Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/805

Rh of all our thoughts and all our acts toward the service of humanity. How much stronger and more efficacious would this state of spiritual unity become if, instead of resting exclusively on the necessary relations of men, it based itself on the sum of our relations with the Universe, and if, while retaining as its object the reign of justice or happiness in human society, it enveloped that object in the broader end of the conformity of our conduct with the action of the power "other than ourselves, which labors to put order into the world," or, as Matthew Arnold defines it in his felicitous and celebrated formula, "the Power not ourselves, that makes for righteousness"!

But is not this to attribute to the Unknowable an object, a design, a will—attributes absolutely incompatible with the unconditioned and the infinite? Is it not, in short, to return to the doctrine of final causes which has been proscribed by Evolution?

We may answer that, if modern science has cast discredit on the old system of final causes, it has not, it appears, prohibited us from assigning a certain end to the evolution of the Universe taken as a whole; that the tendency toward this end, aside from knowing whether it is conscious or not, intelligent or not, is easily substantiated by the numberless indications of a gradual progress in the development of nature as well as of humanity; and that this tendency toward a determined end contradicts the system of evolution only in so far as it may be copied after the manifestations of our volitional activity. If a person holds that the notions of object, end, tendency, and predetermination are derived from our subjective experiences, we should observe—as Mr. Spencer has done of our notion of force, deduced from the muscular effort—that we are constrained to think of external energy in terms borrowed from our consciousness of internal energy, and that there is nothing to prevent our seeing equally in the notions thus formed the simple symbol of the reality. The essential point is not to forget that here also the Unknowable should be superior and not inferior to our broadest conception of the human faculties.

We have, however, no need at this time to go beyond Mr. Spencer's written thought. He affirms that the laws of Nature are the modes of action of the Unknowable, and that the most important of them, the law of evolution, tends, in the existing Universe, to equilibrium, harmony, and co-ordination, which is interpreted in the moral world by a more complete submission to the injunctions of duty, by the introduction of more justice into the relations of men; in short, by the gradual realization of the conditions necessary to the constant progress of the individual and of society. The more, then, man is conscious of his relations with the Unknowable, and the more he comprehends the solidarity that binds all parts of the Universe, chiefly the members of humanity, the more he will grasp the importance of his modest part in the great drama of Evolution, and the more he will