422 THE WOELD OF LIFE 



grand in their revelations; both, offering ever-fresh vistas of 

 unf athomed mysteries ; both impressing upon him the existence 

 of immanent forces and controlling mind-power as their only 

 possible cause. 



I suggest, further, that these deeper and deeper mysteries 

 which confront us everywhere as we advance farther in our 

 knowledge of this universe, are now serving, and will serve 

 in the future so long as man exists upon the earth, to give 

 him more and more adequate conceptions of the power, and 

 perhaps to some extent of the nature, of the author of that 

 universe ; will furnish him with the materials for a religion 

 founded on knowledge, in the place of all existing religions, 

 based largely on the wholly inadequate conceptions and be- 

 liefs of by-gone ages. 



ft 



A Suggestion as to the Origin of Life 



As it may be expected that I should state what is my ovm 

 conception of the power which I claim to be proved to exist, 

 and to be the fundamental cause of the life-world as well as 

 of the material universe, I will here make a few suggestions 

 as to what seems to me to be the least improbable, the least 

 difficult, of all attempts to deal with what Herbert Spencer 

 held to be " unknowable," but the non-existence of which he 

 held to be unthinkable. In the Chapter on Religion, in Dar- 

 win's Life and Letters, he also seems to have rested in the one 

 conclusion, that the universe could not have existed without an 

 intelligent cause, but that any adequate conception of the 

 nature of that cause was beyond the powers of the human mind 

 to form. With these views I am in complete sympathy; but 

 I yet think that we can form some conceptions of the powers 

 at work in nature which help us to overcome the insuperable 

 difficulty as to the nature of the infinite and absolute creator, 

 not only of our world and our universe, but of all that exists 

 or can exist in infinite space. Here, as everywhere in science, 

 we must not attempt to deal with the ultimate problem with- 



