50 THE CREED OF SCIENCE, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL. 



atomistic materialism of some of the other expositors of 

 Darwin's doctrines. 



Now, for my own part, I am quite prepared to give 

 up the old anthropomorphic Creator, who went to work 

 in the construction of worlds and organisms as the 

 architect and the machinist. I gladly deliver myself, 

 by the aid of the scientific doctrine of the eternity and 

 indestructibility of matter, from the old dogma of the 

 creation ex nihilo, of the earth and planets by creative 

 fiat. I am even ready, on the strength of the united 

 demand of modern philosophy and thought, made by 

 Spinoza, Fichte, Shelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and 

 Hartmann, as thinkers ; by Schliermacher as theologian, 

 and by Goethe as poet, to surrender the human attri- 

 butes of personality and consciousness in the Deity ; and 

 all the more readily as we are assured by philosophy 

 that these attributes, which we find we can never, by 

 the utmost effort of thought, connect in any way with 

 the notion of God, are in clear contradiction to the 

 notion of an Absolute Being, which, as such, cannot be 

 subject to the limitations which consciousness implies. 

 We can give up all these imperfect conceptions of God, 

 one and all ; but yet we cannot abandon all belief in a 

 purpose, an intention, a finality of some sort, which has 

 been and still is manifested in the universe, and in the 

 evolution of human destiny. 



We cannot give up belief in purpose, because the 

 alternative belief is that the earth and the million spheres 

 in space came from mechanical necessity and for no end, 

 and that life and consciousness came from this same 

 mechanical necessity, supplemented by chance as the 

 active shaping agency and real divinity ; that all things 

 came from chance and that the universe drifts at hazard 

 towards no particular goal but final dissolution. 



