ted me. "The agnostic grants that there _may_ be
something beyond the sphere of man's knowledge; I can make no such
admission. For me, what is called the unknowable is simply the
non-existent. We see what is, and we see all." Now this gave me a sort
of shock; it seemed incredible to me that a man of so much intelligence
could hold such a view. So far am I from feeling satisfied with any
explanation, scientific or other, of myself and of the world about me,
that not a day goes by but I fall a-marvelling before the mystery of the
universe. To trumpet the triumphs of human knowledge seems to me worse
than childishness; now, as of old, we know but one thing--that we know
nothing. What! Can I pluck the flower by the wayside, and, as I gaze at
it, feel that, if I knew all the teachings of histology, morphology, and
so on, with regard to it, I should have exhausted its meanings? What is
all this but words, words, words? Interesting, yes, as observation; but,
the more interesting, so much the more provocative of wonder and of
hopeless questioning. One may gaze and think till the brain whirls--till
the little blossom in one's hand becomes as overwhelming a miracle as the
very sun in heaven. Nothing to be known? The flower simply a flower,
and there an end on't? The man simply a product of evolutionary law, his
senses and his intellect merely availing him to take account of the
natural mechanism of which he forms a part? I find it very hard to
believe that this is the conviction of any human mind. Rather I would
think that despair at an insoluble problem, and perhaps impatience with
those who pretend to solve it, bring about a resolute disregard of
everything beyond the physical fact, and so at length a self-deception
which seems obtuseness.

X.

It may well be that what we call the unknowable will be for ever the
unknown. In that thought is there not a pathos beyond words? It may be
that the human race will live and pass away; all mankind, from him who in
the world's dawn first shaped to his fearful mind an image of the Lord of
Life, to him who, in the dusking twilight of the last age, shall crouch
before a deity of stone or wood; and never one of that long lineage have
learnt the wherefore of his being. The prophets, the martyrs, their
noble anguish vain and meaningless; the wise whose thought strove to
eternity, and was but an idle dream; the pure in heart whose life was a
vision of the living God, th