THE GHOST OF RELIGION. 441 



have ever been predicated of God can be used of this Energy. Neither 

 goodness, nor wisdom, nor justice, nor consciousness, nor will, nor life, 

 can be ascribed, even by analogy, to this Force. Now a force to which 

 we can not apply the ideas of goodness, wisdom, justice, consciousness, 

 or life, any more than we can to a circle, is certainly not God, has no 

 analogy with God, nor even with what Pope has called the " Great 

 First Cause, least understood." It shares some of the negative attri- 

 butes of God and First Cause, but no positive one. It is, in fact, only 

 the Unknowable a little more defined ; though I do not remember that 

 Mr. Spencer, or any evolution philosopher, has ever formulated the 

 Unknowable in terms with so deep a theological ring as we hear in the 

 phrase " Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed." 



The terms do seem, perhaps, rather needlessly big and absolute. 

 And fully accepting Mr. Spencer's logical canons, one does not see 

 why it should be called an " absolute certainty." " Practical belief " 

 satisfies me ; and I doubt the legitimacy of substituting for it " abso- 

 lute certainty." "Infinite" and "Eternal," also, can mean to Mr. 

 Spencer nothing more than " to w^hich we know no limits, no beginning 

 or end," and, for my part, I prefer to say this. Again, " an Energy " 

 — why AN Energy ? The Unknowable may certainly consist of more 

 than one energy. To assert the presence of one uniform energy is to 

 profess to know something very important about the Unknowable : 

 that it is homogeneous, and even identical, throughout the Universe. 

 And then, " from which all things proceed " is perhaps a rather equiv- 

 ocal reversion to the theologic type. In the Athanasian Creed the 

 Third Person " proceeds " from the First and the Second. But this 

 process has always been treated as a mystery ; and it would be safer to 

 avoid the phrases of mysticism. Let us keep the old words, for we all 

 mean much the same thing ; and I prefer to put it thus. All observa- 

 tion and meditation. Science and Philosophy, bring us " to X\iq practical 

 belief that man is ever in the presence of some energy or energies ^ of 

 which he knows nothing, and to which therefore he would be wise to 

 assign no limits, conditions, or functions." This is, doubtless, what 

 Mr. Spencer himself means. For my part, I prefer his old term, the 

 Unknowable. Though I have always thought that it would be more 

 philosophical not to assert of the Unknown that it is Unknowable. 

 And, indeed, I would rather not use the capital letter, but stick literally 

 to our evidence, and say frankly " the unknown." 



Thus viewed, the attempt, so to speak, to put a little unction into 

 the Unknowable is hardly worth the philosophical inaccuracy it in- 

 volves ; and such is the drawback to any use of picturesque language. 

 So stated, the positive creed of Agnosticism still retains its negative 

 character. It has a series of propositions and terms, every one of 

 which is a negation. A friend of my own, who was much pressed to 

 say how much of the Athanasian Creed he still accepted, once said 

 that he clung to the idea " that there was a sort of a something." In 



