Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/801

Rh himself admits that we may accept with full confidence all that the evolutionist philosophy affirms and contests with reference to the permanent indications of an ultimate energy. Now, is not this concession of Mr. Harrison's the complete refutation of his thesis relative to the negative nature of the Unknowable?

He adds, indeed, that an existence of which we can know nothing remains, in the religious point of view, as if it did not exist. To this objection it may be replied that he consents himself to admit mystery as an element of the religious sentiment. We will only add to this, with Mr. Spencer, that it is an essential element of it, and in this respect the Unknowable is susceptible of satisfying the most difficult imaginations, for it is the mystery of mysteries, and something that we may be sure will never be cleared up in this world, whatever may be the progress of science. Mr. Harrison commits an error—especially strange with a positivist—when he reproaches evolutionism for using the term Unknowable instead of Unknown. The Unknown includes a knowable part, the sum of the phenomena and laws which still escape our perception, but which we may be able to know and doubtless will know more and more. The Unknowable, on the other hand, represents what will always escape our knowledge by virtue of our intellectual organization itself—the first cause, the Noumenon, the essence of things—unless Mr. Harrison, urging the doctrine of positivism to an extreme, prohibits us from mentioning all that transcends phenomena and their relations, even in order to declare it Unknowable! As M. Littré admits: "Immensity, material as well as intellectual, appears under its double character of reality and inaccessibility. It is an ocean that beats against our shore, and for which we have neither bark nor sail, but the clear vision of which is as salutary as formidable!"

A second element, which every one agrees in declaring characteristic of religion, is that feeling, of a complex nature, which is interpreted, according to circumstances, into wonder or fear, enthusiasm or stupor, before the object of religious contemplation. Is not this one of the impressions most easily engendered by the discovery of that mysterious energy that rises, at the end of all our investigations, in all the avenues of knowledge, as if by the conception of that substantial stratum which remains when all else changes and passes away primordial foundation of Nature and consciousness, without which, if we could only suppose it absent for a second, the whole Universe would resolve itself into chaos or into nothing?

Schleiermacher referred the essence of religion to a feeling of dependence. Does not Evolution teach that the force of which we are conscious whenever we produce a change by our own effort is correlative to the power that transcends consciousness, and can we imagine a closer dependence than this relation of the individual with the ultimate Energy of which it is, like all of Nature, a transient production?