e spiritual element in Man than we are called
upon to throw away our belief in the constancy of Nature? When
questioned as to the ground of our irresistible belief that like causes
must always be followed by like effects, Mr. Mill's answer was that it
is the result of an induction coextensive with the whole of our
experience; Mr. Spencer's answer was that it is a postulate which we
make in every act of experience;[20] but the authors of the "Unseen
Universe," slightly varying the form of statement, called it a supreme
act of faith,--the expression of a trust in God, that He will not "put
us to permanent intellectual confusion." Now the more thoroughly we
comprehend that process of evolution by which things have come to be
what they are, the more we are likely to feel that to deny the
everlasting persistence of the spiritual element in Man is to rob the
whole process of its meaning. It goes far toward putting us to permanent
intellectual confusion, and I do not see that any one has as yet
alleged, or is ever likely to allege, a sufficient reason for our
accepting so dire an alternative.

For my own part, therefore, I believe in the immortality of the soul,
not in the sense in which I accept the demonstrable truths of science,
but as a supreme act of faith in the reasonableness of God's work. Such
a belief, relating to regions quite inaccessible to experience, cannot
of course be clothed in terms of definite and tangible meaning. For the
experience which alone can give us such terms we must await that solemn
day which is to overtake us all. The belief can be most quickly defined
by its negation, as the refusal to believe that this world is all. The
materialist holds that when you have described the whole universe of
phenomena of which we can become cognizant under the conditions of the
present life, then the whole story is told. It seems to me, on the
contrary, that the whole story is not thus told. I feel the omnipresence
of mystery in such wise as to make it far easier for me to adopt the
view of Euripides, that what we call death may be but the dawning of
true knowledge and of true life. The greatest philosopher of modern
times, the master and teacher of all who shall study the process of
evolution for many a day to come, holds that the conscious soul is not
the product of a collocation of material particles, but is in the
deepest sense a divine effluence. According to Mr. Spencer, the divine
energy which is manifested