Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/21

of the fact of evolution, which could only be explained by “the reality of an Omnipresent Energy.” The positivist, in his turn, was to be shown right, in so far as he maintained against the theist, theological or metaphysical, traditional or philosophical, the weighty discovery that all knowledge is necessarily relative to the constitution of the knowing subject, therefore cannot be the knowledge of any Ultimate Reality, nor of things as they are in themselves, but must be knowledge of phenomena only — of things as they appear to conscious experience, limited as this is by correlation with a specific nervous organism. The agnostic, however, was to be shown the most comprehensively right of all: for his was the truth that embraced and harmonised the truth of the positivist and the truth of the theist, at once and together; his was the immovable assurance of the fact of an Ultimate Reality, whose nature nevertheless could only be stated as the “Unknowable,” or as the Power present in all things, the Eternal Mystery immanent in all worlds; his was the possession, too, of a boundless cosmos of phenomena, indefinitely receding into the mysterious recesses of the past, and unfolding by orderly evolution, ever more richly complex both in psychic and in physical intricacy, into the indefinite mystery of the future. Thus he was able, moreover, to meet the genuine demands of the religious consciousness, and to meet them supremely; namely, by an Eternal Power immanent in the world, instead of by an anthropomorphic God transcendent of the world, — to meet them supremely, because religion, at its authentic base, was founded in Solemnity and