nothing can be known; or he may put it a little more strongly, in the phrase of his peculiar philosophy, by saying that the existence of a God or of creation by divine power is "unthinkable." It is in this that he differs from the old-fashioned and now extinct atheist, who bluntly denied the existence of a God. The modern agnostic assumes an attitude of greater humility and disclaims the actual denial of God. Yet he practically goes farther, in asserting the impossibility of knowing the existence of a Divine Being; and in taking this farther step Agnosticism does more to degrade the human reason and to cut it off from all communion with anything beyond mere matter and force, than does any other form of philosophy, ancient or modern.

Yet in this Agnosticism there is in one point an approximation to truth. If there is a God, he cannot be known directly and fully, and his plans and procedure must always be more or less incomprehensible. The writer of the book of Job puts this as plainly as any modern agnostic in the passage beginning "Canst thou by searching find out God?"—literally, "Canst thou sound the depths of God?"—and a still higher authority informs us that "no man hath seen God"—that is, known him as we know material things. In short, absolutely and essentially God is incomprehensible; but this is no new discovery, and the mistake of the agnostic lies in failing to perceive that the same difficulty stands in the way of our perfectly knowing anything whatever. We say that we know things when we mean that we know them in their properties, relations, or effects. In this sense the knowledge of God is perfectly possible. It is impossible only in that other sense of the word "know"—if it can have such a sense—in which we are required to know things in their absolute essence and thoroughly. Thus the term "agnostic" contains an initial fallacy in itself; and this philosophy, like many others, rests, in the first instance, on a mere jugglery of words. The real question is, "Is there a God who manifests himself to us mediately and practically?" and this is a question which we cannot afford to set aside by a mere play on the meanings of the verb "to know."

If, however, any man takes this position and professes to be incapable of knowing whether or not there is any power above and behind material things, it will be necessary to begin with the very elements of knowledge, and to inquire if there is anything whatever that he really knows and believes.

Let us ask him if he can subscribe to the simple creed expressed in the words "I am, I feel, I think." Should he deny these propositions, then there is no basis left on which to argue. Should he admit this much of belief, he has abandoned somewhat of his agnostic position; for it would be easy to show that in even uttering the pronoun "I" he has committed himself to the belief in the unknowable. What is the ego which he admits? Is it the material organism or any one of its organs or parts? or is it something distinct, of which the organism is merely the garment, or outward manifestation? or is the organism itself anything more than a bundle of appearances partially known and scarcely understood by that which calls itself "I"? Who knows? And if our own personality is thus inscrutable, if we can conceive of it neither as identical with the whole or any part of the organism nor as existing independently of the organism, we should begin our Agnosticism here, and decline to utter the pronoun "I" as implying what we cannot know. Still, as a matter of faith, we must hold fast to the proposition "I exist" as the only standpoint for science, philosophy, or common life. If we are asked for evidence of this faith, we can appeal only to our consciousness of effects which imply the existence of the ego, which we thus have to admit or suppose before we can begin to prove even its existence.

This fact of the mystery of our own existence is full of material for thought. It is in itself startling—even appalling. We feel that it is a solemn, a dreadful, thing to exist, and to exist in that limitless space and that eternal time which we can no more understand than we can our own constitution, though our belief in their existence is inevitable. Nor can we divest ourselves of anxious thoughts as to the source, tendencies, and end of our own being. Here, in short, we already reach the threshold of that dread unknown future and its possibilities, the realization of which by hope, fear, and imagination constitutes, perhaps, our first introduction to the unseen world as distinguished from the present world of sense. The agnostic may smile if he pleases at religion as a puerile fancy, but he knows, like other men, that the mere consciousness of existence necessarily links itself with a future—nay, unending—existence, and that any being with this consciousness of futurity must have at least a religion of hope and fear. In this we find an intelligible reason for the universality of religious ideas in relation to a future life. Even where this leads to beliefs that may be called superstitious, it is more reasonable than Agnosticism; for it is surely natural that a being inscrutable by himself should be led to believe in the existence of other things equally inscrutable, but apparently related to himself.

But the thinking "I" dwells in the midst of what we term external objects. In a certain sense it treats the parts of its own bodily organism as if they were things external to it, speaking of "my hand," "my head," as if they were its property. But there are things practically infinite beyond the organism itself. We call them objects or things, but they are only appearances; and we know only their relations to ourselves and to each other. Their essence, if they have any, is inscrutable. We say that the appearances indicate matter and energy, but what these are essentially we know not. We reduce matter to atoms, but it is impossible for us to have any conception of an atom or of the supposed ether, whether itself in some sense atomic or not, including such atoms. Our attempts to form rational conceptions of atoms resolve themselves into complex conjectures as to vortices of ethers and the like, of which no one pretends to have any distinct mental picture; yet on this basis of the incomprehensible rests all our physical science, the first truths in which are really matters of pure faith in the existence of that which we cannot understand. Yet all men would scoff at the agnostic who on this account should express unbelief in physical science.

Let us observe here, further, that since the mysterious and inscrutable "I" is surrounded with an equally mysterious and inscrutable universe, and since the ego and the external world are linked together by indissoluble relations, we are introduced to certain alternatives as to origins. Either the universe or "nature" is a mere phantom conjured up by the ego, or the ego is a product of the universe, or both are the result of some equally mysterious power beyond us and the material world. Neither of these suppositions is absurd or unthinkable; and, whichever of them we adopt, we are again introduced to what may be termed a religion as well as a philosophy. On one view, man becomes a god to himself; on another, nature becomes his god; on the third, a Supreme Being, the Creator of both. All three religions exist in the world in a vast variety of forms, and it is questionable if any human being does not more or less give credence to one or the other.

Scientific men, even when they think proper to call themselves idealists, must reject the first of the above alternatives, since they cannot doubt the objective existence of external nature, and they know