INTRODUCTION 



parently be, like the " quasi-psychical " charac- 

 ter of the Inscrutable Power, something that 

 we can assert only by sacrificing every effort to 

 give it a demonstrable or comprehensible de- 

 finition. In the text of the " Cosmic Philoso- 

 phy,'* as we remember, there also occurs the 

 expression, which in its own place in our ac- 

 count we have already cited, the thesis that we 

 may say, ^we bear in mind the symbolic char- 

 acter of the word, that " God is Spirit." The 

 words concerning the " quasi-psychical " char- 

 acter of the Inscrutable Power constitute still 

 another of these records of germinal thought. 

 And here, too, the thought was destined to 

 bear, in Fiske's mind, a fruit which the reader 

 of the " Cosmic Philosophy " would hardly 

 have anticipated. As Fiske looked back upon 

 these expressions, from the point of view which 

 he had already reached when he wrote in 1885 

 the Preface to " The Idea of God," they 

 seemed to him, however, to convey a decidedly 

 and explicitly positive tendency which goes be- 

 yond what we have yet been able to attribute 

 to him. He admitted, however, in the Preface 

 in question, that at the time when he wrote the 

 " Cosmic Philosophy " he was himself not fully 

 conscious of all that these thoughts implied. 



'^t^. Ten years later, in his speech at the din- 

 ner given to him by Mr. John Spencer Clark 

 civ 



