306 THE FUTUKE OF RELIGION" AND MORALS. 



confirmed by Science. Far as her ken stretches back- 

 ward in time through millions of centuries, she discovers 

 law ; deep as she penetrates now into space, she finds 

 the same. But, replies the materialist, these laws are 

 only the necessary behaviour of matter ; and matter, 

 filling space, the seat and source of its own energies and 

 governed by its own necessary laws, is God. There is 

 nothing but matter, coarse or fine, together with the 

 energies which play about it, filling up space ; nothing 

 but matter, composed ultimately of similar atoms, from 

 the solid spheres to the azure abyss in which they swim ; 

 itself merely a fine ether, a subtler and more attenuated 

 matter. Pemocritus was right. There exists nothing 

 but atoms and the void ; save only that the void is 

 ether, a rarer matter. And in reply to this, we can only 

 ask the materialist, How can this be maintained to-day, 

 when it is acknowledged that all we know of matter 

 is only phenomenal, only what our five imperfect senses 

 tell us; when, further, the most important fact about 

 matter is now seen to be, not the matter itself, whose 

 atoms seem vanishing quantities, but the various Protean 

 energies that play about it, and when these various 

 energies, transmutable as they are into each other, are 

 themselves only known phenomenally, as interpreted by 

 a higher spiritual energy, which last, however mysteri- 

 ously conditioned by these lower physical energies, can 

 in no respect be regarded as a product of them, since 

 of productivity science knows nothing beyond the bare 

 fact of succession ? 



And, in fact, notwithstanding assertions to the con- 

 trary, it may be doubted if this is not the position held 

 by the author of the History of Creation, as we have 

 seen it is that of Lange in his History of Materialism. 

 For Professor Haeckel has prefixed to the title-page of 



