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exhaust Lockeism, which is what it seems to me he has not done. Until that 
is fully accomplished the philosophy of the future will be very little better than 
the philosophy of the past. When we have pushed our explorations of mind 
to the uttermost limits we are referred to matter, he says, for the final 
answer. Now, “we” are the third party. He teUs us there are mind and 
matter to start with, and then he introduces the demanding ego ^ — the 
person who is to deal with the whole subject. He should here define surely 
what he means by the “ agnosticism ” he professes. He scarcely has done 
this, because it does not suffice to tell us that agnosticism means a 
confession that we do not know. Within a certain region we do know. The 
Gnostics of the earlier Church — the Gnostics of Christian times — were 
in the habit of attempting the realm of the unseen, and there speculating. 
We object to this ; and although Clement of Alexandria thought fit to 
call the true Christian a Gnostic he did not call him so in that sense, but in 
another, viz., as truly wise ; which I must not detain you by dwelling on. Now, 
modern Agnostics, those who do not know those things which the Gnostics 
professed to know, ought to tell us more distmctly that they are only Agnostics 
beyond the sphere of the physical, where they have no perceptions. They 
would know everything in the sphere of the physical, but beyond that they 
admit themselves to have no natural knowledge whatever. They are quite 
right ; and in that sense every Christian is an Agnostic so far as his natural 
knowledge is concerned — he has no formal knowledge of things unseen by the 
aid of merely natural faculties and powers. We have no exact knowledge of 
causation. We can recognise that in the physical world in all its departments 
there is evidently a causation of various kinds ; but we cannot penetrate any 
farther. We are shut up in the limits of the physical. We can go no 
farther than acknowledging that there is an unseen world beyond, in which 
lie causation, contingency, the power of conscious action. These at once 
take us into another sphere : they are utterly beyond the physical, and 
if people would only honestly tell us that they mean no more by their 
agnosticism than that the natural man discerneth not things of the 
Spirit, I should quite agree with them. I here put it into more theological 
language than I should care to force on them at the outset ; but I think they 
are bound to tell us that the unseen which lies beyond the phenomenal 
world, does contain the realities without which everything in the seen or 
physical world would have been unknown. Mr. Herbert Spencer 
exhausts a great deal of space in order to prove this, or nearly to prove it ; 
but he is indistinct, and will not come to the point with the broad statement 
that in the world of the unseen lie all the powers which originate what he 
calls “forces.” Professor Tait and Mr. Balfour Stewart almost deny that there 
are such things as forces : they wish to get rid of the word altogether. It is 
very difficult for them to find place for forces in the physical univer.se. Forces 
lie beyond : call them by what name you will, they lie beyond. If 
once Mr. Herbert Spencer would deal effectually with this question of the 
causes of the physical which lie in the unseen, he would have less difficulty in 
finding out the God whom we adore, who is the Cause of all things finite, and 
