Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/806

 feel inclined to follow the elevated aspirations of his nature, regarded as the expressions of the Eternal Energy, which, if the philosophy of Mr. Spencer is not a vain illusion, is leading us toward a better future.

Thus the religion of the Unknowable assimilates to itself an ultimate factor which is found in all religions; the desire of uniting one's self with the object of worship, or, at least, of conforming to the rules that proceed from it. Mr. Spencer seems himself to have comprehended the necessity of this extension, if we may judge from a letter which he addressed last year to one of his most earnest disciples in the United States, the Rev. J. M. Savage, a Unitarian minister, in which he felicitated him on having clearly brought out the religious and ethical sides of evolutionary doctrines.

On the other hand, the resources which the religious spirit discovers in the doctrine of the Unknowable have struck even some of Mr. Harrison's co-religionists, who, less bound, perhaps, to the letter of Positivist tradition, have recognized the necessity of giving a broader and more solid support to the worship of Humanity. As Mr. William Frey, an American Comtist, wrote to the Boston "Index" in 1882, the strong feeling which the Comtists experience toward humanity can only become deeper and more intense if they regard it as a mediator between men and the Unknowable, because there will come into play the strongest cord of the religious sentiment—the aspiration of man toward the Infinite.

We should not be surprised at the influence, amounting to a kind of fascination, which the philosophy of Mr. Spencer exercises over an increasing portion of the Anglo-Saxon public. Whether true or false, complete or incomplete, it unquestionably represents the vastest and grandest synthesis that human genius has produced for a long time. After having embraced in succession all the phases of cosmical evolution, all the degrees of organic, sensible, intellectual, and social development, we could foresee that the eminent thinker would enter the domain of religious ideas to inquire into the application of his general law there. We have seen by what conclusions, at once sympathetic and original, his views, in this regard, trench upon nearly all the systems that have issued from the contemporaneous scientific movement.

In 1860 Mr. Laugel called him the last of the English metaphysicians. Mr. Spencer would no more accept this designation now than then. It is nevertheless true that his doctrine of the Unknowable, as Mr. Harrison asserts, is, before everything, of theology, and that in his hands the evolution of Religion becomes the religion of Evolution. The future alone can tell what lot is reserved for this conception, which is doubtlessly not new in itself, but which, for the first time, perhaps, is presented to us as the logical and indispensable complement of a system exclusively based on Positivist methods.