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generation may as yet have failed to prove tlie fact. Future 

 experiments may be as unavailing. But while the first in- 

 stance of special creation is not only undiscovered but in- 

 conceivable, the suggestion conies with overwhelming force 

 that the transition from inorganic matter to organic life 

 as little needed the interposition of an extra-mundane God 

 as the transition of our April into May and June. The ob- 

 jection to materialism could not be too strenuous, so long- 

 as matter was regarded as something which, without inher- 

 ent mind, could build the cosmos and the thought and love 

 and pity of mankind, i^ay, let the separate atoms be as 

 alive and pushing as you please ; grant them not only chem- 

 ical affinities, but each a brain compared with which Newton's 

 or Plato's were an imbecile affair, and who shall deem that 

 they could so put their heads together as to produce the 

 j)resent universe. " The divinity is in the atoms," as the 

 seer hath told ; but it is in them not as distinct in indi- 

 vidualities, but as a pervasive and cohering unity. 



I can easily imagine that more than one malicious humor- 

 ist has said of this course of lectures upon Evolution, " As 

 I passed by and beheld your devotions, I found an* altar 

 with this inscription, ' To the UnknoAvn God.' " Not merely 

 the worship of the unknown, but of the unknowable, is 

 supposed by many persons to be the only worship that Evo- 

 lutionism allows her votaries. It is a lamentable fact that 

 Herbert Spencer is himself unknown to the majority save 

 as the prophet of the Unknowable, a distinction as little to 

 be envied as that accorded to Harriet Martineau, when it 

 was said by some irreverent person, " There is no God, and 

 Harriet Martineau is his prophet." For Spencer's doctrine 

 of the Unknowable is the least characteristic and least val- 

 uable i)art of his entire performance. In his ''First Prin- 

 ciples" he lias made it the propyhcum to the temple of his 

 thought, but its architecture is conceived in an entirely dif- 

 ferent spirit, and it only serves to keep us back from what 

 is worthy of our admiration. It is as metaphysical as Prof. 

 Davidson coidd wish, as metaphysical as Sir William Ham- 

 ilton's "Philosophy of the Unconditioned" and Mansell's 

 "Limits of Ileligious Thought," to which it immediately 

 succeeded, inlieriting the weakness of their i)hilosoi)hical 

 method. With Hamilton and IVfansell, he insisted on the 

 unthinkable and consequently unknowa])h^ character of all 

 the ])rimary concepts of both Science and Ifeligion. It is 



