Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/347

Rh Clearly, then, by the never-ceasing verification of its dicta and by the increasing efficiency and wider range of its guidance, Science is gaining a greater and greater Authority; at the same time that the Authority of Theology is being decreased by the discrediting of its statements and by its unsuccessful regulation of conduct. Hence if Reason, whenever it abdicates in favor of Authority, has to choose between the two, it is compelled to accept the Authority of Science rather than that of Theology, where they are in conflict. So far from strengthening his own position by showing how large a share Authority has, and ought to have, in determining our beliefs, it seems to me that Mr. Balfour strengthens the position of his opponents.

Not unfitly introduced by the foregoing considerations, Mr. Balfour's assault on the fundamental position held by me may now be dealt with. He supposes that he has shown it to be untenable, and is thought to have done so by others. Here are the relevant passages. After describing me as holding that "beyond what we think we know, and in closest relationship with it, lies an infinite field which we do not know, and which with our present faculties we can never know, yet which can not be ignored without making what we do know unintelligible and meaningless," he proceeds:—

"But he has failed to see whither such speculations must inevitably lead him. He has failed to see that if the certitudes of science lose themselves in depths of unfathomable mystery, it may well be that out of these same depths there should emerge the certitudes of religion; and that if the dependence of the 'knowable' upon the 'unknowable' embarrasses us not in the one case, no reason can be assigned why it should embarrass us in the other.

"Mr. Spencer, in short, has avoided the error of dividing all reality into a Perceivable which concerns us, and an Unperceivable which, if it exists at all, concerns us not. Agnosticism so understood he explicitly repudiates by his theory, if not by his practice. But he has not seen that, if this simple-minded creed be once abandoned, there is no convenient halting-place till we have swung round to a theory of things which is its precise