tion. To show the folly of
referring to the Unknown the attributes of our own spirits, he makes
"the grotesque supposition that the tickings and other movements of a
watch constituted a kind of consciousness; and that a watch possessed of
such a consciousness, insisted on regarding the watchmaker's actions as
determined like its own by springs and escapements." (p. 111). The vast
majority of men, instead of agreeing with Mr. Spencer in this matter,
will doubtless heartily, each for himself, join the German philosopher
Jacobi, in saying, "I confess to Anthropomorphism inseparable from the
conviction that man bears the image of God; and maintain that besides
this Anthropomorphism, which has always been called Theism, is nothing
but Atheism or Fetichism."[4]

Mr. Spencer, therefore, in accounting for the origin of the universe and
all its phenomena, physical, vital, and mental, rejects Theism, or the
doctrine of a personal God, who is extramundane as well as antemundane,
the creator and governor of all things; he rejects Pantheism, which
makes the finite the existence-form of the Infinite; he rejects Atheism,
which he understands to be the doctrine of the eternity and
self-existence of matter and force. He contents himself with saying we
must acknowledge the reality of an unknown something which is the cause
of all things,--the noumenon of all phenomena. "If science and religion
are to be reconciled, the basis of the reconciliation must be this
deepest, widest, and most certain of all facts,--that the Power which
the universe manifests is utterly inscrutable." (p. 46). "The ultimate
of ultimates is Force." "Matter and motion, as we know them, are
differently conditioned manifestations of force." "If, to use an
algebraic illustration, we represent Matter, Motion, and Force, by the
symbols _x_, _y_, _z_; then we may ascertain the values of _x_ and _y_
in terms of _z_, but the value of _z_ can never be found; _z_ is the
unknown quantity, which must forever remain unknown, for the obvious
reason that there is nothing in which its value can be expressed." (pp.
169, 170).

We have, then, no God but Force. Atheist is everywhere regarded as a
term of reproach. Every man instinctively recoils from it. Even the
philosophers of the time of the French Revolution repudiated the charge
of atheism, because they believed in motion; and motion being
inscrutable, they believed in an inscrutable something, _i. e._ in
Force. We doubt not Mr