Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/467

Rh point, in agreement with him. But for this reference it would not have occurred to me to associate in thought Mr. Harrison's criticisms with those of the Edinburgh Reviewer; but now that comparison is suggested, I am struck by the fact that Mr. Harrison's representations of my views diverge from the realities no less widely than those of a critic whose antagonism is unqualified, and whose animus is displayed in his first paragraph.

So anxious is Mr. Harrison to show that the doctrine he would discredit has no kinship to the doctrines called religious, that he will not allow me, without protest, to use the language needed for conveying my meaning. The expression "an Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed," he objects to as being "perhaps a rather equivocal reversion to the theologic type;" and he says this because "in the Athanasian Creed the Third Person 'proceeds' from the First and the Second." It is hard that I should be debarred from thus using the word by this preceding use. Perhaps Mr. Harrison will be surprised to learn that, as originally written, the expression ran—"an Infinite and Eternal Energy by which all things are created and sustained; "and that in the proof I struck out the last clause because, though the words did not express more than I meant, the ideas associated with them might mislead, and there might result such an insinuation as that which Mr. Harrison makes. The substituted expression, which embodies my thought in the most colorless way, I can not relinquish because he does not like it—or rather, indeed, because he does not like the thought itself. It is not convenient to him that the Unknowable, which he repeatedly speaks of as a pure negation, should be represented as that through which all things exist. And, indeed, it would be inconvenient for him to recognize this; since the recognition would prevent him from asserting that "none of the positive attributes which have ever been predicated of God can be used of this Energy."

Not only does he, as in the last sentence, negatively misdescribe the character of this Energy, but he positively misdescribes it. He says—"It remains always Energy, Force: nothing anthropomorphic; such as electricity, or anything else that we might conceive as the ultimate basis of all the physical forces." Now, on page 9 of the essay Mr. Harrison criticises, there occurs the sentence—"The final outcome of that speculation commenced by the primitive man, is that, the Power manifested throughout the Universe distinguished as material, is the same power which in ourselves wells up under the form of consciousness;" and on page 11 it is said that "this necessity we are under, to think of the external energy in terms of the internal energy, gives rather a spiritualistic than a materialistic aspect to the Universe." Does he really think that the meaning of these sentences is conveyed by comparing the ultimate energy to "electricity"? And does he