Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/485

Rh must necessarily underlie every permanent existence and the universe itself.

The number of world-riddles, as Haeckel says, is diminishing rapidly, and our scientific knowledge has come to be so far-reaching that if we cannot resolve every minor problem of the universe, we have at least gone far toward the solution of the mightiest among the larger questions. One 'comprehensive question/ as he calls it, remains: What is the foundation of the 'Law of Substance,' the law of the persistence of matter and its attribute, force?

"What is the real character of this mighty world-wonder that the realistic scientist calls Nature or the Universe, that the idealist philosopher calls Substance or the Cosmos, what the pious believer calls God?"

"We must admit that we know as little of its essence, as did the ancients or the philosophers of the later centuries, up to our own. The mystery deepens as we probe it; there remains beneath all and behind all an apparently 'unknowable,' to-day, as in all earlier times." Haeckel throws no new light upon this eternal sphinx-life. He claims that the eternity of matter, with its inalienable eternity of unchanging attributes, its eternally persistent motion and energy, means eternal life of the universe, with never-ending renewal of such movements as we are now conscious of and in this probably all men of science are ready to agree with him. But he goes on to assert that the necessary conclusion is the destruction of 'the three central dogmas of the dualistic philosophy—the personality of God, the immortality of the soul and the freedom of the will.' He finds few philosophers willing to go with him to the end of his logic and thinks that 'consecutive thought is a rare phenomenon in nature.' The majority of philosophers are desirous of clinging to the old beliefs on the one hand, while taking hold of the monism of the newer time on the other, seeking to ride both the differently moving steeds and usually ending by dropping from the younger at the limit of their powers of holding on.

This has undoubtedly been true in the past and will probably remain true in the future and as long as man retains his apparently eternal and immortal convictions relating to a higher power; but, admitting Haeckel's accusation and going with him to the ultimate of his deduced facts and law, it seems extremely probable that, arrived at its end, they will all be found much in the position of Haeckel himself, confronting the deduction of Clausius and Lord Kelvin, and will still ask the unanswerable question:

What lies beyond? Who or What inaugurated this eternity? What or Who originated matter? What or Who marked the limits of the universe? If limitless: Who and What filled it with matter and motion and life?

There will still within the soul of every thinking human being