Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/138

Rh ideal or divine life. To no theory of the world can man give a willing and a cordial adhesion, then, if it strikes at the heart of his personal reality and contradicts those hopes of ceaseless moral growth that alone make life worth living. Not in its statement of God as the All-in-all, taken by itself, but in its consequent denial of the reality of man — his freedom and immortal growth in goodness — is it that pantheism betrays its insufficiency to meet the needs of the human spirit.

It is no doubt true that this opposition between the doctrine of a Sole Reality and our natural longings for permanence, our natural bias in favour of freedom and responsibility, in itself settles nothing as to the truth or falsity of the doctrine. It might be that the system of Nature, it might be that its Ground, is not in sympathy or accord with “the bliss for which we sigh.” But so long as human nature is what it is, so long as we are by essence prepossessed in favour of our freedom and yearn for a life that may put death itself beneath our feet, and with death imperfection and wrong, so long will our nature reluctate, so long will it even revolt, at the prospect of having to accept the doctrine of pantheism; so long shall we instinctively draw back from that vast and shadowy Being which, be it con-scious or unconscious or simply the Unknowable, must for us and our highest hopes be verily the