Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/70

60 of which he is chief, the planet on which he dwells, the system to which it belongs, and the whole vast system of systems sweeping in unimagined circles through space, all be supposed to exist, and have no architect and no supporter. Such is not the deduction of science, and such is not the conclusion at which the most skilled interpreters of Nature have arrived. In examining any artificial work, it is an instinct with man, and his reason approves, to assign for it a conscious and intelligent cause; and he knows that the cause exists in mind, for without mind nothing could be planned or originated. Not only so, but in every instance we judge of the character of the originating mind by the product. A great and noble work is not originated by a feeble and undeveloped mind, nor a crude and imperfect work by a large and well-disciplined one.

We judge similarly in regard to every work, from the crude utensils of the "cave-dwellers" to the mighty products of a Michael Angelo, a Shakespeare, or a Laplace. So, in judging of works compared with which the mightiest works of man are as mole-hills, whose beauty it is the highest exercise of his genius feebly to copy and represent, whose method and arrangement it is the life-work of the most exalted intellects to discover, and whose extent, either in time or space, he still gropes to find the unit of, we assign for cause a corresponding soul; and he who comprehends best the work is capable of understanding best the architect.

The gods of sects and specialties may perhaps be failing of their accustomed reverence, but, in the mean time, there is dawning on the world, with a softer and serener light, the conception, imperfect though it still may be, of a conscious, originating, all-pervading, active soul—the "Over-Soul," the Cause, the Deity; unrevealed through human form or speech, but filling and inspiring every living soul in the wide universe according to its measure: whose temple is Nature, and whose worship is aspiration.

Science, then, so far from excluding God from the universe, demands him as an ever-active power; but, as man can only know him through his works, and as the universe is yet comparatively unknown to him even in his highest condition, and must remain so while he is confined to earth, it follows that our knowledge, and even our conceptions of him, must be limited and imperfect, and our appreciation of him correspondingly so.

Is there, then, reason, in harmony with science, to expect an existence under more favorable circumstances for a knowledge and appreciation of this originating soul whom science itself demands?

As interpreted by the doctrine of evolution, we find man, as he now exists, with his physical organization and advanced psychical being, the product of a long series of developments. He has arrived, however, only at a certain point in the ascending series; from that point he easily reviews the whole long line beneath him from the very