deliverance by going back to Kant, when he said "I was compelled to remove knowledge that I might make room for faith." The German words are strong: "Ich musste das Wissen aufheben um zum Glauben Platz zu machen." At such a hearing the pure mystic rejoices, for he is prone to be sceptical of information about the highest things conveyed by channels of mere reason. So, too, should Huxley have been glad of the Kantian philosophy thus far, since he affirms that "the ground of everyone of our actions, and the validity of all our reasonings, rest upon the great act of faith which leads us to take the experience of the past as a safe guide in our dealings with the present and the future." But if science and religion are both ultimately resolvable into acts of faith, why accept the one and reject the other? Countless millions have shaped their lives on the belief that Nature was not strictly uniform; that a Power existed by which its ordinary course might be suspended or reversed. Nor is the intellect bewildered by such a limit to uniformity, as J. S. Mill frankly conceded, if we grant with Christians an Almighty Creator of heaven and earth. It is far more difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of mind as the product in any intelligible sense of mindless matter. I can easily believe in miracles, provided there is a Disposer of all things who wills to work them; but in blind Chance or eyeless Necessity I cannot so much as discover a positive meaning at all. And I am convinced that the agnostic's razor-edge between Aye and No on this subject will never afford safe walking. But since faith must be our portion, and men like T. H. Huxley refuse to have faith in God while making it the guarantee of what they term Nature, let me ask where does the difference lie that justifies their double attitude? Clearly

in the evidence which proves one aot of faith to be reasonable and the other unreasonable. Behold us, then, brought into the jury-box after we had been sent home as mystics who needed not knowledge upon which to frame a verdict in religion; still are we driven to the exercise of understanding just as before Kant wrote.

Professor Huxley rejected with scorn "the wonderful fallacy that the laws of nature are agents, instead of being, as they really are, a mere record of experience, upon which we base our interpretations of that which does happen, and our anticipation of that which will happen." Here is more than a summer day's task for the intelligent British jury, called upon to decide whether experience has been always uniform, without shadow of turning in the immeasurable past, nay in the immediate present. For they will have heard rumors of telepathy and perhaps have taken part in psychical research. At all events, they know that the historical religion of Europe is committed to belief in the Resurrection of Christ from the deada fact, if it be true, which no one would cite by way of illustrating the uniformity of Nature. What, then, is the real drift of Huxley's appeal to Kant? Did he propose to give unto Faith a plenary indulgence whereby it might believe as it listed? Not at all. He meant to banish from thought and discussion the whole religious problem with whatever it implied. Now Kant, so far as method is concerned, was apparently anxious to transfer that problem from the ground of "pure Reason," where it could never in his opinion be solved, to another and a higher, the realm of conscience and conduct, where life demanded its solution. But Huxley, who had gone with him one mile, stopped dead when invited to travel a second, of which the goal was Religion

Regained. He replied to the philosopher who was for advancing along this open road by retorting on him in Kant's own style, "The limitation of our faculties renders real answers to such questions not merely impossible, but theoretically inconceivable." In later years, as I ventured once to say, the Professor contented himself with assigning all these problems to the Unknown, "leaving the Unknowable in sole charge of Mr. Spencer." Yet the sentence I have just quoted occurs in an article on "Agnosticism," dated 1889; and I marvel in what more stringent language we could have been told to discharge from our minds every hope of attaining the facts, without which Religion becomes the emptiest of dreams.

No doubt the heyday of this fierce unbelieving movement is over; we may watch Darwin with his train of scientific demigods going swiftly down the sky. Spencer himself, most combative and unyielding of benevolent souls, ends his Autobiography in a key of elegiac sadness, regretting the burden put upon him of prophesying about an Absolute whose one unquestionable attribute is final despair. When a man of boundless self-conceit-and such, intellectually considered, Spencer was can desire the churches with their dogmas and priesthoods not to vanish too quickly from the scene, "What," in the words of St. Paul, "shall we say to these things?" Much more powerfully than a retractation on bended knees, or any palinodia prescribed by prelates, do the last pages of Spencer's writing bear witness to the "deep heart of man," which enshrines his most consummate Reason, not to be defeated by ten thousand denials of its faculty to plant a sure step in the world beyond phenomena. I have been calling up the names of stars of the first magnitude on that impenetrably dark vault where the

Unknowable rayed out blackness. Let me add one more, the curiously variable light, known to some of us in both his aspects, of J. G. Romanes. This chief of science, whom no small company reckoned as Darwin's successor (though of course not his equal), once published anonymously under the signature of "Physicus" a startling challenge, which he designated A Candid Examination of Theism. The volume dated 1878-just on forty years ago is lying open on my desk; but I could almost rehearse without consulting it passages that have lingered in memory, so bold and pathetic was their tone in the very height of "victorious analysis" then prevailing. Romanes, in his character of man of science, felt bound to declare that, if the experiencephilosophy were valid, most assuredly there was no God; for "the hypothesis of Mind in nature is as certainly superfluous to account for any of the phenomena of nature, as the scientific doctrine of the persistence of force and indestructibility of matter is certainly true."

