PRIMITIVE M/.N. 345 



whom excess of light has made blind. " If the light 

 that is in man be darkness, how great is that dark- 

 ness." But then this notion of a God is a very old 

 and primitive one, and Spencer takes care to inform 

 us that " first thoughts are either wholly out of 

 harmony with things, or in very incomplete harmony 

 with them," and consequently that old beliefs and 

 generally diffused notions are presumably wrong. 



Is it true, however, that the modern knowledge of 

 nature tends to rob it of a spiritual First Cause ? One 

 can conceive such a tendency, if all our advances in 

 knowledge had tended more and more to identify force 

 with matter in its grosser forms, and to remove more 

 and more from our mental view those powers which 

 are not material ; but the very reverse of this is the 

 case. Modern discovery has tended more and more 

 to attach importance to certain universally diffused 

 media which do not seem to be subject to the laws of 

 ordinary matter, and to prove at once the Protean 

 character and indestructibility of forces, the aggregate 

 of which, as acting in the universe, gives us our 

 nearest approach to the conception of physical omni- 

 potence. This is what so many of our evolutionists 

 mean when they indignantly disclaim materialism. 

 They know that there is a boundless energy beyond 

 mere matter, and of which matter seems the sport and 

 toy. Could they conceive of this energy as the ex- 

 pression of a personal will, they would become theists. 



Man himself presents a microcosm of matter and 

 force, raised to a higher plane than that of the merely 



