Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/329

Rh "notamment Tiele, 'Manuel de l'histoire des Religions,' traduit par M. Maurice Vernes, Liv. II, et dans la 'Revue de l'Histoire des Religions,' la 'Religion de l'ancien empire Chinois' par M. Julius Happel (t. IV, do. 6)"]

Whether Mr. Harrison's opinion is or is not changed by this array of counter-opinion, he may at any rate be led somewhat to qualify his original statement that "Nothing is more certain than that man everywhere started with a simple worship of natural objects."

I pass now to Mr. Harrison's endeavor to rebut my assertion that he had demolished a simulacrum and not the reality.

I pointed out that he had inverted my meaning by representing as negative that which I regarded as positive. What I have everywhere referred to as the All-Being, he named the All-Nothingness. What answer does he make when I show that my position is exactly the reverse of that alleged? He says that while I am "dealing with transcendental conceptions, intelligible only to certain trained metaphysicians," he is "dealing with religion as it affects the lives of men and women in the world;" that "to ordinary men and women, an unknowable and inconceivable Reality is practically an Unreality;" and that thus all he meant to say was that the "Everlasting Yes" of the "evolutionist," "is in effect on the public a mere Everlasting No" (p. 354). Now compare these passages in his last article with the following passages in his first article:—"One would like to know how much of the Evolutionist's day is consecrated to seeking the Unknowable in a devout way, and what the religious exercises might be. How does the man of science approach the All-Nothingness" (p. 502)? Thus we see that what was at first represented as the unfitness of the creed considered as offered to the select is now represented as its unfitness considered as offered to the masses. What were originally the "Evolutionist" and the "man of science" are now changed into "ordinary men and women" and "the public;" and what was originally called the All-Nothingness has become an "inconceivable Reality." The statement which was to be justified is not justified, but something else is justified in its stead.

Thus it is, too, with the paragraph in which Mr. Harrison seeks to disprove my assertion that he had exactly transposed the doctrines of Dean Mansel and myself, respecting our consciousness of that which transcends perception. He quotes his original words, which were, "there is a gulf which separates even his all-negative deity from Mr. Spencer's impersonal, unconscious, unthinkable Energy." And he then goes on to say: "I was speaking of Mansel's Theology, not of his Ontology. I said deity not the Absolute." Very well; now let us see what this implies. Mansel, as I was perfectly well aware, supplements his ontological nihilism with a theological realism. That which in his ontological argument he represents as a mere "negation of conceivability," he subsequently reasserts on grounds of faith, and clothes