HELICIOUS RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT. 837 



beyond consciousness, and the ideas derived from such im 

 pressions. To speak of an intelligence which exists in the 

 absence of all such alien activities, is to use a meaningless 

 word. If to the corollary that the First Cause, considered 

 as intelligent, must be continually affected by independent 

 objective activities, it is replied that these have become such 

 by act of creation, and were previously included in the First 

 Cause ; then the reply is that in such case the First Cause 

 could, before this creation, have had nothing to generate in it 

 such changes as those constituting what we call intelligence, 

 and must therefore have been unintelligent at the time 

 when intelligence was most called for. Hence it is clear that 

 the intelligence ascribed, answers in no respect to that which 

 we know by the name. It is intelligence out of which all 

 the characters constituting it have vanished. 



These and other difficulties, some of which are often dis 

 cussed but never disposed of, must force men hereafter to 

 drop the higher anthropomorphic characters given to the First 

 Cause, as they have long since dropped the lower. The con 

 ception which has been enlarging from the beginning must 

 go on enlarging, until, by disappearance of its limits, it 

 becomes a consciousness which transcends the forms of dis 

 tinct thought, though it for ever remains a consciousness. 



G59. &quot; But how can such a final consciousness of the 

 Unknowable, thus tacitly alleged to be true, be reached by 

 successive modifications of a conception which was utterly 

 untrue ? The ghost- theory of the savage is baseless. The 

 material double of a dead man in which he believes, never 

 had any existence. And if by gradual de-materialization of 

 this double was produced the conception of the supernatural 

 agent in general if the conception of a deity, formed by the 

 Iropping of some human attributes and transfiguration of 

 others, resulted from continuance of this process ; is not the 

 developed and purified conception reached by pushing the 

 process to its limit, a fiction also ? Surely if the primitive 