Could the gentle David Hume have read these words, a smile, I think, would have passed over his countenance. "Persistent force" and "indestructible matter," as known by experience to creatures of a day, may serve our little schemes of "interpretation and anticipation" very well; but how can we possibly ascertain that matter and force are eternal, except by transcending our experience? A forbidding "if" stands on the threshold; "if" things were ever as we now think they are; "if" the record of their action which we term their "laws" never was different; and "if" we had any means of finding out the condition of existence, or whether anything existed, in the infinite past. To affirm Eternal Being is, indeed, to plunge into deeps beyond sounding.

But to affirm it as pure Unreason— which is the necessary implication of Romanes, with his mindless force and matter-appears to me the sum of all possible audacities. And is "science" bound by an indissoluble ligament to this Siamese twin? So surely as we have knowledgethus runs the conclusion-so certain is it that the First Being, Cause, Reality-names will not alter the case has none. I set down words that shock by their violent assault on our powers of belief. Yet this, or nothing at all, is what Romanes intended to assert. The man of science could not pause until he had reached that absolute negation. But the man of sense revolted, and he wrote:

With the utmost sorrow I find myself compelled to accept the conclusions here worked out. . . . Whether I regard the problem of Theism on the lower plane of strictly relative probability, or on the higher plane of purely formal considerations, it equally becomes my obvious duty to stifle all belief of the kind which I conceive to be the noblest and to discipline my intellect with regard to this matter into an attitude of the purest scepticism. And forasmuch as I am far from being able to agree with those who affirm that the twilight doctrine of the "new faith" is a desirable substitute for the waning splendor of "the old," I am not ashamed to confess that with this virtual negation of God, the universe to me has lost its soul of loveliness. . . . There is a dreadful truth in those words of Hamilton-Philosophy having become a meditation, not merely of death, but of annihilation, the precept "Know Thyself" has become transformed into the terrific oracle to Oedipus

"Mayest thou ne'er know the truth of what thou art."

It is consoling to remember that this victim of science falsely so-called was rescued in time out of the dungeon of

We

Giant Despair, and found the Divine Master who had never been far from him. Professor Romanes lived to understand that his reasoning to the perfect Unreason of all things was a pure sophism. It made the universe a riddle indeed of Oedipus, but Oedipus himself was the solution; and when he defined his own nature truly the Sphinx of Materialism flung herself headlong down from her rock. must-I would repeat after Descartes-first inquire, "What is man?" before we attempt the harder question, "What is not man?" The light that never was on sea or land is the true light and shines in us, "Lux in tenebris lucet." That in our incompleteness it should be dimmed and often clouded over is not wonderful. But that in the myriads upon myriads of star-clusters, entrancingly fair even to human eyes, moving in measures which our finest mathematics cannot cope with, yet on laws reducible to the formulas of Kepler and Newtonthat in such music of the spheres no Reason should be, or ever have been, the master-player, is out of all possibility; and those who give in to a superstition so enormous deserve to be told, reversing the well-known words of Polonius, that there is madness in their method. Of the philosophy which affirms phenomena to be the only certainties, and mind to be the "epiphenomenon" of matter, we may say what Horace writes of Love:

Haec si quis tempestatis prope ritu Mobilia et caeca fluitantia sorte laboret Reddere certa sibi, nihilo plus explicet

ac si

Insanire paret certa ratione modoque. But why, it may be asked, did men of rare intellectual ability take delight in sceptically denying its source and standard, which can only be Mind? The reply given by Sir Oliver Lodge, himself a scientific man of vast achievements, is that their very success.

in one province of knowledge so absorbed their thought as to induce a partial oblivion of the whole. In other words, analysis though a good servant is a bad master. Goethe warned his own age, in verses too familiar for quotation, that to dissect the living might yield all its parts to the experimentalist, but not the spirit which was fled. The intellect, like the dyer's hand, although it has safeguards of its own, may be subdued to what it works in; for not the proudest genius can reflect all the lights innumerable of Being. There is, however, something more to be added, which struck me in reading the American Lester Ward, whose comprehensive treatise on Pure Sociology appeared in 1903. The passage now in my view appears to me so frank and significant that I may be allowed to transcribe its main portion. Professor Ward says:

