RETROGRESSIVE RELIGION, 473 



over, as originally elaborated and as recently restated, my argument 

 was that in the discovery by Science that it could not do more than 

 ascertain the order among phenomena, there was involved a tacit con- 

 fession of impotence in presence of the Mystery of Things — a confes- 

 sion which brought Science into sympathy with Religion ; and that 

 in their joint recognition of an Unknowable Cause for all the effects 

 constituting the knowable world. Religion and Science would reach a 

 truth common to the two. I do not see that anything said by my 

 critics has shaken this position.. I held at the outset, and continue 

 to hold, that this Inscrutable Existence which Science, in the last re- 

 sort, is compelled to recognize as unreached by its deepest analyses 

 of matter, motion, thought, and feeling, stands toward our general 

 conception of things, in substantially the same relation as does the 

 Creative Power asserted by Theology ; and that when Theology, which 

 has already dropped many of the anthropomorphic traits ascribed, 

 eventually drops the last of them, the foundation-beliefs of the two 

 must become identical. So far as I see, no endeavor has been made 

 to show that this is not the case. Further I have contended, originally 

 and in the article named, that this Reality transcending appearance 

 (which is not simply unknown as Mr. Harrison thinks it should be called, 

 but is proved by analysis of the form of our intelligence to be unknow- 

 able), * standing toward the Universe and toward ourselves in the same 

 relation as an anthropomorphic Creator was supposed to stand, bears a 

 like relation with it not Only to human thought but to human feeling : 

 the gradual replacement of a Power allied to humanity in certain 

 traits, by a Power which we can not say is thus allied, leaves un- 

 changed certain of the sentiments comprehended under the name re- 

 ligious. Though I have argued that in ascribing to the Unknowable 

 Cause of things such human attributes as emotion, Avill, and intelli- 

 gence, we are using words which, when thus applied, have no corre- 

 sponding ideas ; yet I have also argued that we are just as much de- 

 barred from denying as we are from affirming such attributes ; f since, 

 as ultimate analysis brings us everywhere to alternative impossibilities 

 of thought, we are shown that beyond the phenomenal order of things, 

 our ideas of possible and impossible are irrelevant. Nothing has been 

 said which requires me to change this view : neither Mr. Harrison's 

 statement that " to make a religion out of the Unknowable is far more 

 extravagant than to make it out of the Equator," nor Sir James 

 Stephen's description of the Unknowable as "like a gigantic soap- 

 bubble not burst but blown thinner and thinner till it has become 

 absolutely imperceptible," seems to me applicable. One who says that 

 because the Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things pro- 

 ceed, can not in any way be brought within the limits of human con- 

 sciousness it therefore approaches to a nonentity, seems to me like 

 one who says of a vast number that because it passes all possibility of 

 * " First Principles," Tart I, chapter iv. f " First Principles," § 31. 



