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exist. And, indeed, it would greatly embarrass him to recognise this; since the recognition would prevent him from asserting that 'none of the positive attributes which have ever been predicated of God can be used of this Energy.'

Not only does he, as in the last sentence, negatively misdescribe the character of this Energy, but he positively misdescribes it. He says It remains always Energy, Force: nothing anthropomorphic; such as electricity, or anything else that we might conceive as the ultimate basis of all the physical forces.' Now, on page 9 of the essay Mr. Harrison criticises, there occurs the sentence-The final outcome of that speculation commenced by the primitive man, is that the Power manifested throughout the Universe distinguished as material, is the same power which in ourselves wells up under the form of consciousness;' and on page 10 it is said that this necessity we are under, to think of the external energy in terms of the internal energy, gives rather a spiritualistic than a materialistic aspect to the Universe.' Does he really think that the meaning of these sentences is conveyed by comparing the ultimate energy to electricity'? And does he think this in face of the statement on p. 11 that phenomenal manifestations of this ultimate energy can in no wise show us what it is? Surely that which is described as the substratum at once of material and mental existence, bears towards us and towards the Universe, a relation utterly unlike that which electricity bears to the other physical forces.

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Persistent thinking along defined grooves, causes inability to get out of them; and Mr. Harrison, in more than one way, illustrates this. So completely is his thought moulded to that form of phenomenalism entertained by M. Comte, that, in spite of repeated denials of it, he ascribes it to me; and does this in face of the various presentations of an opposed phenomenalism, which I have given in the article he criticises and elsewhere. Speaking after his lively manner of the Unknown Cause as an ever-present conundrum to be everlastingly given up,' he asks- How does the man of science approach the All-Nothingness?' Now M. Comte describes Positivism as becoming perfect when it reaches the power se représenter tous les divers phénomènes observables comme des cas particuliers d'un seul fait général... en considérant comme absolument inaccessible et vide de sens pour nous la recherche de ce qu'on appelle les causes, soit premières, soit finales; '3 and in pursuance of this view, the Comtean system limits itself to phenomena, and deliberately ignores the existence of anything implied by the phenomena. But though M. Comte thus exhibits to us a doctrine which, performing the happy despatch,' eviscerates things and leaves a shell of appearances with no reality inside; yet I have in more than one place, and in the most emphatic way, declined thus to commit intellectual suicide. So far from regarding that which transcends phenomena as

* Système de Philosophie Positive, vol. i. pp. 5 and 14.

the All-Nothingness,' I regard it as the All-Being. Everywhere I have spoken of the Unknowable as the Ultimate Reality-the sole existence all things present to consciousness being but shows of it. Mr. Harrison entirely inverts our relative positions. As I understand the case, the All-Nothingness' is that phenomenal existence in which M. Comte and his disciples profess to dwell-profess, I say, because in their ordinary thoughts they recognise an existence transcending phenomena, just as much as other people recognise it.

That the opposition between the view actually held by me and the view ascribed to me by Mr. Harrison, is absolute, will be most clearly seen on observing the contrast he draws between my view and the view of the late Dean Mansel. He says:

Of all modern theologians, the Dean came the nearest to the Evolution negation. But there is a gulf which separates even his all-negative deity from Mr. Spencer's impersonal, unconscious, unthinking, and unthinkable Energy.

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It is quite true that there exists this gulf. But then the propositions forming the two sides of the gulf are the opposites of those which Mr. Harrison represents. For whereas, in common with his teacher Sir William Hamilton, Dean Mansel alleged that our consciousness of the Absolute is merely a negation of conceivability;' I have, over a space of ten pages, contended that our consciousness of the Absolute is not negative but positive, and is the one indestructible element of consciousness which persists at all times, under all circumstances, and cannot cease until consciousness ceases '—have argued that while the Power which transcends phenomena cannot be brought within the forms of our finite thought, yet that, as being a necessary datum of every thought, belief in its existence has, among our beliefs, the highest validity of any is not, as Sir W. Hamilton alleges, a belief with which we are supernaturally inspired,' but is a normal deliverance of consciousness. Thus, as represented by Mr. Harrison, Dean Mansel's views and my own are exactly transposed. Misrepresentation could not, I think, go further.