Most psychologists, and also the world at large, regard consciousness as something that differs toto coelo from all other things. They are scarcely willing to admit that it can be a natural thing at all. The testimony on this point is so nearly unanimous that it seems almost presumptuous in anyone to attempt to stem such a torrent. It is not confined to persons of a theological bent, but extends to the most outspoken evolutionists, like Spencer and Huxley. But it is difficult to see why this should be so. It practically amounts to a recognition of discontinuity, and seems to me virtually to give away the whole evolutionary or monistic hypothesis. If at this particular point where psychic phenomena begin there is an absolute break, and something is introduced whose elements are not contained in anything that preceded it, I do not see why we should find any fault with the introduction of any number of such external elements or factors, and there seems to be no reason for stopping short of the most

arbitrary theological explanation of all the phenomena of the universe.*

I cannot extol Professor Ward's English as equal to that of Hume or Huxley; but it serves to bring out a point of supreme interest and I submit his contention to thoughtful readers. If matter in motion, unaided and alone, with no other properties or powers, but simply the phenomenon as we know it, could bring forth Mind, or turn into Mind, then the universe of thought as we know it would require no intelligent Cause, and Materialism to the extent of sheer Atheism would be the sole philosophy credible. Hence the tremors which assail our Washington denier of "theological explanations," when he perceives the captains of evolution rising up one after another to declare that, as Huxley says, besides Matter and Force there is a third thing in the universe, namely, consciousness. This importunate third thing stands like a gateless barrier to check the march of sincere Materialists who would conquer the world without deceiving it, and of such, I believe, was Professor Ward. He wrote, for instance, that "there can be no psychic force where there is no mind, no vital force where there is no life. There can be no mind where there is no brain or nerve ganglia, no life where there is no animal, plant, protist, or protoplasm," and he will admit nothing more than that "the universe possesses the potency of life and mind." I call this intellectual honesty. Men of a character so straight do not put forward the doctrine of mindless matter as the whole of truth when assailing orthodoxy, and of matter as a mere "state of consciousness" or "symbol of the unknowable X," when assailed in their turn. For the sleight of hand is so far from being sound philosophy that it is not even good manners. W. *Pure Sociology, p. 128.

must drive the logic and fact of the situation home. Either Mind is the origin of Matter, or Matter is the origin of Mind, or both alike are derived from that which is neither as we apprehend them. If I may recur to my Japanese illustration, since the agnostic does not know whether the Mikado exists, he is debarred from affirming that the Shogun however disguised is the one supreme ruler by whose fiat all things happen in the Kingdom of the Rising Sun. Professor Ward denies the Mikado; and his Shogun will consequently be required to explain how certain enactments— let us say touching the temple-services -are within his power. If he has solemnly declared, and indeed proved by evidence, that he does not so much as know what is meant by a temple or by religion, being himself altogether secular in views and principles, those who have trusted in his universal jurisdiction may well feel unhappy.

The vital issue turns on consciousness and conscience; in other words, on human knowledge and human action strictly so-called, known to us by immediate experience, but disclosing the eternal order in which they find their only true place and bearing. Negatively, these realities are not the product of physical forces; and positively they lead us into a universe of spiritual being. Mind has no position, is not a mode of motion, nor an energy transformable into or out of any of the phenomena classed as energy; its presence or absence cannot be detected by mechanical experiment; and when we draw inferences respecting it we do so by analogy with our own mind of which we are conscious, not from physical phenomena taken alone. It has been said that "Matter is annihilated if it be identified with Mind." But if the converse be maintained, and all our seeming knowledge is nothing except a fluid and transient

state of molecular motion, with what face can we talk of certitudes, laws of nature, intelligent "interpretation and anticipation" of things past or things to come? The foundation and test of truth would alike be wanting. Let me draw the conclusion. First, physical science, though a product of mind, can by physical observation make nothing of mind. And secondly, it is impossible to conceive a beginning of Thought. These two negatives unite in a great affirmative, viz., that Eternal Being is Eternal Reason.

An immediate corollary which bears with it endless consequences must be noted. Where objects are quite incommensurable we cannot make them the subjects of a single and identical science. The method by which we ascertain the pressure on a surface in foot-pounds is not calculated to throw a strong light on Shakespeare's design in the character of Hamlet. "Can anyone," says Hume, "conceive a passion of a yard in length, a foot in breadth, and an inch in thickness? Thought therefore and extension are qualities wholly incompatible, and never can incorporate together into one subject." Of mental and sensible experiences he writes: "These objects and perceptions, so far from requiring any particular place, are absolutely incompatible with it, and even the imagination cannot attribute it to them." Whatever, then, be the relation of Matter to Mind, it is not one of identity, nor does Mind in any way proceed as an effect from Matter as a cause. There is a science of Thought in which the world of physical phenomena finds no place, and on which it can exercise no influence except as a possible field for the manifestation of spirit called art, whether ethical, esthetical, or instrumental. In the volume of Thought a crowning chapter is rightly termed "Religion," or the "Binding,"