soul will continue to exist, for the same reason which leads me to expect that the sun will continue to rise. While nature remains uniform, death will no more put out the soul than it will put out the sun. All the talk, of which we hear so much in the present day, about there being no soul, or no soul but brain, or no soul that is likely to survive the death of the body-all this is pure nonsense, illogical and unscientific to the last degree. It is certain, demonstrable beyond the possibility of doubt-(1) that we have a soul; (2) that the soul remains persistently identical, while its body and experiences change; (3) that there is no reason why death should put an end to the soul; (4) that, on the contrary, there is the strongest reason—namely, the uniformity of nature-why it should not. The lessons of our childhood then, though mingled no doubt with error, had a firm foundation in fact. And Wordsworth's Ode to Immortality, which is perhaps the most spiritual poem in any language, is no creation of a diseased brain; it is the outcome of a strictly scientific use of the imagination :

"The soul that rises with us-our life's star

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar,

Hence in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither;

Can in a moment travel thither;

And see the children sport upon the shore,

And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.”

62

Agnosticism.

V.

EVOLUTION OF SPECIES.

ET us take a brief survey of the ground over

which we have already travelled. The fundamental principle of agnosticism is, that knowledge is necessarily restricted to what are technically called phenomena—that is, to those things which are capable of being apprehended by the senses. What cannot become a sensation must, the agnostics tell us, for ever remain unknown. Now we saw that this general principle of theirs was false; for the soul, though it can never be apprehended by the senses, is knowable and known. The existence of a soul is a necessary condition for the existence of sensations. The very meaning of the word sensation is something felt by some one-that is to say, by a soul.

Further, when we investigated the faculty of memory, we discovered that the soul was distinguished from transitory and changing phenomena by its permanence and identity. The very meaning of the word remembrance is, that one and the self-same soul has existed in two different states-viz., in its present state of recollection, and also in the previous state of which this recollection is a copy. The soul having thus existed in successive states must, beyond question, have persisted between them. We saw that there was no reason to suppose this persistence would cease with death; but that, on the contrary, there was every reason to suppose it would not. Waiving, however, the question of the soul's persistence in another life, we took our stand upon the undeniable fact of its persistence in this, and we saw that its persistent and non-phenomenal character, so far from making it unknowable, rendered it, on the contrary, pre-eminently knowable. There is nothing in the universe we know so well, for the simple reason that it is present and identical in all our experiences, while those experiences themselves are for ever changing and passing away. The only plausible reasons for supposing the soul to be unknown are—(1) that we cannot

picture it; and (2) that we cannot define it. The answer to the first objection is this-Only what is material is picturable; the soul being immaterial, is therefore necessarily unpicturable; anything that could be pictured would not be a soul. And as regards the second objectionviz., its undefinableness—the answer is, that we can only define a thing by referring it to something better known than itself. The soul, therefore, is, from the very nature of the case, undefinable, because it is itself the best known.

Now let us pass on, from the knowledge of the soul, to the knowledge of God. If the agnostics had been right in asserting that only phenomena could be known, it would follow necessarily that God, if a God there were, not being a phenomenon, must from His very nature be unknowable. But, conversely, as the soul is knowable, it follows that knowledge is not restricted to phenomena; and hence, for anything our experience tells us to the contrary, God may be known. We have thus got rid of an objection that barred the way to all further inquiry. The demonstration of the

knowableness of the soul is a demonstration that all knowledge is not phenomenal. In other words, there is nothing in the nature of