition, have recognized the necessity of giving a broader 

 and more solid support to the worship of Humanity. As Mr. William 

 Frey, an American Comtist, wrote to the Boston "Index " in 1882, 

 the strong feeling which the Comtists experience toward humanity can 

 only become deeper and more intense if they regard it as a mediator 

 between men and the Unknowable, because there will come into play 

 the strongest cord of the religious sentiment— the aspiration of man 

 toward the Infinite. 



We should not be surprised at the influence, amounting to a kind 

 of fascination, which the philosophy of Mr. Spencer exercises over an 

 increasing portion of the Anglo-Saxon public. Whether true or false, 

 complete or incomplete, it unquestionably represents the vastest and 

 grandest synthesis that human genius has produced for a long time. 

 After having embraced in succession all the phases of cosmical evolu- 

 tion, all the degrees of organic, sensible, intellectual, and social devel- 

 opment, we could foresee that the eminent thinker would enter the 

 domain of religious ideas to inquire into the application of his general 

 law there. We have seen by what conclusions, at once sympathetic and 

 original, his views, in this regard, trench upon nearly all the systems 

 that have issued from the contemporaneous scientific movement. 



In 1860 Mr. Laugel called him the last of the English metaphysi- 

 cians. Mr. Spencer would no more accept this designation now than 

 then. It is nevertheless true that his doctrine of the Unknowable, as 

 Mr. Harrison asserts, is, before everything, of theology, and that in his 

 hands the evolution of Religion becomes the religion of Evolution. 

 The future alone can tell what lot is reserved for this conception, 

 which is doubtlessly not new in itself, but which, for the first time, 

 perhaps, is presented to us as the logical and indispensable complement 

 of a system exclusively based on Positivist methods. 



