an. One
remembers Darwin's sorrowful admission, that the deadening of his
spiritual instincts left him incapable of enjoying, or even tolerating,
the rhythm of the poet's verse. The world has heard the note of
weariness with which Mr. Spencer absolved himself from further effort
on behalf of science and man. The late Prof. Romanes, in his volume
entitled _A Candid Examination of Theism_, made the melancholy
declaration that the admission of a philosophy of pure mechanism or
materialism had, for him at least, "robbed the universe of its soul of
beauty". In later years, as is well known, the same writer came to see
things with other eyes. Mind took the place of force as the ultimate
fact of creation, and with it the sun of loveliness returned once more.

Have we ever sufficiently reflected that the purely negative philosophy
has done nothing for idealism in any shape or form? It has inspired no
art, music or poetry. With nothing to draw upon but the blind whirl of
infinite atoms and infinite forces, of which man is himself the
haphazard and highest production, it has contented itself with the
elementary work of destruction, without even attempting to dig the
foundations for anything which it is proposed to erect in the place of
what has been destroyed. "Scepticism," says Carlyle, "is, after all,
only half a magician. She calls up more spectres than she can lay."
Scepticism was, nay is, sometimes, a necessary attitude of the human
mind. But man cannot live on doubt alone, and therefore, though we
profoundly believe the possibility of living the good life
independently of religious sanctions, we unhesitatingly affirm the deep
need man has of religious emotion to satisfy the ineradicable instinct
of his nature towards communion with the unseen world. Here are the
words of a man who had exhausted the possibilities of life before he
wrote them, conveying in the simplest, though most penetrating way, a
most momentous truth: "_Fecisti nos Domine ad Te, et irrequietum est
cor nostrum donec requiescat in Te_". "_Thou hast made us, O Lord, for
Thyself, and our heart is restless until it find rest in Thee_." And
if we would have a modern commentary upon this saying of the fourth
century writer, Augustine of Hippo, here are a few words of Victor
Hugo, spoken in the French Parliament of the forties: "_Dieu se
retrouve a la fin de tout_".

Before leaving this point, it would be well to complete the argument by
distinctly