Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/91

Rh not believe that we are physically so well cared for as we are—naturally selected, evolved, provided with every possible adaptation to our material environment, and given the prize at last as "the fittest of all possible beings to survive"—and then are left utterly in the lurch as regards all our higher wants. No, our instinct revolts against such a supposition; and we crave to know on what grounds something can be said, as well as on what grounds almost everything can be denied.

3. Now, Mr. Spencer could help us in this quest, if he would. His analysis, in "First Principles," of our religious conceptions shows what he could do. He there—while carefully warning us that all our knowledge is merely relative, and that our reasoning faculties do not present to us truth as it is, but only as it is reflected on the mirror of our mind—places nevertheless such confidence in those faculties that he allows them, in Buddhist-fashion, to strip away feature after feature, as it were, from our religious conception of God, and to reduce it to a grim skeleton labeled "Everlasting Force." But why "Force" only? To begin with, surely this also is a "conception." It is engendered by a multitude of observations blending into a higher unity and taking at last a definite shape. And the only sanction it has to rest upon is, not (ex hypothesi) any certainty or absolute truth in human logic, but simply an ineradicable faith that, to us at any rate, the notions of "permanence" and "force" sufficiently represent though they may not actually be, the truth. We seem, then, already to have made the grand transition from reasoning to conceiving, from destruction to construction, from restless analysis to quiet synthesis, and from logic to belief that the great Unknown is, in one word, Power—"an infinite and eternal energy."

4. But just as we draw from the stores of our own consciousness this idea of "Power," of force, of muscular or mental energy, precisely in the same way we are justified in drawing the idea of "purpose" in the direction of that energy. In fact, we can not anyhow conceive of force without "direction" of some kind; and our instincts imperatively demand of us, when we think of force in the highest and sublimest way we can, that we impregnate that idea with another product of our plastic imagination, and conceive it as efficiently directed to some worthy end—in short, as power and wisdom combined. This may be, and undoubtedly is, quite as human and relative and provisional a conception as that of a pure blind, unguided Force would be. But while the mind shrinks with unmitigated horror from the notion of "an infinite and eternal Energy," loose as it were in the universe, without any rational purpose or aim, but wielding portentous cosmic forces at hap-hazard, as a madman or a rogue-elephant might do, the mind rests and is satisfied when it can once feel assured that all is guided and has perfect efficiency for (what we can only call) some worthy "design." The word is, of course, utterly inadequate when things of such a scale are in question. But can Mr. Spencer or any one