RELIGIOUS RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT. 347 



with the ascription of intelligence. Not to dwell on the seriality and 

 limitation implied as before, we may note that intelligence, as alone 

 conceivable by us, presupposes existences independent of it and object- 

 ive to it. It is carried on in terms of changes primarily wrought by 

 alien activities — the impressions generated by things beyond conscious- 

 ness, and the ideas derived from such impressions. To speak of an 

 intelligence which exists in the absence of all such alien activities is 

 to use a meaningless word. If, to the corollary that the First Cause, 

 considered as intelligent, must be continually affected by independent 

 objective activities, it is replied that these have become such by act 

 of creation, and were previously included in the First Cause, then the 

 reply is that in such case the First Cause could, before this creation, 

 have had nothing to generate in it such changes as those constituting 

 what we call intelligence, and must therefore have been unintelligent 

 at the time when intelligence was most called for. Hence it is clear 

 that the intelligence ascribed answers in no respect to that which we 

 know by the name. It is intelligence out of which all the characters 

 constituting it have vanished. 



These and other difficulties, some of which are often discussed but 

 never disposed of, must force men hereafter to drop the higher an- 

 thropomorphic characters given to the First Cause, as they have long 

 since dropped the lower. The conception which has been enlarging 

 from the beginning must go on enlarging, until, by disappearance of 

 its limits, it becomes a consciousness which transcends the forms of 

 distinct thought, though it forever remains a consciousness. 



" But how can such a final consciousness of the Unknowable, thus 

 tacitly alleged to be true, be reached by successive modifications of a 

 conception which was utterly untrue ? The ghost-theory of the savage 

 is baseless. The material double of a dead man in which he believes 

 never had any existence. And if by gradual dematerialization of 

 this double was produced the conception of the supernatural agent 

 in general — if the conception of a deity, formed by the dropping of 

 some human attributes and transfiguration of others, resulted from con- 

 tinuance of this process — is not the developed and purified conception 

 reached by pushing the process to its limit a fiction also? Surely, 

 if the primitive belief was absolutely false, all derived beliefs must be 

 absolutely false." 



This objection looks fatal ; and it would be fatal were its premise 

 valid. Unexpected as it will be to most readers, the answer here to 

 be made is that at the outset a germ of truth was contained in the 

 primitive conception — the truth, namely, that the power which mani- 

 fests itself in consciousness is but a differently-conditioned form of the 

 power which manifests itself beyond consciousness. 



Every voluntary act yields to the primitive man proof of a source 

 of energy within him. Not that he thinks about his internal expe- 



