CH. i.j THE QUESTION RESTATED. ZTt 



is in fact synonymous with the overthrow and destruc 

 tion of the latter. In coming to regard the universe as 

 evolved in accordance with discernible physical laws, work 

 ing throughout a lapse of time to which human thinking 

 can assign neither a beginning nor an end, we cease to re 

 gard it as created at any given point of time in accordance 

 with a preconceived plan remotely analogous to the plans 

 by which finite intelligence adapts means to ends. It is not, 

 as we shall see in a moment, that the one conception meta 

 physically refutes the other, but that it practically super- 

 cedes it, and enables philosophy to dispense with it. While 

 upon the time-honoured statical view of things, any given 

 group of phenomena was explained by a reference to the 

 direct creative action of a divine Power extraneous to the 

 Cosmos ; on the other hand, upon the modern dynamical 

 view of things, any given group of phenomena is explained 

 by a reference to some antecedent group of phenomena, while 

 all phenomena alike are regarded as the sensible manifes 

 tations of a divine Power immanent in the Cosmos. It 

 becomes desirable, therefore, to inquire whether on the new 

 view there is any ground for assuming, as was necessarily 

 assumed on the old view, that the divine Power works by 

 methods analogous to human methods. The question which 

 we have to answer is not whether there exists a God. As 

 w?% clearly shown in the first part of this work, and as will 

 presently be still more emphatically reiterated, our Cosmic 

 Philosophy is based upon the affirmation of God s existence, 

 and not upon the denial of it, like irreligious Atheism, or 

 upon the ignoring of it, like non-religious Positivism. The 

 question which we have now to answer concerns the exist 

 ence of a limited personal God, who is possessed of a quasi- 

 human consciousness, from whose quasi-human volitions 

 have originated the laws of nature, and to whose quasi- 

 human contrivance are due the manifold harmonies observed 

 in the universe. Is this most refined and subtilized remnant 



