prehensible; that his ways are past finding out; that he is the
Unconditioned, the Infinite, the Unknowable. They really mean that he is
another order of intelligence, which, to quote a famous comparison of
Spinoza, has the same name as ours, but is no more one with it than the
dog is one with his namesake, the dog-star!

They are eagerly seconded in this position by a school of writers who
distinctly see where such a doctrine leads, and who do not hesitate to
carry it home. Mr. Mill is right in his scorn for those who "erect the
incurable limitations of the human conceptive faculty into laws of the
outward universe," if there are such limitations. And Mr. Spencer is
justified in condemning "the transcendent audacity which passes current
as piety," if his definition of the underlying verity of religion is
admitted--that it is "the consciousness of an inscrutable power which,
in its nature, transcends intuition, and is beyond imagination."[98-1]
They are but following the orthodox Sir William Hamilton, who says:
"Creation must be thought as the incomprehensible evolution of power
into energy."[99-1] We are to think that which by the terms of the
proposition is unthinkable! A most wise master!

Let it be noted that the expressions such as inscrutable,
incomprehensible, unknowable, etc., which such writers use, are avowedly
not limited to man's intelligence in its present state of cultivation,
but are applied to his _kind_ of intelligence, no matter how far
trained. They mean that the inscrutable, etc., is not merely not _at
present_ open to man's observation--that were a truism--but that it
cannot be subsumed under the laws of his reasoning powers. In other
words, they deny that all intelligence is one in _kind_. Some accept
this fully, and concede that what are called the laws of order, as shown
by science, are only matters of experience, true here and now, not
necessarily and absolutely true.

This is a consistent inference, and applies, of course, with equal force
to all moral laws and religious dogmas.

The arguments brought against such opinions have been various. The old
reply to the sophists has been dressed in modern garb, and it has been
repeatedly put that if no statement is really true, then this one, to
wit "no statement is really true," also is not true; and if that is the
case, then there are statements which really are true. The theory of
evolution as a dogma has been attacked by its own maxims; in asser