The explanation of that which is explicable,
does but bring out into greater clearness the inexplicableness of that
which remains behind. However we may succeed in reducing the equation to
its lowest terms, we are not thereby enabled to determine the unknown
quantity: on the contrary, it only becomes more manifest that the
unknown quantity can never be found.

Little as it seems to do so, fearless inquiry tends continually to give
a firmer basis to all true Religion. The timid sectarian, alarmed at the
progress of knowledge, obliged to abandon one by one the superstitions
of his ancestors, and daily finding his cherished beliefs more and more
shaken, secretly fears that all things may some day be explained; and
has a corresponding dread of Science: thus evincing the profoundest of
all infidelity--the fear lest the truth be bad. On the other hand, the
sincere man of science, content to follow wherever the evidence leads
him, becomes by each new inquiry more profoundly convinced that the
Universe is an insoluble problem. Alike in the external and the internal
worlds, he sees himself in the midst of perpetual changes, of which he
can discover neither the beginning nor the end. If, tracing back the
evolution of things, he allows himself to entertain the hypothesis that
all matter once existed in a diffused form, he finds it utterly
impossible to conceive how this came to be so; and equally, if he
speculates on the future, he can assign no limit to the grand succession
of phenomena ever unfolding themselves before him. On the other hand, if
he looks inward, he perceives that both terminations of the thread of
consciousness are beyond his grasp: he cannot remember when or how
consciousness commenced, and he cannot examine the consciousness that at
any moment exists; for only a state of consciousness that is already
past can become the object of thought, and never one which is passing.

When, again, he turns from the succession of phenomena, external or
internal, to their essential nature, he is equally at fault. Though he
may succeed in resolving all properties of objects into manifestations
of force, he is not thereby enabled to realise what force is; but finds,
on the contrary, that the more he thinks about it, the more he is
baffled. Similarly, though analysis of mental actions may finally bring
him down to sensations as the original materials out of which all
thought is woven, he is none the forwarder; for he cannot in th