Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/487

Rh, as originally elaborated and as recently restated, my argument was that in the discovery by Science that it could not do more than ascertain the order among phenomena, there was involved a tacit confession of impotence in presence of the Mystery of Things—a confession which brought Science into sympathy with Religion; and that in their joint recognition of an Unknowable Cause for all the effects constituting the knowable world. Religion and Science would reach a truth common to the two. I do not see that anything said by my critics has shaken this position. I held at the outset, and continue to hold, that this Inscrutable Existence which Science, in the last resort, is compelled to recognize as unreached by its deepest analyses of matter, motion, thought, and feeling, stands toward our general conception of things, in substantially the same relation as does the Creative Power asserted by Theology; and that when Theology, which has already dropped many of the anthropomorphic traits ascribed, eventually drops the last of them, the foundation-beliefs of the two must become identical. So far as I see, no endeavor has been made to show that this is not the case. Further I have contended, originally and in the article named, that this Reality transcending appearance (which is not simply unknown as Mr. Harrison thinks it should be called, but is proved by analysis of the form of our intelligence to be unknowable), standing toward the Universe and toward ourselves in the same relation as an anthropomorphic Creator was supposed to stand, bears a like relation with it not only to human thought but to human feeling: the gradual replacement of a Power allied to humanity in certain traits, by a Power which we can not say is thus allied, leaves unchanged certain of the sentiments comprehended under the name religious. Though I have argued that in ascribing to the Unknowable Cause of things such human attributes as emotion, will, and intelligence, we are using words which, when thus applied, have no corresponding ideas; yet I have also argued that we are just as much debarred from denying as we are from affirming such attributes; since, as ultimate analysis brings us everywhere to alternative impossibilities of thought, we are shown that beyond the phenomenal order of things, our ideas of possible and impossible are irrelevant. Nothing has been said which requires me to change this view: neither Mr. Harrison's statement that "to make a religion out of the Unknowable is far more extravagant than to make it out of the Equator," nor Sir James Stephen's description of the Unknowable as "like a gigantic soap-bubble not burst but blown thinner and thinner till it has become absolutely imperceptible," seems to me applicable. One who says that because the Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed, can not in any way be brought within the limits of human consciousness it therefore approaches to a nonentity, seems to me like one who says of a vast number that because it passes all possibility of