PROFESSOR POWELL ON ATHEISM AND PANTHEISM. 57

"but in investing that nature with new and higher appli"cation. Continuity with the material world remains the 66 same; but a new relation is developed in it, kindled with "celestial fire.

"It is a mistake to connect notions of man's spiritual "nature with animal part. The latter must be viewed as

part of the same physical development and system as the rest "of the animal creation. This spiritual nature cannot be "affected by physical considerations, therefore the whole idea "of pantheism is utterly preposterous, is a mystical fancy of "most perplexing and unintelligible nature, involving con"tradictions of the grossest kind."

The essayist must mean that material pantheism that makes mother earth the procreator as well as maternal former of all her offspring. We are told that it is a mistake to connect spiritual with physical development; but we are not told how they are to be kept separate.

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"In proportion as man's moral superiority is not held to "consist in attributes of a material and corporeal kind or origin, it can signify little how his physical nature may "have originated. The battle of evidences will have to "be fought on the field of physical science.

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"The present belief in the origin of man, geologically speaking, depends on negative evidence. There seems no

reason, upon any good analogy, why human remains might "not be found in deposits corresponding to periods immensely "more remote than commonly supposed, when the earth was "in all respects equally well fitted for human habitation. "And if such remains occur, it is equally accordant with "analogy to expect that these may be of extinct and lower "species. It is perfectly conceivable that a lower species of "the human race might have existed destitute of spiritual " and moral endowments. Development begins with lowest "forms, and advances by gradual steps to the highest, until "in the most recent periods a creature was produced, in "which self-conscious knowledge was revealed."

The long-sustained interest that thinking people take in the debate concerning the preservation and extinction of

species, by the modus operandi of mother nature's processes, recently designated as the "means of natural selection" is due to the apprehended overthrow of long cherished ideas respecting man's origin, and the date and mode of his first appearance upon this planet. The experience and teaching

of secular science is not in favour of new constructions. It maintains that species are permanent only so long as certain peculiar external conditions remain the same; but that after a certain period a change appears, corresponding to those in external circumstances, and it is further contended that the introduction of a new species is not a solitary occurrence, but a fact that makes its appearance repeatedly and constantly in the lapse of ages. At the furthest, this new species is but part of a series, manifesting a regular or timed phenomenal process called law, and constitutes part of a regularly pre-arranged evolution of new organized beings out of former conditions. The new species are subject to the same pre-arranged law as any case of ordinary reproduction, and generate the concept of special and distinct attributes or characters, inherited from parents. Species, it is said, involves not only the consideration of type, but of descent. There is no necessity for any exhibition of pious fright at the progress of that philosophy which demonstrates that man is no exception to the great plan of natural growth and development; and it does not follow, that because there is nothing to connect man with the quadrumana, that the human races have therefore a claim to supernatural origin and a special creation.

Even if the idea of progressive development in any single line of ascent from lower orders must be abandoned, it does not necessarily follow that every attempt to account philosophically for true progressive advance in the order of nature is to be scouted as dangerous and profane. The Bible itself asserts that man is, relatively to Deity and immortality, no better than the beasts that perish; and when these Scriptures speak of immortality, they do not apply this prerogative to man, but to a higher race of beings, of which man is only the embryo (the grub or chrysalis) in the womb of natural processes.

CHAPTER IV.

PHILOSOPHY OF THE BIBLE.

CAN Deity be so defined as to be comprehended by the human mind? To define in a comprehensive form is to limit, it is to abstract something from that one great existence of which the defining or conceiving mind is itself a part. So that if definition necessarily implies limitation, and Deity must be infinite, then, as an unlimited entity, he cannot be comprehensively defined. Not only does an infinite Being defy explicit definition for comprehension, but the human mind. cannot conceive the existence of an infinite entity whose identified unity is postulated as distinct from the infinite multiplicity of related entities in the universe. The gradation from finite to infinite is itself an infinite procession of relationship; and the infinite must absorb, in its existence of unity, every mode of related and conditioned entity in the cosmos; and thus the infinite means the unity of indefinite or infinite multiplicity. One universal Parent, existing in plurality of offspring, as defined by Jesus Christ, appears by the law of identity in the logic of the absolute to be no way opposed to the spirit of Benedict Spinoza's philosophy. Spinoza imagined the infinite entity of Deity to be that great existence which possessed the sovereign prerogative of begetting, per se, in the mind, the conception of it being in itself the cause, in an absolute sense, of everything.

