Evolution as liduted to Iteli'jious TJtoii'jht. 331 



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

 exi^eriments may be as unavailing. But "while the hrst in- 

 stance of special creation is not only undiscovered but in- 

 conceivable, the suggestion comes 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 A}jril into May and Jvme. The ob- 

 jection to materialism could not be too strenuous, so long 

 as matter was regarded as something which, without inher- 

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

 and pity of mankind. Xay, 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 Avliich Xewton's 

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

 they could so put their heads together as to produce the 

 present 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 Unknown God.' " Xot 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 ^lartiiieau is his prophet." For Spencer's doctrine 

 ■of the Unknowable is the least characteristic and least val- 

 uable part of his entire performance. In his "First Prin- 

 ciples " he has made it the propylaeum to the temj^le 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 metaph^'sical as Sir AVilliam Ham- 

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

 " Limits of Religious Thought," to which it immediately 

 succeeded, inlieriting the weakness of their philosophical 

 method. A\'itli Hamilton and ^Mansell, he insisted on the 

 unthinkable and conseqiiently unknowable character of all 

 the primary concepts of both Science and Eeligion. It is 



