XII.] THEOLOGY AND EVOLUTION. 307 



of His attributes, so that our minds can, as it were, only 

 apprehend, in a most fragmentary and imperfect manner 

 (as through a glass darkly), dim perceptions of infinitesimal 

 portions of His inconceivable perfection. In this way the 

 partial glimpses obtained by us in various modes differ 

 from each other ; not that God is anything but the most 

 perfect unity, but that apparently conflicting views arise 

 from our inability to apprehend Him, except in this im- 

 perfect manner, i. e. by successive slight approximations 

 along different lines of approach. Sir William Hamilton 

 has said : 1 " Nature conceals God, and man reveals Him." 

 It is not, according to the teaching above mentioned, ex- 

 actly thus ; but rather that physical nature reveals to us 

 one side, one aspect of the Deity, while the moral and 

 religious worlds bring us in contact with another, and at 

 first, to our apprehension, a very different one. The differ- 

 ence and discrepancy, however, which are at first perceived, 

 is soon found to proceed not from the reason but from a 

 want of flexibility in the imagination. This want is far 

 from surprising. Not only may a man be expected, as a 

 matter of course, to be an adept in his own art, but at the 

 same time to show an incapacity for a very different mode 

 of activity. 2 We rarely find an artist who takes much 



1 "Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic," vol. i. Lecture ii., p. 40. 



2 In the same way that an undue cultivation of any one kind of know- 

 ledge is prejudicial to philosophy. Mr. James Martineau well observes : 

 "Nothing is more common than to see maxims, which are unexceptionable 

 as the assumptions of particular sciences, coerced into the service of a uni- 

 versal philosophy, and so turned into instruments of mischief and distortion. 

 That 'we can know nothing but phenomena,' that 'causation is simply 

 constant priority, ' that ' men are governed invariably by their interests,' 

 are examples of rules allowable as dominant hypotheses in physics or 

 political economy, but exercising a desolating tyranny when thrust on to 

 the throne of universal empire. He who seizes upon these and similar 



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