uring. For it is evident that the strength of this theory now lies in
its _simplicity_,--in its undertaking to explain, so far as explanation is
possible, the sum-total of phenomena by the single postulate of
self-existence. But it seems to me that in the last century there were no
sufficient data for rendering such a theory of things a rational theory;
for so long as the quality of self-existence was supposed to reside in
phenomena themselves, the very simplicity of the theory, as expressed in
words, must have seemed to render it inapplicable as a reasonable theory of
things. The astounding variety, complexity, and harmony which are
everywhere so conspicuous in the world of phenomena must have seemed to
necessitate as an explanation some one integrating cause; and it is
impossible that in the eighteenth century any such integrating cause can
have been conceivable other than Intelligence. Therefore I think, with Mr.
Fiske, that the atheists of the eighteenth century were irrational in
applying their single postulate of self-existence as alone a sufficient
explanation of things. But of course the aspect of the case is now
completely changed, when we regard it in all the flood of light which has
been shed on it by recent science, physical and speculative. For the
demonstration of the fact that energy is indestructible, coupled with the
corollary that every so-called natural law is a physically necessary
consequence of that fact, clearly supply us with a completely novel datum
as the ultimate source of experience--and a datum, moreover, which is as
different as can well be imagined from the ever-changing, ever-fleeting,
world of phenomena. We have, therefore, but to apply the postulate of
self-existence to this single ultimate datum, and we have a theory of
things as rational as the Atheism of the last century was irrational.
Nevertheless, that this theory is more akin to the Atheism of the last
century than to any other theory of that time, is, I think, unquestionable;
for while we retain the central doctrine of self-existence as alone a
scientifically admissible, or non-gratuitous, explanation of things, we
only change the original theory by transferring the application of this
doctrine from the world of manifestations to that which causes the
manifestations: we do not resort to any of the _additional_ doctrines
whereby the other theories of the universe were distinguished from the
theory of Atheism in its original form. Ho