404 APPENDIX 



professing the Agnostic creed, I speak of God as Law, brought back 

 to us by modern science ? 



The answer is simple. It rests upon the root -conception that 

 man, in all his qualities, but most essentially in the highest part of 

 him, his mind, forms a real portion of the world. Being a portion, 

 he cannot apprehend the whole : to do that was the pretension of 

 theologians and ontologists. Yet this part, this man, raised to self- 

 consciousness, increasing always in his grasp on partial knowledge, 

 is brought continually more and more into the presence of a Force, 

 a Life, a Being, call it what you will, which he is bound to recognise 

 and worship as the essence which fashioned him and which keeps 

 him in existence. 



Man has the right to use time-honoured language, and to 

 designate his apprehension of the unity in Nature by that vener- 

 able title, God. He is only doing now what all the men from 

 whom he is descended did before him. Mumbo Jumbo, Indra, 

 Shiva, Jahve, Zeus, Odin, Balder, Christ, Allah what are these 

 but names for the Inscrutable, adapted to the modes of thought 

 which gave them currency ? God is the same, and His years do 

 not change. It is only our way of presenting the unknown to 

 human imagination which varies. 



We are at liberty to leave God out of our account, and to 

 maintain that we can do without this hypothesis. But how shall 

 we then stand ? We must remain face to face with the infinite 

 organism of the universe, which, albeit we can never know it in 

 itself, is always being presented to our limited intelligence as more 

 completely and organically one. The mystery flies before us, 

 and will ever fly. The more we say we know, and the more we 

 really know, the less can we afford to omit the elements of 

 unsearchableness and awe-inspiring unity which have produced 

 religions. 



In these circumstances we are led back to the primitive con- 

 ditions of human thought. We must still acknowledge a power 

 from which we spring, which includes all things, which is the real 

 reality of all we partly grasp by knowledge. Evade it as we will, 

 we are driven to the conclusion, at which the earliest men arrived, 

 that human intelligence alone is insufficient to account for the 

 universe, and that there is a Something beyond, with which man 

 is indissolubly connected, and which has to be approached in the 

 spirit of devotion. This Something, now as then, compels reverence 

 and inspires awe. We may call it God or not as we think fit. 

 Meanwhile it subsists the one paramount fact, in comparison with 



