420 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [frr. iii. 



planets in our own system which do not considerably per- 

 turb the motions of the earth. He wished to exclude from 

 science everything which does not conspicuously affect 

 human interests, and everything which by its magnitude 

 d varfs the conception of Humanity. Far sounder would 

 hi 3 views have been had he now and then permitted his 

 thoughts to range to the uttermost imaginable limits of the 

 sidereal universe, and brought himself duly to realize how 

 by the comparison Humanity quite loses its apparent infini- 

 tude. Or had he more carefully analyzed the process of 

 human thinking itself, the study of which he stigmatized 

 as " metaphysical " and profitless, he might perhaps have 

 seen that the world of phenomena speaks to us, everywhere 

 and at all times, if we only choose to listen, of an Infinite and 

 Unknowable Eeality, whereas the conception of Humanity 

 is but the conception of a Finite and Knowable Phenomenon. 

 Here we touch the bottom of his error. This great Being, 

 says the Comtist, this collective Humanity, is our supreme 

 Being, — " the only one we can know, therefore the only one 

 we can worship." On the other hand, the Cosmist asserts, what 

 we know is not what we worship ; what we know is matter 

 of science ; it is only when science fails, and intelligence is 

 bafiBed, and the Infinite confronts us, that we cease to 

 analyze and begin to worship. What men have worshipped, 

 from the earliest times, has been not the Known, but the 

 Unknown. Even the primeval savage, who worshipped 

 plants and animals, worshipped them only in so far as 

 their modes of action were mysterious to him, — only in so 

 far as they constituted a part of the weird uninterpreted 

 world by which he was surrounded. As soon as lie had 

 generalized the dynamic plienomena presented by the plant 

 or the animal, that is, as soon as it became an object of 

 knowledge, it ceased to be an object of worship. As soon as 

 the grander phenomena of sunrise and sunset, storm and 

 Bclipa«, had been partially generalized, they were no longer 



