Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/470

456 expresses the confessed inability to know or conceive the nature of the Power manifested through phenomena, it fails to indicate the confessed ability to recognize the existence of that Power as of all things the most certain. I might make clear the contrast between that Comtean Agnosticism which says that "Theology and ontology alike end in the Everlasting No with which science confronts all their assertions," and the Agnosticism set forth in "First Principles," which, along with its denials, emphatically utters an Everlasting Yes. And I might show in detail that Mr. Harrison is wrong in implying that Agnosticism, as I hold it, is anything more than silent with respect to the question of personality; since, though the attributes of personality, as we know it, can not be conceived by us as attributes of the Unknown Cause of things, yet "duty requires us neither to affirm nor deny personality," but "to submit ourselves with all humility to the established limits of our intelligence" in the conviction that the choice is not "between personality and something lower than personality," but "between personality and something higher," and that "the Ultimate Power is no more representable in terms of human consciousness than human consciousness is representable in terms of a plant's functions."

But without further evidence, what I have said sufficiently proves that Mr. Harrison's "criticism keen, trenchant, destructive," as it was called, is destructive, not of an actual doctrine, but simply of an imaginary one. I should hardly have expected that Mr. Harrison, in common with the "Edinburgh Reviewer," would have taken the course, so frequent with critics, of demolishing a simulacrum and walking off in triumph as though the reality had been demolished. Adopting his own figure, I may say that he has with ease passed his weapon through and through "The Ghost of Religion;" but then it is only the ghost: the reality stands unscathed.

Before passing to the consideration of that alternative doctrine which Mr. Harrison would have us accept, it will be well briefly to deal with certain of his subordinate propositions.

After re-stating in a succinct way, the hypothesis that from the conception of the ghost originated the conceptions of supernatural beings in general, including the highest, and after saying that "one can hardly suppose that Mr. Spencer would limit himself to that," Mr. Harrison describes what he alleges to be a prior, and, indeed, the primordial, form of religion. He says:—

There were countless centuries of time, and there were, and there ore, countless millions of men for whom no doctrine of superhuman spirits ever took coherent form. In all these ages and races, probably by far the most numerous that our planet has witnessed, there was religion in all kinds of definite form. Comte calls it fetichism—terms are not important: roughly, we may call it