2 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



This doctrine of mental origins need not be taken, 

 however, in the sense of materialism. Indeed, its 

 able and exact advocates expressly repudiate the 

 materialistic construction often put upon it; and to 

 meet their views with precision and justice, one 

 ought carefully and persistently to discriminate their 

 doctrine from materialism. To do this may cost 

 much exercise of subtlety ; but the distinction is real, 

 be it as subtle as it may. Rather, the new doctrine 

 is in its exactest statement a mode of idealism ; and 

 this idealistic philosophy takes two different forms. 



In the hands of most evolutionists, the philosophy 

 is agnosticism — idealism arrested at the line of mere 

 subjectivity and sceptical negation. It demands that 

 the God of our familiar traditional religion, the om- 

 niscient Creator who sees in the beginning that con- 

 summate end when the children of his hand shall 

 bear his perfect spiritual image, and who thus is 

 eternally their Redeemer, shall abdicate in favour 

 of the Unknowable — the omnipresent Power that 

 doubtless is immanent in all things, and whose re- 

 sistless infinity comes forth in the ever growing pro- 

 cess of evolution, but whose nature and whose final 

 goal are forever hidden from even possible know- 

 ledge ; the Immutable Energy, of which we may 

 declare neither that it is conscious nor unconscious, 

 neither that it is material nor spiritual, but only that 

 it is the Secret behind the Veil. 



