Nineteenth-Century Science and Religion i6i 



with the schemes of space and time, conceived as abstractions, 

 as an alignment of uniform points and moments. 



Not only is the reality of its variable concrete aspects im- 

 poverished, but it is deprived of that subjective colouring which is 

 an integral part of all experience. That which is given us — in short, 

 that which is effectively lived by us — is not the things or the facts 

 divorced from the soul, but the world in an indivisible union with 

 our spirit, with our sentiments, and with our acts of will. One 

 should not be surprised therefore if, when these abstractions have 

 been constructed, they are found to be insufficient to exhaust that 

 living experience of which they are only fragments ; or that the 

 attempt to erect these fragments into an hypostasis brings us face 

 to face with those difficulties or with those insoluble antinomies 

 which are the arguments of agnosticism. 



Thus space and time, abstractly projected in pretended reality 

 from themselves, give place to contradictions of the actual infinite. 

 Movement, in the attempt to make something absolute from them, 

 leads us also into an infinite process. The dynamic continuity of 

 experience, breaking upon things which ought to act the one upon 

 the other from outside, places us face to face with the difficulty of 

 action from a distance, and so on. It is not difficult to show how 

 all the antinomies on which Spencer bases his agnosticism spring 

 from his abstract intellectualism. 



Analogically, the eternal difficulties which, have always 

 troubled thought in its effort to conceive God and His relations 

 with the world, and which Spencer repeats after the example of 

 Mansel, spring from an abstract conception of the Deity as a thing 

 in itself, as a system enclosed in the mass of its eternity. Hence 

 spring, for example, the contradictions of a divine prescience in 

 which everything is already given and time exhausted, and of 

 human liberty, which presupposes an unforeseeable and inex- 

 haustible future ; or of an Absolute which is the totality of Being 

 and therefore includes everything in itself, and to which, meanwhile, 

 the creative act ought to be linked as a contingent fact. 



Mansel did not stop before these contradictions, just as no 

 agnostic really stops before the supposed limits of thought ; but he 

 had thrown himself beyond them with faith. We must believe 

 in revealed truths, because their incomprehensibility is not greater 

 than that which could be found in any other scientific con- 

 ception, and depends not on those truths, but on a defect of our 



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