carries him beyond his narrow individuality to seek and
find a larger self in others. Morality, even in its lowest form, implies
knowledge, and knowledge of something better than "those _apparent_
other mortals." With the first dawn of the moral life comes the
consciousness of an ideal, which is not actual; and such a break with
the natural is not possible except to him who has known a better and
desired it. The ethical endeavour of man is the attempt to convert ideas
into actuality; and all his activity as moral agent takes place within
the sphere that is illumined by the light of knowledge. If knowledge
breaks down, there is no law of action which he can obey. The moral law
that must be apprehended, and whose authority must be recognized by man,
either sinks out of being or becomes an illusive phantom, if man is
doomed to ignorance or false knowledge. To extinguish truth is to
extinguish goodness.

In like manner, religion, which the poet would fain defend for man by
means of agnosticism, becomes impossible, if knowledge be denied.
Religion is not blind emotion; nor can mere feeling, however ecstatic,
ascend to God. Animals feel, but they are not, and cannot be,
religious--unless they can know. The love of God implies knowledge. "I
know Him whom I have believed" is the language of religion. For what is
religion but a conscious identification of the self with One who is
known to fulfil its needs and satisfy its aspirations? Agnosticism is
thus directly destructive of it. We cannot, indeed, prove God as the
conclusion of a syllogism, for He is the primary hypothesis of all
proof. But, nevertheless, we cannot reach Him without knowledge. Emotion
reveals no object, but is consequent upon the revelation of it; feeling
yields no truth, but is the witness of the worth of a truth for the
individual. If man were shut up to mere feeling, even the awe of the
devout agnostic would be impossible. For the Unknowable cannot generate
any emotion. It appears to do so, only because the Unknowable of the
agnostic is not altogether unknown to him; but is a vast, abysmal
"Something," that has occupied with its shadowy presence the field of
his imagination. It is paganism stricken with the plague, and philosophy
afflicted with blindness, that build altars to an unknown God. The
highest and the strongest faith, the deepest trust and the most loving,
come with the fullest knowledge. Indeed, the distinction between the awe
of the agnostic, w