It is in this sense that I accept Mr. Spencer's doctrine of the Unknowable. How far my interpretation agrees with his own I do not undertake to say. On such an abstruse matter it is best that one should simply speak for one's self. But in his recent essay on "Retrogressive Religion" he uses expressions which imply a doctrine of theism essentially similar to that here maintained. The "infinite and eternal Energy from which all things proceed," and which is the same power that "in ourselves wells up under the form of consciousness," is certainly the power which is here recognized as God. The term "Unknowable" I have carefully refrained from using; it does not occur in the text of this essay. It describes only one aspect of Deity, but it has been seized upon by shallow writers of every school, treated as if fully synonymous with Deity, and made the theme of the most dismal twaddle that the world has been deluged with since the days of mediæval scholasticism. The latest instance is the wretched positivist rubbish which Mr. Frederic Harrison has mistaken for criticism, and to which it is almost a pity that Mr. Spencer should have felt called upon to waste his valuable time in replying. That which Mr. Spencer throughout all his works regards as the All-Being, the Power of which "our lives, alike physical and mental, in common with all the activities, organic and inorganic, amid which we live, are but the workings,"--this omnipresent Power it pleases Mr. Harrison to call the "All-Nothingness," to describe it as "a logical formula begotten in controversy, dwelling apart from man and the world" (whatever all that may mean), and to imagine its worshippers as thus addressing it in prayer, "O _x_^n, love us, help us, make us one with thee!" If Mr. Harrison's aim were to understand, rather than to misrepresent, the religious attitude which goes with such a conception of Deity as Mr. Spencer's, he could nowhere find it more happily expressed than in these wonderful lines of Goethe:--
"Weltseele, komm, uns zu durchdringen! Dann mit dem Weltgeist selbst zu ringen Wird unsrer Kräfte Hochberuf. Theilnehmend führen gute Geister, Gelinde leitend, höchste Meister, Zu dem der alles schafft und schuf."