dead nation produces a dead literature. The age made
doubtful by an excess of science produces a literature burdened with
sadness and pain. Great and truthful as it may be, it lacks in power to
conquer the world. It shows, not the power of Homer, but the power of
Lucretius.

Her altruism has its side of truth, but not all of the truth is in it. Any
system of thought which sees nothing beyond man is not likely to find that
which is most characteristic in man himself. He is to be fathomed, if
fathomed at all, by some other line than that of his own experience. If he
explains the universe, the universe is also necessary to explain him. Man
apart from the supersensuous is as little to be understood as man apart
from humanity. He belongs to a Universal Order quite as much as he belongs
to the human order. Man may be explained by evolution, but evolution is not
to be explained by anything in the nature of man. It requires some larger
field of vision to take note of that elemental law. Not less true is it
that mind does not come obediently under this method of explanation, that
it demands account of how matter is transformed into thought. The law of
thought needs to be solved after mind is evolved.

There is occasion for surprise that a mind so acute and logical as George
Eliot's did not perceive that the evolution philosophy has failed to settle
any of the greater problems suggested by Kant. The studies of Darwin and
Spencer have certainly made it impossible longer to accept Locke's theory
of the origin of all knowledge in individual experience, but they have not
in any degree explained the process of thought or the origin of ideas. The
gulf between the physiological processes in the brain and thought has not
been bridged even by a rope walk. The total disparity of mind and matter
resists all efforts to reduce them to one. The utmost which the evolution
philosophy has so far done, is to attempt to prove that mind is a function
of matter or of the physiological process. This conclusion is as far as
possible from being that of the unity of mind and matter.

That man is very ignorant, and that this world ought to demand the greater
share of his attention and energies, are propositions every reasonable
person is ready to accept. Granted their truth, all that is necessarily
true in agnosticism has been arrived at. It is a persistent refusal to see
what lies behind outward facts which gives agnosticism all its practical
justificat