220 Dr. Matheson on the same. CHAP. 



" The process by which we reached this conclusion 

 was itself a purely natural process. We did not 

 reach it by any transcendentalism, we did not come 

 to it by any mysticism ; we were driven to it by the 

 barred gate of our own experience. It was the limits 

 of our own senses that compelled us to seek a solution 

 of the universe which invoked the presence of a 

 Power beyond them. Experience, and nothing but 

 experience, was the source of our information that 

 Nature was inadequate to account for her own 

 existence. No transcendental logic, no mystical 

 power of abstraction, no special faculty conversant 

 with the things beyond experience, would ever in 

 this matter have possessed one tithe of the authority 

 which was wielded by the testimony of experience 

 itself, when it told us that the domain of visible 

 nature was too narrow and limited to account for 

 what we see." 1 



The Invisible which we are thus compelled to 

 recognise is identical with the Unknowable of that 

 modern philosophy which is formulised in the 

 writings of Herbert Spencer; a self -existent and 

 eternal Power, the ground of the existence of all 

 being, mental or material, and in its essential 

 nature absolutely inscrutable to us. Those who 

 stop here, and assert that no further knowledge 

 is possible to such faculties as ours, call them- 

 selves not believers but agnostics. But, as Dr. 

 Matheson remarks, "to know that we know nothing, 

 1 Matheson's Can the Old Faith live with the Neiv ? p. 59. 



