Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/802

782 It is of a power conceived in this manner that we may well say, In illo vivimus, movemur, et sumus (in it we live, and move, and are).

The conditions indispensable to becoming the object of a religion are thus found in the Unknowable, as well as in the Eternal, the Absolute, the Self-Existent, the Most High, the Only Pure, or whatever other qualifications men may have made the equivalent of the divine. The last word of Evolution agrees with the definitions of the most refined theologists, which, transcending vulgar symbolism, have constantly recognized God in the double character of reality and incomprehensibility. We may add that, before becoming the scientific faith of Spencer, Huxley, and even of Haeckel, this religious conception has sufficed for men of the highest mind and the most pious imagination, such as Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Kant, Goethe, Shelley, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Emerson, and even M. Rénan, It can lead not to religion only, but even to mysticism, however little, like some Neoplatonists and certain Hindoo philosophers, one may become absorbed in the conception of the supreme unity. Under this relation, the danger is not that it will remain without influence, but that it will communicate to its adepts a kind of vertigo more formidable than the fascination of the abyss, either by the contrast of its incommensurable grandeur with the insignificance of our being, or by the opposition of its immutable Unity with the unlimited Variety and perpetual expansion of the material Universe. These sentiments, as Mr. Spencer remarks, can only increase in frequency as well as in intensity as the human mind becomes more capable in seizing the comprehensiveness of things and their complex relations.

Certainly, it is no longer possible to attribute to that Supreme Reality goodness, consciousness, and personality, as we conceive them. But do our conceptions exhaust the modes of the infinite? Mr. Harrison will see only the negative side of the Unknowable. Whether you employ, he tells us, the term existence or energy, you never have anything but a scientific generalization, a dumb, blind, insensible entity, without common attributes, and consequently without possible