not high time that we should set to
work to seek such dogmas as are written in the innermost nature of
things? Must we not reverse philosophical science?

"We trouble ourselves very little about the supposed void that
must have pre-existed for us, and we try to fathom the supposed
void that lies before us. We make God responsible for the future,
but we do not expect Him to account for the past. And yet it is
quite as desirable to know whether we have any roots in the past
as to discover whether we are inseparable from the future.

"We have been Deists or Atheists in one direction only.

"Is the world eternal? Was the world created? We can conceive of
no middle term between these two propositions; one, then, is true
and the other false! Take your choice. Whichever it may be, God,
as our reason depicts Him, must be deposed, and that amounts to
denial. The world is eternal: then, beyond question, God has had
it forced upon Him. The world was created: then God is an
impossibility. How could He have subsisted through an eternity,
not knowing that He would presently want to create the world? How
could He have failed to foresee all the results?

"Whence did He derive the essence of creation? Evidently from
Himself. If, then, the world proceeds from God, how can you
account for evil? That Evil should proceed from Good is absurd. If
evil does not exist, what do you make of social life and its laws?
On all hands we find a precipice! On every side a gulf in which
reason is lost! Then social science must be altogether
reconstructed.

"Listen to me, uncle; until some splendid genius shall have taken
account of the obvious inequality of intellects and the general
sense of humanity, the word God will be constantly arraigned, and
Society will rest on shifting sands. The secret of the various
moral zones through which man passes will be discovered by the
analysis of the animal type as a whole. That animal type has
hitherto been studied with reference only to its differences, not
to its similitudes; in its organic manifestations, not in its
faculties. Animal faculties are perfected in direct transmission,
in obedience to laws which remain to be discovered. These
faculties correspond to the forces which express them, and those
forces are essentially material and divisible.

"Material faculties! Reflect on this juxtaposition of words. Is
not this a probl