how entire unanimity, from the grossest superstition
up to the most developed theism, in the belief that the existence of the
world is a mystery which ever presses for interpretation, though it can
never be entirely explained. And in the progress of religion from crude
fetichism to the developed theology of our time, the truth, at first but
vaguely perceived, that there is an omnipresent Inscrutable which manifests
itself in all phenomena, ever comes more clearly into view.

[Footnote 1: Cf. also Fiske's _Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy_, 2 vols.,
1874. Numerous critiques and discussions of Spencer's views have been given
in various journals and reviews; among more extended works reference may be
made to Bowne, _The Philoesophy of Herbert Spencer_, 1874; Malcolm Guthrie,
_On Mr. Spencer's Formula of Evolution_, 1879, and the same author, _On Mr.
Spencer's Unification of Knowledge_, 1882; and T.H. Green, on Spencer and
Lewes, _Works_, vol. i.--TR.]

Science meets this ultimate religious truth with the conviction, grasped
with increasing clearness as the development proceeds from Protagoras to
Kant, that the reality hidden behind all phenomena must always remain
unknown, that our knowledge can never be absolute. This principle maybe
established inductively from the incomprehensibility of the ultimate
scientific ideas, as well as deductively from the nature of intelligence,
through an analysis of the product and the process of thought. (1) The
ideas space, time, matter, motion, and force, as also the first states of
consciousness, and the thinking substance, the ego as the unity of subject
and object, all represent realities whose nature and origin are entirely
incomprehensible. (2) The subsumption of particular facts under more
general facts leads ultimately to a most general, highest fact, which
cannot be reduced to a more general one, and hence cannot be explained or
comprehended. (3) All thought (as has been shown by Hamilton in his essay
"On the Philosophy of the Unconditioned," and by his follower Mansel)
is the establishment of relations, every thought involving relation,
difference, and (as Spencer adds) likeness. Hence the absolute, the idea
of which excludes every relation, is entirely beyond the reach of an
intelligence which is concerned with relations alone, and which always
consists in discrimination, limitation, and assimilation--it is trebly
unthinkable. Therefore: Religion and Science agree in the supreme tru