interpret, is a matter we may not, perhaps need not, pause to discuss. IV. As a 1. But it is not enough that we subject the material conception of our scientific metaphysics to criticism; we must attempt a constructive argument, adapted to the new idea of nature, in behalf of the ancient belief in the eternal God who made the worlds. This endeavour implies and incorporates our past discussions, grows out of the positions already defined and vindicated. One thing is here specially worthy of note, the quest for a cause is common to Theism and the new metaphysic. It cannot, like the older empiricism, quench the discussion on the threshold by saying “the search for causes is fruitless; as all we can know is antecedence and sequence, the very word 'cause' ought to to be banished from philosophy." simple matter of fact the search for the cause was never so vigorously, in a sense so hopefully, pursued Evolution has given so strong an impulse to speculation concerning the origin and author of life, that men are forced, even in spite of themselves, to ask after what caused to be. The causal or material conception of our scientific metaphysicians we have just examined. They have not found a material substitute for God, nay, let us roundly and honestly say, they cannot find one. Their attempt to do so becomes suicidal, ends in an agnosticism which can neither affirm nor deny. They are equally unable to say, "Matter did create," and "God did not." Their ultimate and inevitable conclusion is a scepticism more utterly fatal to as now. REASON IN MAN AND THE UNIVERSE. 67 science than even to Theism. And the very reason that invalidates the process by which they seek to replace God with matter compels us to displace matter for God. Man is the interpreter of the universe, but he is also its interpretation. The rationality that is the essence of his being is also the essence of its; the thought he brings to it is answered and completed by the thought it brings to him. His intellect faces an intelligible world; what is intelligible to intellect proceeds from intellect, is moved by its energies, is full of its contents. Without the harmony of the outer and inner, the universal and personal reason, man could have no rational consciousness, no sense of order, no ability to interpret the universe, no universe he could interpret. The reason latent in the child can develop into the active reason of the man only as he lives in a rational world. The rationality of the individual could not survive in the presence of the irrationality of the whole. And so we may say, these things involve each other: man as rational, a rational universe; and their mutual rationality reflects and expresses a relation necessary and adapted to their respective natures, an intercourse and mutual speech that makes the particular conscious of the universal reason and of its own dependence on it. Possibly an illustration may help us to seize some of the more essential points in the argument. Language is intelligible to us because it is a work of intelligence, at once a creation and incarnation of mind. Sounds that did not embody reason could never be to us a language, and no skill of ours could ever extract reason from them. The arrow-headed characters of Assyria were a few years since mere insignificant signs, and men looked at them with a sort of helpless wonder, and the vain desire to know what they might mean. By a series of happy discoveries, used by men of patient genius and rare skill, the insignificant became significant signs, and a long dead and silent language awoke to life and speech. But now one thing was supremely necessary to success, that the signs represent thought, be symbols of reason and rational speech. Had they not been so, they could never have been made intelligible, made to speak to living minds of minds that once lived, and of what they believed and did. One may say, then, that it was the reason immanent in the language that made it rational to us, that unless thought had made it, thought could never have understood, interpreted, and translated it. So the universe is rational to our reason by virtue of the immanent and absolute Reason it articulates; and these two, the outer and the inner Reason, co-existing, alike active, alike related, the universal acting on the particular Reason through nature, through nature the particular reaching, reading and hearing the universal, cannot but create, as it were, by act and articulation, recognition of the fact, a confession and monument of the relation. And this recognition is faith in God, man's discovery of the Reason without and above him through the action of that Reason within and upon him, and, as a consequence, his consciousness of his dependence upon God and his obligations to Him. Our limits unhappily forbid more than a hurried statement of the principles from which our positive argument must start. Enough to indicate whither it tends Evolution has supplied us with a stand IDEALISM OF NATURE AND MAN. 69 point which by transcending unifies the old ontological and cosmological arguments for the existence of Deity. The intelligence of man and the intelligibility of the universe are correlatives, essentially akin, each supplemental of the other and necessary to the other. But this implies that the universe must be interpreted in the terms of the intelligence,-the reason, conscience and will, not in the terms of its antithesis, the unknown interpreted as matter, motion and force. Whatever increases the intelligibility of the universe; in other words, whatever makes the way or method of nature more rational, adds to the validity of this principle, increases the necessity of starting from it in every attempt at a philosophical interpretation of the world and its cause. The more reasonable nature becomes to us, the less we can escape from reason as its source. But not only so, in seeking to get at the nature of this source, we must do it through nature at her fullest, richest, most perfect point. This new necessity is also created by evolution. It is not the stem or the root, but the fruit, which best shows the nature of the seed. It is not one stage in the process, but the end that most clearly shows what was contained in the beginning. Now whatever the moments in the movement may have been, it is unquestionable that evolution terminates in man, and man is mind. But mind cannot be the fruit of nature, unless nature from the first had been the seed-plot of mind. The world that by a strictly natural process grows into reason must stand rooted in reason, the more natural the process the more necessary is reason to the root. What nature evolves had been involved in its terms or premisses, the evolution of thought implies the thought to be evolved, the process being as it were none the less dialectical that nature conducts it. Without the prior and parent idealism of nature, we could have no idealism of man. 2. It is the more necessary to insist on this point, as it brings out a necessary contrast-the right method for the study of evolution as a creative process were a wrong method for the study of the creative cause. To know the former, we must study the way nature does her work; to know the latter, we must study the work nature has done. In a process like evolution the cause is not fully revealed till it stands expressed in the most perfect effect. There alone it becomes manifest, there only can its nature be known. What we watch at any lower point is the working of the cause, not the manifestation of its essential character and qualities. Nor is this all; what we watch is what we create. Our beginnings are not nature, they are man carrying back his thoughts of what must have been, are our to-day transported into a yesterday we never knew and so must create. Mr. Darwin's "few forms or one" are Mr. Darwin's, mere abstractions which nature never knew. Mr. Herbert Spencer's beautiful law of evolution is not nature's, is simply Mr. Spencer's, an abstract speculation as to how nature proceeded when she formed inorganic masses, and organic matter and life. These are in reality the end speculating about its own beginnings, thought going back into an immemorial past which exists only to thought, and which has no order save the order thought creates for it. Not at the beginning, which is his own abstract and imaginary creation, must the man who would interpret the nature of the universal cause take |