this not merely as
independent of human consciousness, but as independent of the whole
noumenal universe--Deity itself alone excepted. That is, the Being of which
Deity is predicated must be Unconditioned. Hence it is incumbent on Cosmic
Theism to prove, either that the Causal Agent which it denominates Deity is
itself the whole noumenal universe, or that it created the rest of a
noumenal universe; else there is nothing to show that this Causal Agent was
not itself created--seeing that, even if we assume the existence of a God,
there is nothing to indicate that the Causal Agent of Cosmism is that God.

It would appear therefore from this, that whatever else the Cosmist's
theory of things may be, it certainly is not Theism; and I think that
closer inspection will tend to confirm this judgment. To this then let us
proceed.

Mr. Fiske is very hard on the atheists, and so will probably repudiate with
scorn any insinuations to the effect that his theory of things is
"quasi-atheistic." Nevertheless, it seems to me that he is very unjust to
the atheists, in that while he spares no pains to "purify" and "refine" the
theory of the theists, so as at last to leave nothing but what he regards
as the distilled essence of Theism behind; he habitually leaves the theory
of the atheists as he finds it, without making any attempt either to
"purify" it by removing its weak and unnecessary ingredients, or to
"refine" it by adding such sublimated ingredients as modern speculation has
supplied. Thus, while he despises the atheists of the eighteenth century
for their irrationality in believing in the self-existence of a
_phenomenal_ universe, and reviles them for their irreligion in denying
that "the religious sentiment needed satisfaction;" he does not wait to
inquire whether, in its essential substance, the theory of these men is not
the one that has proved itself best able to withstand the grinding action
of more recent thought. But let us in fairness ask, What was the essential
substance of that theory? Apparently it was the bare statement of the
unthinkable fact that Something Is. It therefore seems to me useless in Mr.
Fiske to lay so much stress on the fact that this Something was originally
identified by atheists with the phenomenal universe. It seems useless to do
this, because such identification is clearly no part of the _essence_ of
Atheism, which, as just stated, I take to consist in the single dogma of
self-existence as itself s