Turn now from outward events to inner life; from events grown shadowy with time, to life ever dim and mysterious alike to savage and sage. Everywhere man beholds much that is incomprehensible; within, around, the past, the future. Invisible forces are at work, invisible agencies play upon his destiny. And in the creations of fancy, which of necessity grow out of the influence of nature upon the imagination, it is not strange that mysteries darken, facts and fancies blend; the past and the future uniting in a supernatural present.
We are never content with positive knowledge. From the earliest workings of the mind, creations of fancy play as important a part in ethical economy as positive perceptions. Nor does culture in any wise lessen these fanciful creations of the intellect. In the political arena of civilized nations, wars and revolutions for the enforcement of opinion concerning matters beyond the reach of positive knowledge, have equaled if they have not exceeded wars for empire or ascendancy. In the social and individual affairs of life we are governed more by the ideal than by the real. On reaching the limits of positive knowledge, reason pauses, but fancy overleaps the boundary, and wanders forward in an endless waste of speculation.
[Sidenote: RELIGIOUS AND SCIENTIFIC ULTIMATES.]
The tendency of intellectual progress, according to the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, is from the concrete to the abstract, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from the knowable to the unknowable. Primordially nothing was known; as superstitions and priestcraft grew rank, everything became known; there was not a problem in the natural or in the supernatural world unsolvable by religion. Now, when some elements of absolute knowledge are beginning to appear, we discover, not only that little is positively known, but that much of what has been hitherto deemed past controverting, is, under the present régime of thought, absolutely unknowable. Formerly ultimate religious knowledge was attained by the very novices of religion, and ultimate scientific knowledge was explained through their fanatical conceptions. Not only were all the mysteries of the material universe easily solved by the Fathers, but heaven was measured and the phenomena of hell minutely described. Now we are just beginning to comprehend that ultimate facts will probably ever remain unknowable facts, for when the present ultimate is attained, an eternity of undiscovered truth will still lay stretched out before the searcher. Until the finite becomes infinite, and time lapses into eternity, the realm of thought will remain unfilled. At present, and until the scope of the intellect is materially enlarged, such theories as the origin of the universe--held by atheists to be self-existent, by pantheists to have been self-created, and by theists to have been originated by an external agency--must remain, as they are now admitted to be, questions beyond even the comprehension of the intellect. Likewise scientific ultimates--such as the qualities of time and space, the divisibility of matter, the co-ordination of motion and rest, the correlation of forces, the mysteries of gravitation, light and heat--are found to be not only not solvable, but not conceivable. And, as with the external, so with the inward life; we cannot conceive the nature, nor explain the origin and duration, of consciousness. The endless speculations of biology and psychology only leave impressions at once of the strength and weakness of the mind of man; strong in empirical knowledge, impotent in every attempt rationally to penetrate the unfathomable. Nowhere in mythology do we find the world self-created or self-existent. Some external agency is ever brought in to perform the work, and in the end the structure of the universe is resolved into its original elements.