TRUE ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 1 47 



^ 9. The Ideal of true anthropomorphism, and 

 the ideal also of true science, would be realized 

 when all our explanations made use of no principles 

 which were not self-evident to human minds, self- 

 explanatory to human feeling-s. Such Ideals are, It 

 is true, remote from the present state of our know- 

 ledge, but we may lay it down as a canon of Inquiry 

 that a principle Is the better, other things being 

 equal, the more closely it clings to^ the analogy of 

 human agency, the more completely parallel Its 

 course runs to the course of the human mind. 



When by the master-key of the Self all' problems 

 have been undone, when all things have been shown 

 to be of like nature with the mind that knows them, 

 then at length will knowledge be perfect and per- 

 fectly anthropomorphic. 



Our care, then, must be, not to avoid anthropo- 

 morphism, but to avoid bad anthropomorphism, not 

 to allow the Inevitable anthropomorphism of our 

 explanations to become confused or inconsistent, or 

 to lag behind the conceptions of our highest aspir- 

 ations. 



We start, then, with the certainty of our own> 

 existence, on the basis and analogy of which the: 

 world must be Interpreted. 



