t a
single stroke, it changes the dead blank _it_ of the world into a
living _thou_, with whom the whole man may have dealings. To you, at
any rate, I need waste no words in trying to prove its supreme
commensurateness with all the demands that department Number Three of
the mind has the power to impose on department Number Two.

Our volitional nature must then, until the end of time, exert a
constant pressure upon the other departments of the mind to induce them
to function to theistic conclusions. No contrary formulas can be more
than provisionally held. Infra-theistic theories must be always in
unstable equilibrium; for department Number Three ever lurks in ambush,
ready to assert its rights, and on the slightest show of justification
it makes its fatal spring, and converts them into the other form in
which alone mental peace and order can permanently reign.

The question is, then, _Can_ departments One and Two, _can_ the facts
of nature and the theoretic elaboration of them, always lead to
theistic conclusions?

The future history of philosophy is the only {128} authority capable of
answering that question. I, at all events, must not enter into it
to-day, as that would be to abandon the purely natural-history point of
view I mean to keep.

This only is certain, that the theoretic faculty lives between two
fires which never give her rest, and make her incessantly revise her
formulations. If she sink into a premature, short-sighted, and
idolatrous theism, in comes department Number One with its battery of
facts of sense, and dislodges her from her dogmatic repose. If she
lazily subside into equilibrium with the same facts of sense viewed in
their simple mechanical outwardness, up starts the practical reason
with its demands, and makes _that_ couch a bed of thorns. From
generation to generation thus it goes,--now a movement of reception
from without, now one of expansion from within; department Number Two
always worked to death, yet never excused from taking the most
responsible part in the arrangements. To-day, a crop of new facts;
to-morrow, a flowering of new motives,--the theoretic faculty always
having to effect the transition, and life growing withal so complex and
subtle and immense that her powers of conceiving are almost ruptured
with the strain. See how, in France, the mummy-cloths of the academic
and official theistic philosophy are rent by the facts of evolution,
and how the young thinkers are