This

this kingdom can be said to exist. Supreme Being is indeed much more than a name or an idea in our heads; but it is a name only for the present accumulated inheritance of humanity's spiritual progress. Does it then satisfy Comte's account of what is necessary for religion? No; it is not a Real Power which is more than ourselves. It satisfies the other conditions it is an object which we can reverence, and on which our affections can rest, and in whose realisation we can take part; for it is a real growth, in which the achievements of the past survive through their effects in the present. But this is the only way in which the past exists; in what other way could it be real? Thus in this sense only is Humanity a Real Power-that we are moved by our thoughts of the past and by all its conscious and unconscious effects in our own selves. Comte is not even entitled to say that Humanity is the source of our ideals and our various kinds of human good; it simply consists of these ideals and these forms of good, so far as they have attained realisation and perpetuated them

selves, and so far as they are sources of inspiration.

If there is an absolute Being who is the source of all our good, we are rationally compelled to identify it with the Power which sustains the phenomena of Nature. Otherwise, the so-called Being only exists so far as we have realised it: even its further realisation is as yet only a possibility, set before us as an ideal. But whence comes this imperious, persuasive Ideal? Dr Edward Caird-in his excellent little work on The Social Philosophy and Religion of Comte-points out that the same arguments which break down the division between man and man, break down the division between man and Nature: "the only philosophical difficulty is to conceive how man can transcend his private or particular individuality at all; and, if that is shown to be for him possible, there is no reason whatever for denying that he can and must rise to the knowledge of God, the absolute or objective unity of the world"; and this unity, regarded in its intellectual aspect, is simply the goal of science.

Comte dwells on the indifference to all

human aims which characterises natural

laws and forces. This world-old problem stands in the way of our identifying the Source of our ideals with the Source of natural law; or as Huxley would have said prevents us from regarding the "ethical process" of humanity as having anything in common with the "cosmic process of the universe. Yet at the same time the existence of this problem is the very fact which prompts us to make the identification-which may seem a paradox. Consider what our relation to Nature really is. Man is formed out of the dust of the earth; physically, we are made of the same stuff as the plants and stones. We are bound by countless ties to the world on which we live; we are earth of its earth, it is flesh of our flesh. We are enclosed by a network of laws that never fail; we are like prisoners bound on every side by a million unfelt bonds which never give way, like "a magic web woven through and through us, . . . penetrating us with a network subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world."

The aspect under which the physical universe first presents itself to us is that of a vast system of forces acting by laws which never vary; and this is what has "beset us behind and before" and "laid its hand upon us." How are we profited if a being, unrelated to these forces, has inspired us to search after truth and goodness, if for anything we knew to the contrary the nature of the universe, by whose life ours is enfolded, may render it impossible that truth. and goodness should ever be effectively realised? We may be willing to trust in the highest desires and aspirations to which man's nature rises; but what avails it, if we do not know their relation to the world around us?

Professor Huxley, in his Lecture on Evolution and Ethics, has given us a most forcible and eloquent statement of the opposition between Nature and human morality, and has shown how for ages past mankind has found itself face to face with the same dread problem of evil; and how in seeking to know "whether there is or is not a sanction for morality in the ways of the cosmos," it has learnt at last that "cosmic nature is no

school of virtue, but the headquarters of the enemy of ethical nature.” To this Comte would have heartily assented; and indeed the difference between the ethical and the cosmic process is not to be denied, though it is sometimes exaggerated. But when we

consider the fact on which we have been dwelling, that so large a part of our life is actually bound up with the cosmic process itself, what are we to make of this opposition between the same cosmic process and that higher part of ourselves which produces ideal morality? It suggests to us that what Huxley calls the "cosmic process" has not produced all the contents of man's soul; that our distinctively human qualities and powers are not the product of mere physical evolution. The fatalistic machinery of Nature her forces and her laws, which prevail all through and indeed constitute the "material universe" must somehow be subordinate to a deeper reality, whose laws are related to, and expressed in, human ideals of goodness. Only if we can hold this, can we allow the absolute authority which Comte and Huxley - in different waysclaim for the ethical life.