354 THE FUTURE OF RELIGION AND MORALS. 



existence of God has been accepted as complete and 

 decisive. This, however, leaves God, in Kant's system, 

 where he is posited before Kant's refutation began, as an 

 absolute Being behind all experience, the finally unfathom- 

 able but real ultimate source o the phenomena of mind 

 as of matter ; a notion in all essential particulars the 

 same as the conception of Spinoza reproduced by Goethe 

 and Spencer, which we have already presented. 



4. This conception of a grand Keality, whose phe- 

 nomenal projections in space and in our consciousness 

 alone are knowable, is a great as well as philosophical 

 conception, and probably that with which all thinking 

 men will finally close as the worthiest that finite faculty 

 can frame of Deity. It has the merit of reconciling most 

 of what Science has been teaching with all that Philo- 

 sophy whose special business it is to decide upon the 

 question has yet been able to agree upon. Further 

 and this is important it satisfies the demands of the 

 imagination, as shown by its general acceptance by 

 imaginations of 'the grand order, as those of Goethe, 

 Wordsworth, Shelley, Carlyle ; it falls in also with the 

 instinctive beliefs of the human race, which, at bottom, 

 and ever in its own blind wisdom, both believed in God 

 and acknowledged His final incomprehensibility. 



But will this conception offer any effectual check to 

 the new and all-menacing materialism ? Yes ; we think 

 so. For the universe is no longer regarded as made up 

 solely of matter, nor yet of matter and energy in conjunc- 

 tion. Matter has not so completely filled up the universe, 

 either as diffused ether or as solid bodies, but that there 

 is room for an all-important principle that it is not 

 material behind. Nor has energy, whether chemical, 

 electrical, mechanical or thermal, exhausted all possible 

 forms of phenomenal energy, and still less their source, 