The conception I have everywhere expressed and implied, of the relation between human life and the Ultimate Cause, if not diametrically opposed with like distinctness to the conception Mr. Harrison ascribes to me, is yet thus opposed in an unmistakable way. After suggesting that (") would be an appropriate symbol for the religion of the Infinite Unknowable,' and amusing himself and his readers by imaginary prayers made to (x"); after making a subsequent elaboration of his jeu d'esprit by suggesting that (nx) would serve for the formula of certain modern Theisms, he says of these:

The Neo-Theisms have all the same mortal weakness that the Unknowable has. They offer no kinship, sympathy, or relation whatever between worshipper and worshipped. They too are logical formulas begotten in controversy, dwelling apart from man and the world.

First Principles, § 26.

Now, considering that in the article he had before him, there is in various ways implied the view that the power which manifests itself in consciousness is but a differently conditioned form of the power which manifests itself beyond consciousness '-considering that there, as everywhere throughout my books, the implication is that our lives, alike physical and mental, in common with all the activities, organic and inorganic, amid which we live, are but the workings of this Power, it is not a little astonishing to find it described as simply a logical formula begotten in controversy.' Does Mr. Harrison really think that he represents the facts when he describes as 'dwelling apart from man and the world,' that Power of which man and the world are regarded products, and which is manifested through man and the world from instant to instant?

Did I not need the space for other topics, I might at much greater length contrast Mr. Harrison's erroneous versions with the true ones. I might enlarge on the fact that, though the name Agnosticism fitly expresses the confessed inability to know or conceive the nature of the Power manifested through phenomena, it fails to indicate the confessed ability to recognise the existence of that Power as of all things the most certain. I might make clear the contrast between that Comtean Agnosticism which says that ‘Theology and ontology alike end in the Everlasting No with which science confronts all their assertions,' and the Agnosticism set forth in First Principles, which, along with its denials, emphatically utters an Everlasting Yes. And I might show in detail that Mr. Harrison is wrong in implying that Agnosticism, as I hold it, is anything more than silent with respect to the question of personality; since, though the attributes of personality, as we know it, cannot be conceived by us as attributes of the Unknown Cause of things, yet duty requires us neither to affirm nor deny personality,' but to submit ourselves with all humility to the established limits of our intelligence' in the conviction that the choice is not between personality and something lower than personality,' but between personality and something higher,' and that the Ultimate Power is no more representable in terms of human consciousness than human consciousness is representable in terms of a plant's functions.' 7

But without further evidence, what I have said sufficiently proves that Mr. Harrison's criticism keen, trenchant, destructive,' as it was called, is destructive, not of an actual doctrine, but simply of an imaginary one. I should hardly have expected that Mr. Harrison, in common with the Edinburgh Reviewer, would have taken the course, so frequent with critics, of demolishing a simulacrum and walking off in triumph as though the reality had been demolished. Adopting his own figure, I may say that he has with ease passed his weapon Harrison, Nineteenth Century for March, p. 497. First' Principles, § 31.

1 Essays, vol. iii. p. 251.

through and through 'The Ghost of Religion;' but then it is only the ghost: the reality stands unscathed.

Before passing to the consideration of that alternative doctrine which Mr. Harrison would have us accept, it will be well briefly to deal with certain of his subordinate propositions.

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After re-stating in a succinct way, the hypothesis that from the conception of the ghost originated the conceptions of supernatural beings in general, including the highest, and after saying that one can hardly suppose that Mr. Spencer would limit himself to that,' Mr. Harrison describes what he alleges to be a prior, and, indeed, the primordial, form of religion. He says:

There were countless centuries of time, and there were, and there are, countless millions of men for whom no doctrine of superhuman spirits ever took coherent form. In all these ages and races, probably by far the most numerous that our planet has witnessed, there was religion in all kinds of definite form. Comte calls it Fetichism-terms are not important: roughly, we may call it Nature-worship. The religion in all these types was the belief and worship not of spirits of any kind, not of any immaterial, imagined being inside things, but of the actual visible things themselves-trees, stones, rivers, mountains, earth, fire, stars, sun, and sky. (P. 498.)

