Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/503

478 Augustine, Plato had gone. So far we have gone. Beyond that, said St. Augustine, the truth was not revealed to human wisdom, but only to humble faith. Beyond that, with the rational consequences that we have been able to draw from it in the foregoing, we are frankly agnostic. If any man knows more about the Powers in the world than science has found out by patient examination of the facts, let him rejoice in his knowledge. We are not in possession of such knowledge. We believe in the Conservation of the physical forces, in the Law of Evolution as it is at present and for a limited past time found to express the facts of nature, and in the fact of the Dissipation of Energy. All this we believe as the scientifically probable view, and we do so on the authority of certain students of physical science, who, having examined the facts, seem to agree upon so much as capable of popular exposition. We believe in such other results of science as are known to us. But beyond this nothing as to the Powers in the world is clear to us. We know nothing about individual immortality, nothing about any endless future progress of our species, nothing about the certainty that what men call from without goodness must empirically triumph just here in this little world about us. All that is dark. We know only that the highest Truth is already attained from all eternity in the Infinite Thought, and that in and for that Thought the victory that overcometh the world is once for all won. Whatever happens to our poor selves, we know that the Whole is perfect. And this knowledge gives us peace. We know that our moral Vindicator