good and evil, is thus desired. This thinking being would still have religious significance, even if it had no other attributes than these. Should we find it necessary to regard this being as without affection, sympathy, or even power to act, as without willingness to avenge wrong-doing, if we had to deprive it of everything else that is human save knowledge; let this be a passionless and perfect knowledge, an absolutely fair judgment of our moral actions, and there would still be in the world something of religious value. It is not affirmed that we ought to rest content with such a conception as this, but at all events this conception would not be valueless. Even so again, the conception of some natural tendency in the world that, being “a power not ourselves,” “makes for righteousness,” this conception, as Mr. Matthew Arnold has so well shown us, would have a religious value. Something of this kind then, more or less definite and full of life, is what we seek. What indication is there that such search is not hopeless? For the author’s part, he professes to be quite willing to accept any result of research, however gloomy or skeptical, to which he is led by genuine devotion to the interests of human thought as thought. But he insists that as moral beings we should make clear to ourselves what are the interests of thought, and that we should see whether they do lead us to results that are not wholly skeptical, nor altogether gloomy. There is no reason for clipping our own wings for fear lest we should escape from our own coops and fly over the palings into our own garden. Let us get all the satisfaction from
