Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/310

Rh because both mean variety of action. He delights in the triumphs of the victors, in the groans of the conquered, in the sportiveness of young animals, in the writhing of a poor beast that dies in torture, in the insidious struo-o-le for existence that the Entozoa carry on, in the hopeless sighs that men send up to him in their woe, and in the ideal raptures and agonies of saints, artists, and lovers. All these things he likes, because they are just so many forms of existence. He wants plenty of life and vigor to contemplate, as a boy wants stiff soap-suds to make pretty bubbles for his pleasure as he lies idle. This being is doubtless finite (like his brother, the Setebos of the inimitable monologue that Browning has put into Caliban’s mouth). But just now he reigns hereabouts, even as Caliban’s Setebos reigned in the island. And his designs are so obviously shown in nature, that anybody ought to believe in him who simply looks at the facts of experience.”

Of this horrible doctrine we apprehend that experience as such offers no disproof. For all that science can say, we might be in the hands of just such a demon. Hence it behooves religious students to cease looking for the living God among the dead facts of physical science, and to betake themselves to their own proper field. Science simply leaves all such hypotheses utterly doubtful. Our little corner of the world may have become what it is in any one of numberless physically definable ways. And, if designed, its immediate purpose may be any one of numberless purposes. It is not probable that experience can tell us much about that matter. Science