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The attitude of discipleship is not favourable to inquiry; and, as fanatical Christians show us, inquiry is sometimes thought sinful and likely to bring punishment. I do not suppose that Mr. Harrison's reverence for M. Comte has gone this length; but still it has gone far enough not only to cause his continued adherence to a doctrine espoused by M. Comte which has been disproved, but also to make him tacitly assume that this doctrine is accepted by one whose rejection of it was long ago set forth. In the Descriptive Sociology there are classified and tabulated statements concerning some eighty peoples; and besides these I have had before me masses of facts] concerning many other peoples. An induction based on over a hundred examples, warrants me in saying that there has never existed anywhere such a religion as that which Mr. Harrison ascribes to countless millions of men' during countless centuries of time.' A chapter on 'Idol-worship and Fetich-worship' in the Principles of Sociology, gives proof that in the absence of a developed ghost-theory, Fetichism is absent. I have shown that, whereas among the lowest races, such as the Juángs, Andamanese, Fuegians, Australians, Tasmanians, and Bushmen, there is no fetichism; fetichism reaches its greatest height in considerably-advanced societies, like those of ancient Peru and modern India: in which last place, as Sir Alfred Lyall tells us, 'not only does the husbandman pray to his plough, the fisher to his net, the weaver to his loom; but the scribe adores his pen, and the banker his account books.' 8 And I have remarked that, had fetichism been conspicuous among the lowest races, and inconspicuous among the higher, the statement that it was primordial might have been 'Religion of an Indian Province,' Fortnightly Review for Feb. 1872, p. 131.

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held proved; but that, as the facts happen to be exactly the opposite, the statement is conclusively disproved.'"

Similarly with Nature-worship: regarding this as being partially distinguished from Fetichism by the relatively imposing character of its objects. In a subsequent chapter I have shown that this also, is an aberrant development of ghost-worship. Among all the many tribes and nations, remote in place and unlike in type, whose superstitions I have examined, I have found no case in which any great natural appearance or power, feared and propitiated, was not identified with a human or quasi-human personality. I am not aware that Professor Max Müller, or any adherent of his, has been able to produce a single case in which there exists worship of the great natural objects themselves, pure and simple-the heavens, the sun, the moon, the dawn, etc.: objects which, according to the mythologists, become personalised by 'a disease of language.' Personalisation exists at the outset; and the worship is in all cases the worship of an indwelling ghost-derived being.

That these conclusions are necessitated by an exhaustive examination of the evidence, is shown by the fact that they have been forced on Dr. E. B. Tylor notwithstanding his original enunciation of other conclusions. In a lecture On Traces of the Early Mental Condition of Man,' delivered at the Royal Institution on the 15th of March, 1867, he said:

It is well known that the lower races of mankind account for the facts and events of the outer world by ascribing a sort of human life and personality to animals, and even to plants, rocks, streams, winds, the sun and stars, and so on through the phenomena of nature. . . It would probably add to the clearness of our conception of the state of mind which thus sees in all nature the action of animated life and the presence of innumerable spiritual beings, if we gave it the name of Animism instead of Fetichism.

Here, having first noted that the conception of Fetichism derived by Dr. Tylor from multitudinous facts, is not like that of Mr. Harrison, who conceives Fetichism to be a worship of the objects themselves, and not a worship of their indwelling spirits, we further note that Dr. Tylor regards this ascription of souls to all objects, inanimate as well as animate, which he proposes to call Animism rather than Fetichism, as being primordial. In the earlier part of his Primitive Culture published in 1871 (as in vol. i. p. 431), we find a re-statement of this view; but further on we observe a modification of it, as instance the following sentence in vol. ii. p. 100.

It seems as though the conception of a human soul, when once attained to by man, served as a type or model on which he framed not only his ideas of other souls of lower grade, but also his ideas of spiritual beings in general, from the tiniest elf that sports in the long grass, up to the heavenly Creator and Ruler of the world, the Great Spirit.

And then, in articles published in Mind for April and for July, 1877, Dr. Tylor represented himself as holding a doctrine iden

• Principles of Sociology, § 162.

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