Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/680

 *ception of this truth conflicted strangely, in his candid mind, with his idealistic prepossessions.

A more consistent and rigorous form of Idealism is that which has been referred to as the strict consequence of Moderate Idealism. This form, which I will term Extreme Idealism, denies the existence of persons as well as things. The Extreme Idealist believes himself to be the only being in the universe. There is to him no period preceding his own existence; none succeeding it. Past and future, except in his own life, have no meaning for him. We cannot reason with him, for all we may say is only a transient mode of his own sensations. Obviously, to such a philosophy there is no reply but one: it is simply unthinkable. Were any one seriously to defend it, the very seriousness of his defense would prove that he did not believe it. For against what or whom would he be contending? Against a phantom of his own mind. And the more pains he took to prove to us that he believed us to have no existence but as a part of himself, the less credit should we attach to his assertions.

Philosophy, therefore, is under a logical compulsion to make the same fundamental assumption as Religion—that of an ultimate, unknown, and all-pervading Power Origin, or Cause. Science, in a variety of ways, does the same. It does so, first, in its belief of a past and a future in the history of the solar system far transcending the past and future of humanity, or indeed of any form of life whatever. Passing at a glance over our brief abode on the face of the earth, Geology pushes its researches back into a time preceding by innumerable ages the existence of mankind, while her elder sister Astronomy carries her vision to a still remoter age, when even the planet we now inhabit was but a fragment in one indistinguishable mass. But it is not only these two sciences that assume the continuance of nature quite independently of our presence or absence; every other science does the like. The botanist, the chemist, the physicist, all believe that the facts they assert are facts in an external nature, the relations of which as now discovered by their several sciences held good before man existed, and will hold good after he has ceased to exist. But to say this, is to say in effect that there is something more than the mere phe