90 
wlio demand an elucidation of all difficulties. To them we 
can only say, with Bishop Butler, “ Satisfaction in this sense 
is not the lot of man.” 
But time requires us to hasten on. If twilight has been 
around us in this last discussion, abysmal darkness belongs 
to the depths into which we are next asked to follow. 
We have had a God,* great and adorable though very far 
off, recognized, whom we are bidden to “ invest ” with our 
highest and holiest thought, though He may be inaccessible 
to prayer by reason of mechanical necessity. But, now, what 
if not even this be admitted ? What if the deadly logic of 
Spinoza be valid ? What, again, if God be so far off that He 
condescended not to make us, but only fashioned a sea-jelly 
in the unfathomable ages, the progeny of which after vicissi- 
tudes beyond imagination, after experiencing longings un- 
utterable, and putting forth efforts suggested by the varying 
necessities of its multiform existence, “ climbed up to man.” 
What if Comte be right, and nothing be the fit object of 
human investigation save what can be seen, and measured, 
and counted, and recognized by the senses, and all else, if 
indeed there be anything else, be unfit subjects for human 
thought, unknown and unknowable. These ghastly specu- 
lations, with their multiplying ramifications, form the third 
branch of the hostile array of which we speak. Metaphysics, 
used either simply or in combination with physical theories, 
to efface all the spiritual relations of man. These speculations 
have been dealt with in many able papers read before this 
Institute. That there must be many fallacies in the logic, and 
many slips in the reasoning, which lead to such results we 
may assume to be certain ; and to point out these has been 
the object of our learned members. But there is one mode 
of reasoning which our earliest mathematical training ren- 
dered familiar, and taught us to give it undoubting confidence. 
Who remembers not the boyish satisfaction with which, after 
being led through the series of relations between lines and 
angles, we came at last to the emphatic conclusion that “the 
greater was equal to the less, which is absurd,” and how 
surely we grasped the inference that our premises must have 
been erroneous ? 
And so, I think with the larger part of the portentous 
theories which are now paraded before a world which is^ alas! 
ceasing to be astonished, and rather craving the grotesque 
and the unexpected at the hands of those who are now styled 
* Fragments of Thought, p. 94. 
