y of greater men, insists that the
sense limitations imposed upon its own intelligence shall forthwith be
erected into a dogma to be accepted as infallible by everybody else's
intelligence. Be as reverent as Darwin in your agnosticism, as
tolerant as Comte, we would say to such men, and there is much to
commend in your teaching; but spare us the ridiculous spectacle of a
handful of pamphleteers and minor essayists arraigning the sublimest
philosophy ever known to the world, and consecrated by the homage of
ninety out of every hundred thinkers who have ever approached its
study, as a system erected upon a mirage--the image of a man's own
personality distorted by its projection into the infinite. Tennyson
himself once said that "the average Englishman's god was an
immeasurable clergyman, and that not a few of them mistook their devil
for their god", That may very well be, but the philosophers of the
world who have built the house of wisdom are not "average Englishmen,"
and to describe their theism as the imagination of an immeasurable
man--surpliced clergyman or otherwise--is a criticism, not of the
philosophers, but of their would-be critics. _Non ragionian di lor, ma
guarda e passa!_

But Tennyson was a passionately convinced theist. With that scrupulous
voraciousness which, according to those who knew him most intimately,
was his leading characteristic, he surveys nature not only with the
reverent eye of a mystic, but with the exact vision of science, and
faithfully reports what he sees--so faithfully, indeed, that he was
hailed by Tyndall in, the sixties as "the poet of science". Loving
truth, "by which no man yet was ever harmed," he does not hesitate to
portray nature "red in tooth and claw with ravine shrieking against the
creed" of a moral and beneficent power. And when no reconciliation is
obvious he can but "faintly trust the larger hope" and point hence
where possibly the discords of life will be resolved into a final
harmony.

What hope of answer or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil!

But these facts, however unmistakable, are powerless to alter the main
inevitable conclusion that beneficent power does rule the cosmos,
though they may modify it provisionally, until a better insight into
the workings of nature supplies us with a clue to the mystery's
solution. He is a sorry philosopher indeed who will insist that
nothing whatever can be known because everything cannot be known, that
an