a descent or ascent; but the end, by exhibiting the highest product, determines the kind and quality of the producing factors. This is peculiarly true in a case like the present. For evolution can allow no element to steal into the effect that cannot be traced to the cause. What is evolved in the one was involved in the other. What the method of Nature brings out in the conclusion, it must have found in the cause, the former being only the explication of the latter. On this principle, mind, as the latest and highest result of the creative process, cannot have been absent from the creative cause.

Man is the interpeter of Nature, but he is also its interpretation. That does not mean he is its final cause, but it means he is the highest revelation of its creative power. If we interpret the latter in "the terms of matter, motion, and force," we must interpret in the same terms the phenomena of mind and society. Now these are not interpreted when the possible or probable descent and development of man are traced. We have to do not simply with the becoming of a fact, but with the fact as become. And the fact is here a mind, the consciousness, in which both self and the universe are revealed. It therefore must be interrogated as to itself, as to what it knows, as to the sense in which it can be said to know at all, as to whether its powers, its thoughts, its emotions, its acts and their qualities, can be interpreted in the specified terms. Then the many minds in the

present are heirs of the results achieved by the many minds of the past. Mind has a history-can it be written "in the terms of matter, motion, and force"? Whatever interprets it must interpret the systems it has built, the institutions it has created, the religions it has deposited and developed, the evil it has done, the good it has achieved, the progress it has made. These very words, "evil," "good," "progress," "done," "achieved," "made," start many questions that affect our interpretation of the cosmic cause. If man be the mere product of mechanical and necessary forces, they must rule him, but where they rule there may be a break-down, but can be no evil, an effective or resultful motion, but can be no good. Are the laws which have governed the development or education of humanity mechanical ? If so, can moral terms be used to express results that must be as purely mechanical as any obtained in the earliest stages of the creative process ? If so, how did evolution accomplish so extraordinary a revolution in the nature of the actor and the quality of his acts? Can the terms righteous, benevolent, wise, be applied to men and nations and be denied to the Power that has shaped human destinies? or, in other words, can man be in any sense a moral being without having his development governed by moral laws? Does the will count for anything in the sphere of action? If man is to any extent or in any real sense free, he cannot be the mere product of mole

cular action; if he is the pure creature of primordial molecules, his actions must be as much necessitated as the movements of the planets, or the ebb and flow of the tides, and all his thoughts, religions, institutions, achievements, nothing more than "the transferred activities of his molecules." But this is a point on which consciousness has a right to speak; and Mr. Spencer tells us that belief of it is a necessary condition of all knowledge. Scepticism on one point here involves scepticism on all. If a man doubted his own consciousness, he must doubt everything, and science is impossible. But if consciousness must be held veracious when it testifies to the existence of an outer world, the obligation to believe it is much greater when it speaks to what is known, not in symbol, but in itself. Now, if there is one point on which the consciousness of universal man as expressed in universal language has been more unanimous than another, it has been in testifying to his freedom, and because of it in judging as to the character and quality of his actions. One who believes the veracity of consciousness on other points cannot logically deny it here. But if man be free, he cannot be interpreted in "the terms of matter, motion, and force." Physical necessity can never be the equivalent of moral freedom. But if man cannot be so interpreted, neither can the Power that made him. Man is the image of his Maker. The lake may show the mountain hid in clouds, or the star sleeping in the silent

heaven, and the shadow reveals the reality, known to be real were it only by its image.

Mind in interpreting the universe cannot escape from itself, must begin with thought, and what thought supplies and implies. The interpretation of Nature is the interpretation of thought by thought, the translation of ideas out of a mystic, unspoken, unwritten speech into the speech of men. The true and beautiful thought that lay at the basis of Berkeley's idealism was this-Nature is a visual language, its phenomena the visual words in which one mind speaks to another. So understood it is the expression and vehicle of intelligence, an orderly because a rational system. Science is a mirror held up to Nature, and the reason science exhibits but reflects the reason Nature embodies. The intelligible implies intelligence; what can be construed presupposes mind. So much every rationally conceivable theory as to the origin and being of the universe, even such as stand to each other as antithesis to thesis, must explicitly or implicitly recognise. The reasonable thing in the old artificial Theism was not its formal technic, but its recognition of reason as the source and end of the creation. The substance of Spinoza had thought to balance expansion as a mode of being. The Natur of Goethe, ever building and ever destroying, eternal life and eternal change, never permanent yet never fugitive, without speech yet creating the tongues by which she speaks and the hearts by which she feels, ever

Darwin's

perfect yet never complete, is but Deity externalized and active. The Universum of Strauss, personal qualities working impersonally in Nature and man, is simply the cosmos invested with certain of the moral and intellectual attributes of the being men call God. The Unbewusstes of Hartmann is only a bad attempt to depersonalize a person, with the worst possible results as to the meaning and end of the world, the hopes and dignity of man. evolution, too, lives and wins its way by the conception of a nature which, subtly penetrated by personal attributes, can in whole and in all her parts, contrive, struggle, preserve, develop, and do the million things possible only to perceiving intellect and active will. Thought cannot escape from mind in the universe, because the universe interpreted is thought interpreted and realized.

But it is time this discussion was ended. The conviction with which it was started has gone on deepening with every step, that the grand theistic problem of our time is, not how to prove the existence of God, but how to conceive His relation to the world. That problem demands earnest and honest thought as well as honest and earnest discussion. The discussion has turned hitherto on a false issue, because on a formal rather than a material question. There lies in all our scientific speculation a latent or blank conception of God only waiting to be drawn out or filled up. The Unknowable, the inscrutable Power, is like a dead mask concealing a living face, a ghastly eye-socket