Such self-existence as this would necessarily include in itself every entity, and preclude the possibility of any preceding entity to have caused, created, or generated it; so

that it is necessarily, per se, the alpha and omega of every thing in that endless chain of being that has neither beginning nor end, because it is a circle of eternal, self-existing vitality, that ends where it began.

Baron Bunsen derided the puerile fears of conventional theists, that Spinoza's doctrines would eventually land the human mind in the trackless wilderness of positive netheism. Bunsen is reported to have expressed himself satisfied that Spinoza's doctrine would pave the way for the advance of a more comprehensive philosophy than that narrow sectarian dogmatism, which more than anything tends to drive men to netheistic conclusions, inasmuch as it is the idea of a sectarian, partial, and one-sided Providence that adds fuel to the fire of polemical strife. The atheist's argument is, that nature does not indicate the existence of infinite mental attributes; and that, even supposing they did exist, the domain of human knowledge is not co-extensive with universal existence, and that pure being, as it exists per se, is not an objective reality that can affect human consciousness: because, whatever such absolute or unconditioned entity might think, or say, or do, human consciousness could not and would not mind it, and thus, to all intents and purposes, so far as that human mind was concerned, it would be just as though it did not exist at all.

Pure or absolute and unconditioned being transcends all phenomenal existence, and can only be cognised as it exists in relation; since all that the human mind knows of entities is as they are related to it, and not as they exist in themselves out of relation. Sir William Hamilton admits this, and teaches that the human faculties are not competent to possess actual and immediate knowledge of the infinite and absolute, because all cognition exists in and by consciousness, and this is only possible within the limits and under the conditions of difference, multiplicity, and relation; and from this it must follow that human consciousness can only be the echo of conditioned, phenomenal, and finite causation, and that there is no calculable progress possible for the mind, save in the cosmical kingdom of the relative and conditioned.

LOCKE ON LOGICAL PROBABILITIES.

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The supernatural domain of the absolute and unconditioned had better be left as an unenclosed common, or as waste land for the pasturing of such stray creatures as relish browsing upon the thistles of transcendental mysteries of the Swedenborgian class.

The conclusion, then, is, that the infinite Deity can only be cognised as he exists in relation, and thus all revelation to man must have a positive and negative duality, necessitated in that material embodiment that invariably presents this bifold aspect since its personification in definite and calculable conditions of existence.

No one can deny that the great law of identity reigns paramount in logic; but the dry rules of syllogistic logic, applied to unconditioned abstractions, prove after all but a barren study, possessing little interest for those who seek to apply the inexorable logic of the facts of every day life, which is concerned in and about the how, the why, and the wherefore of phenomenal and conditioned relations—for it is perceived that the great rule of absolute identity wholly fails to account satisfactorily for the relationship of infinitely diversified natural phenomena.

Logic is the science of PROBABILITIES, and therefore relatively a higher and wider study than mathematics. Geometrical reasoning must be exerted in studying probabilities, but this science begins only just where mathematics leaves off. Locke, in his "Conduct of the Understanding," section 7, concludes the first paragraph on this subject by saying, "In proofs of probability, one such (mathematical) "train is not enough to settle the judgment as in demon"strative knowledge." Locke's argument in this section upon the inferiority of mathematics to the science of probabilities is clenched again in his 42nd section, on "Fallacies," where he says, "Right understanding consists in the dis

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covery and adherence to truth, and that in the perception "of the visible or probable agreement of ideas, as they are "affirmed or denied one of another." The highest art of analogical reasoning is not capable of demonstration, and therefore must be submitted to this train of probabilities.