Evolution as Related to Religious Thought. 331 



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

 experiments may be as unavailing. But while the first 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 April into May and June. The ob- 

 jection to materialism could not be too strenuous, so long 

 as matter was regarded as something which, without inher- 

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

 and pity of mankind. Nay, 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 which Newton'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.' " Not 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 Martineau 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 propylseum to the temple of his 

 thought, but its architecture is conceived in an entirely dif- 

 ferent spirit, aud it only serves to keep us back from what 

 is worthy of our admiration. It is as metaphysical as Prof. 

 Davidson could wish, as metaphysical as Sir William Ham- 

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

 "Limits of Religious Thought," to which it immediately 

 succeeded, inheriting the weakness of their philosophical 

 method. With Hamilton and Mansell, he insisted on the 

 unthinkable and consequently unknowable character of all 

 the primary concepts of both Science and Religion. It is 



