excellences of the argument were its scientific defects. The premisses implied too much, required a cosmic theory too artificial to be true to "the method of Nature." The subtle and analytic intellect of Hume did much to turn. the discussion back to first principles. He resolved mind into a succession of ideas and impressions, which could not transcend experience, being no more than its mirror. analysis resolved causation into mere antecedence and sequence, eliminated the "idea of power or necessary connexion," which alone made any theistic inference possible.

His

Thought, design, intelligence, such as we discover in men and other animals," were made the parallels of "heat and cold, attraction and repulsion," and no more than one of the "springs and principles of the universe." Hume's scepticism explained nothing, made nothing certain, or it had not been Scepticism, made the world "a singular kind of effect," a product of blind custom, which had become what it is by chance or accident, rather than by any necessity of mind or nature. Thought could not stand where he left it, but it could not advance without solving the problems he had started. interpreted anew, the thousand and one problems as to the nature, sources, and objects of knowledge reopened and re-discussed. The very subtlety of Hume's scepticism led his contemporaries astray, and allowed its full significance to dawn but slowly on the minds of men who, occupied with subsidiary points, missed cardinal principles. Kant

Man and Nature had to be

headed the reaction against Hume, and it was characteristic of the new direction of thought that he was even more merciless to the old theistic argument. It was incompatible with his doctrine of the Ding an Sich. To reason from the phenomenal to the transcendental was illegitimate. For his system, God, though a moral, was no physical necessity. And here was its weakest point. Nature and God stood dissociated, the one lying, as it were, outside the other, capable of furnishing no evidence either to prove or disprove His Being. The old artificial dualism remained unvanquished, matter and mind standing over against each other in unreconciled antithesis. In physics his idea of the almost mutual inter-independence of Nature and God is well illustrated. His "cosmic gas

hypothesis" is an attempt to explain the origin of the inorganic universe by mechanical law, and makes him the earliest and boldest of modern evolutionists. The unsolved problems that lay in his metaphysics forced his successors to try new speculative methods, to seek along various roads the reconciliation of matter and spirit, Nature and God. Hence arose the marvellous creations of the transcendental philosophy, Fichte's subjective Idealism, Jacobi's emotional Intuitionalism, Schelling's absolute Indifference and later kaleidoscopic Mysticism, and Hegel's absolute Idealism. The speculations started by his physics, carried along different but converging lines by La Place and Goethe, Lamarck and Oken, have become our now

It was

well-known theory of creation by evolution. perhaps fortunate, perhaps unfortunate, that the metaphysical and physical lines so diverged, but he who can so unite them as to evolve a conception of the universe that shall satisfy both science and religion, will be the greatest prophet of the Eternal modern times has known.

Here now we must pause and sum up the result of our historical discussion. The idea of creation by the art of a "manlike Artificer" did not produce the belief in God. That idea had a cosmic and scientific, not a theistic and religious origin. The world needed God to become intelligible; God did not need the world to become credible. Men were Theists before they were scientists, believed in the Being of God before they had thought of either a creator or a cause. And even where He was conceived as Creator, He was not conceived as a manufacturer or mechanic, but as a Maker by a process as natural and immanent as the thinking, the speech, and the volition of man. The technic theory is in no way essential to Theism, can as little destroy it as it could create it. Apologetic Theists have been its chief representatives and exponents, but the higher and profounder Theists have been as merciless to its shallow and contra-natural artificiality as the most audacious evolutionist. Our metaphysical physicists may, therefore, be allowed to handle said theory as severely as they like, only they must remember that it is neither the parent nor the child of Theism, nor in any degree

necessary to its life, but an early ancestor of their own loved cosmic speculations-the first-born of adolescent Philosophy.

The way is now clear for the discussion of the next point-How ought the relation of God to the world to be conceived? The point is cardinal, and must be made prominent and luminous if Theism and science are ever to get honestly face to face, whether for contest or conciliation. Two things are clear. (1) Any interpretation of Nature that leaves out any creative and causal energy or force must be inadequate. (2) Any conception of God that leaves out His active qualities, His energies and their action, must be insufficient. But if every adequate interpretation of Nature must include its causal force, then the Theist cannot allow God and Nature to be conceived as divided, independent, mutually exclusive. Science seeks to explain Nature, but the What is remains inexplicable without the What caused to be. The natura naturata and the natura naturans are distinguishable in idea, but not divisible in reality, or the thought that represents it; and so, as science becomes more conscious of its problems and its goal, it struggles the more strenuously towards the region where physics melt into metaphysics. Scientist and Theist must, therefore, agree in this-neither can so distinguish as to disjoin Nature and its Cause. On the other hand, to conceive God as purely transcendental, as outside and apart from the universe, is to conceive the highest mental abstraction, a neuter absolute

or infinite, but no real being, no positive entity, full of energies potential, actual, active. Nature realizes our idea of God, shows His energies in action, His life in contact with ours. But so to conceive the relation of God and Nature is to conceive the world not as outside or beside God, but as in Him; to conceive no here for it, no there for Him, but He everywhere in it, it everywhere living, moving, and existing in Him. Transcendence is not thus denied, but rather affirmed. God does not depend on the world for His being, but the world on Him. It is not the cause of His existence, but He of its. When so much is said, absolute, and therefore transcendental, being is predicated of God. But when He is conceived as a Creator, He must be conceived as related, and immanence in the creation not only expresses His mode of creative action, but is the only form of thought in which the antithetical notions of the absolute and the relative can be reconciled. Only as the Creator is conceived as immanent can the creation be natura as opposed to factura, or the region of things real the arena and manifestation of spirit.

But, if God and Nature stand so related to each other, His action and its action cannot be distinguished as respectively supernatural and natural. If He is represented as outside, a spectator, watching, like a mechanic, the movements of the enormous machine He has constructed and set agoing, then all His action must be "interference," the machine must be stopped, in whole or part, to let Him