which render the Absolute, whether interpreted as the Unknowable or as God, the sole causal reality. That is, scientific method would in this way bring us to acosmic pantheism. For the empirical method, so far from vindicating either the freedom of the personal will or the immortality of the soul, withholds belief from both, as matters that can never come within the bounds of possible experience. The habit of regarding nothing but the empirically attested as part of science dismisses these two essential conditions of man’s reality beyond the assumed pale of true knowledge into the discredited limbo of naked and unsupported possibilities.
But it is not till we pass from the method of natural science to its two chief modern results, and take in their revolutionary effect as subsidiaries of method in every field of natural inquiry,—it is not till then that we feel the full force of the pantheistic strain which pulls with such tension in many modern minds. Only in the principle of the Conservation of Energy, and in that of Evolution, particularly as evolution is viewed in its aspect of natural selection, do we get the full force of the pantheistic drift. This drift, at the first encounter, seems almost irresistible. That all the changes in the universe of physical experience are resolvable into motions, either molar or molecular; that in spite of the incalculable variety of these motions, the sum-total of
