MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM 8/ 



which render the Absokite, whether interpreted as the 

 Unknowable or as God, the sole causal reality. That 

 is, scientific method would in this way bring us to 

 acosmic pantheism. For the empirical method, so 

 far from vindicating either the freedom of the per- 

 sonal will or the immortality of the soul, withholds 

 belief from both, as matters that can never come 

 within the bounds of possible experience. The habit 

 of regarding nothing but the empirically attested as 

 part of science dismisses these two essential condi- 

 tions of man's reality beyond the assumed pale of 

 true knowledge into the discredited limbo of naked 

 and unsupported possibilities. 



But it is not till we pass from the method of 

 natural science to its two chief modern results, and 

 take in their revolutionary effect as subsidiaries of 

 method in every field of natural inquiry, — it is not 

 till then that we feel the full force of the pantheistic 

 strain which pulls with such tension in many modern 

 minds. Only in the principle of the Conservation 

 of Energy, and in that of Evolution, particularly as 

 evolution is viewed in its aspect of natural selection, 

 do we get the full force of the pantheistic drift. 

 This drift, at the first encounter, seems almost irre- 

 sistible. That all the changes in the universe of 

 physical experience are resolvable into motions, 

 either molar or molecular; that in spite of the incal- 

 culable variety of these motions, the sum-total of 



