456 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



expresses the confessed inability to know or conceive the nature of the 

 Power manifested through phenomena, it fails to indicate the confessed 

 ability to recognize the existence of that Power as of all things the 

 most certain. I might make clear the contrast between that Comtean 

 Agnosticism which says that " Theology and ontology alike end in the 

 Everlasting No with which science confronts all their assertions,"* 

 and the Agnosticism set forth in " First Principles," which, along with 

 its denials, emphatically utters an Everlasting Yes. And I might show 

 in detail that Mr. Harrison is wrong in implying that Agnosticism, as 

 I hold it, is anything more than silent with respect to the question of 

 personality ; since, though the attributes of personality, as we know 

 it, can not be conceived by us as attributes of the Unknown Cause of 

 things, yet " duty requires us neither to affirm nor deny personality," 

 but " to submit ourselves with all humility to the established limits of 

 our intelligence " in the conviction that the choice is not " between 

 personality and something lower than personality," but " between per- 

 sonality and something higher," f and that " the Ultimate Power is no 

 more representable in terms of human consciousness than human con- 

 sciousness is representable in terms of a plant's functions." % 



But without further evidence, what I have said sufficiently proves 

 that Mr. Harrison's " criticism keen, trenchant, destructive," as it was 

 called, is destructive, not of an actual doctrine, but simply of an imagi- 

 nary one. I should hardly have expected that Mr. Harrison, in com- 

 mon with the " Edinburgh Reviewer," would have taken the course, 

 so frequent with critics, of demolishing a simulacrum and walking off 

 in triumph as though the reality had been demolished. Adopting his 

 own figure, I may say that he has with ease passed his weapon through 

 and through " The Ghost of Religion ; " but then it is only the ghost : 

 the reality stands unscathed. 



Before passing to the consideration of that alternative doctrine 

 which Mr. Harrison would have us accept, it will be w^ell briefly to 

 deal with certain of his subordinate propositions. 



After re-stating in a succinct way, the hypothesis that from the con- 

 ception of the ghost originated the conceptions of supernatural beings 

 in general, including the highest, and after saying that "one can 

 hardly suppose that Mr. Spencer would limit himself to that," Mr. 

 Harrison describes what he alleges to be a prior, and, indeed, the pri- 

 mordial, form of religion. He says : — 



There were countless centuries of time, and there were, and there ore, count- 

 less millions of men for whom no doctrine of superhuman spirits ever took co- 

 herent form. In all these ages and races, probahly by far the most numerous 

 that our planet has witnessed, there was religion in all kinds of definite form. 

 Comte calls it fetichism — terms are not important: roughly, we may call it 



♦Harrison, he. cit., p. 497. f "First Principles," § 81. 



X "Essays," vol. iii, p. 251. 



