personality to this first cause is raised, that the choice is not
between personality and something lower. It is between personality and
something higher. To this may belong a mode of being as much
transcending intelligence and will as these transcend mechanical motion.
It is strange, he says, that men should suppose the highest worship to
lie in assimilating the object of worship to themselves. And yet, again,
in one of the latest of his works he writes: 'Unexpected as it will be
to most of my readers, I must assert that the power which manifests
itself in consciousness is but a differently conditioned form of the
power which manifests itself beyond consciousness. The conception to
which the exploration of nature everywhere tends is much less that of a
universe of dead matter than that of a universe everywhere alive.'

Similar is the issue in the reflexion of Huxley. Agnosticism had at
first been asserted in relation to the spiritual and the teleological.
It ended in fastening upon the material and mechanical. After all, says
Huxley, in one of his essays:--'What do we know of this terrible matter,
except as a name for an unknown and hypothetical cause of states of our
own consciousness? Again, what do we know of that spirit over whose
threatened extinction by matter so great lamentation has now arisen,
except that it is also a name for an unknown and hypothetical cause of
states of our consciousness?' He concedes that matter is inconceivable
apart from mind, but that mind is not inconceivable apart from matter.
He concedes that the conception of universal and necessary law is an
ideal. It is an invention of the mind's own devising. It is not a
physical fact. In brief, taking agnostic naturalism just as it seemed
disposed a generation ago to present itself, it now appears as if it had
been turned exactly inside out. Instead of the physical world being
primary and fundamental and the mental world secondary, if not
altogether problematical, the precise converse is true.

Nature, as science regards it, may be described as a system whose parts,
be they simple or complex, are wholly governed by universal laws.
Knowledge of these laws is an indispensable condition of that control of
nature upon which human welfare in so large degree depends. But this
reign of law is an hypothesis. It is not an axiom which it would be
absurd to deny. It is not an obvious fact, thrust upon us whether we
will or no. Experiences are possible wi