Tyndall

said long ago: ‘ While I consider science to be alike powerful as an instrument of intellectual culture, and as a ministrant to the material wants of men, if you ask me whether it has solved, or is likely in our day to solve, the problem of the universe, I must shake my head in doubt..... The question of who made the stars still remains unanswered; and science makes no attempt to answer it.” If the giants of science cannot answer, what can we expect from the pygmies who wrote crude oracles and creation legends? “As far as I can see,” continues the gravely responsible Profe or, “there is no quality in the human intellect which is fit to be applied to the solution of the problem. It entirely transcends us. The mind of man may be compared to a musical instrument with a certain range of notes, beyond which, in both directions, is an infinitude of silence. The phenomena of matter and force lie within our intellectual range; and, as far as they reach, we will, at all hazards push our enquiries. But behind, and above, and around all, the real mystery of the universe lies unsolved, and as far as we are concerned is incapable of solution” (Fragments, ii, p. 72: dated 1879). Profe or Huxley spoke in much the same way, in his Prologue to the Answers to Controverted Questions: for he was too pure an Agnostik to deny that which he did not know, and could not comprehend, “Looking,” he said, “at the subject from a_ rigidly scientific point of view, the a umption that, amid the myriads of worlds, scattered through endle space, there can be no intelligence as much greater than man’s as his is greater than a black beetle’s: no _ being endowed with power of influencing the course of nature as much greater than his as his is greater than a snail’s, seems to me not merely basele but impertinent.” But even if our own minds could grasp the Absolute and Unconditioned (the All), he (or it) could never be a subject for worship. We should require—like Christians—to materialise, or limit him, when he would no longer be the Absolute, Infinite, and Eternal, apart from matter, the Universe, and the sum-total of phenomena. If Absolute he must remain utterly unknown, and to us a non-entity —a god whom we must call (as in Scotch law) “unproven.” So too thought Prof. 218