THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 29 



IV 



The preceding result is recognised — in fact, is 

 proclaimed — by agnostic evolutionism itself, in its 

 tenet of an Omnipresent Energy, whose existence 

 it maintains as a certainty, but whose nature it 

 declares inscrutable. This inference of some neces- 

 sary noumenal Ground is the deep trait in Mr. 

 Spencer's doctrine, answering to the true nature 

 of the philosophic impulse, and constituting the 

 profoundest claim of his scheme to the title of a 

 philosophy. But the dogma that the nature of this 

 Ground is past finding out really means that the uni- 

 versal resemblance among phenomena of every order 

 — the mysterious kinship, not only of the inorganic 

 and the organic, but of the entire physical and 

 physiological world and the psychic world — must 

 be accepted as a dead and voiceless fact, a " final 

 inexplicability," as Stuart Mill used to say. But 

 surely philosophy means explanation, else it is not 

 philosophy ; surely, too, a " final inexplicability " 

 does not explain. While, then, historic philosophy, 

 disallow as it may their theory of knowledge, goes 

 heartily along with Mr. Spencer and his school 

 in their metaphysics thus far, it declines to arrest 

 its progress with them here, and pronounces that 

 in the Something at the heart of universal phenome- 

 nal resemblance, still to be explained, but by tJicir 



