Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/63

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This doctrine of mental origins need not be taken, however, in the sense of materialism. Indeed, its able and exact advocates expressly repudiate the materialistic construction often put upon it; and to meet their views with precision and justice, one ought carefully and persistently to discriminate their doctrine from materialism. To do this may cost much exercise of subtlety; but the distinction is real, be it as subtle as it may. Rather, the new doctrine is in its exactest statement a mode of idealism; and this idealistic philosophy takes two different forms.

In the hands of most evolutionists, the philosophy is agnosticism — idealism arrested at the line of mere subjectivity and sceptical negation. It demands that the God of our familiar traditional religion, the omniscient Creator who sees in the beginning that consummate end when the children of his hand shall bear his perfect spiritual image, and who thus is eternally their Redeemer, shall abdicate in favour of the Unknowable — the omnipresent Power that doubtless is immanent in all things, and whose resistless infinity comes forth in the ever growing process of evolution, but whose nature and whose final goal are forever hidden from even possible knowledge; the Immutable Energy, of which we may declare neither that it is conscious nor unconscious, neither that it is material nor spiritual, but only that it is the Secret behind the Veil.