They turn aside from the ambiguous pageant, the circumspect scrutiny; they specialise the name of Religion upon some clear, swift, extra-scientific knowledge as to the dealings of unseen Powers with mankind.

On such knowledge, or supposed knowledge, the peoples of East and West have stayed in many fashions their soul's desire; but, nevertheless, we all know too well that even yet there is no spiritual food attainable in the precise condition in which it will meet all healthy needs. We are all forced to feel that in the present divided and unstable condition of beliefs there is plausibility in the Agnostic's appeal to us to halt and mark time; in his insistence that we have not really evidence, up to modern standards, which can support any definite creed in matters remote from ordinary methods of proof. Some men, indeed, have ventured explicitly to reply that Christian Faith need not be founded on the same kind of demonstration as Science; that Tradition and Intuition can well supply her outward form and her inward glow. Urged among those who have much of consecrated tradition, of noble intuition in common, this high claim may seem convincing as the gaze of a friend. But it has the inevitable weakness already indicated.

Introduce other persons of different race but equally sincere, the Buddhist, the Parsee, the Jew - nay, the saint of science, like Darwin - and you can meet these men no longer on the ground of Christian Tradition or Intuition - you can meet them on the ground of Science alone. Thus even among spiritually-minded men we seem forced back into the view that Science can be the only world-philosophy or world-religion; - the only synthesis of the Universe which, however imperfect, is believed in semper, ubique, et ab omnibus, by all who can understand it.

This conclusion, however, as already implied, at present satisfies nobody. The Christian says that it is mere mockery to pretend that Science can be the base of Religion; for it tells us nothing of the spiritual world. "Naturally," replies the Agnostic, hardening into Materialism; "since there is no spiritual world of which to tell." "The Universe," cried Clifford triumphantly, "is made of ether and atoms, and there is no room for ghosts".

So soon, however, as the man of science takes this tone - so soon as he passes, so to say, from Huxley to Clifford - he loses his strong position, the Agnostic's raison d'etre. Clifford had not really turned over his atoms thoroughly enough to make sure that no ghost was hidden among them. As indisputably as any worshipper of Mumbo-Jumbo had that eager truth-lover framed an emotional synthesis which outran his Science.

Is, then, the passivity of pure Agnosticism the attitude with which we ought to be content? Ignoramus et ignorabimus - should this be the single clause of our creed? Surely that were too tame a surrender to the Sphinx and her riddle; which, in the old story, turned out after all to be rather easy to guess. Why should we not simply try to find out new facts here, as we have found out new facts everywhere else where we have looked for them? Just here we have not looked for them yet, because neither the priests of our religions nor their critics have till now been disposed for the quest. The priests have thought it safest to defend their own traditions, their own intuitions, without going afield in search of independent evidence of a spiritual world. Their assailants have kept their powder and shot for the orthodox ramparts, ignoring any isolated strongholds which formed no part of the main line of defence.

This search for new facts is precisely what our Society undertakes. Starting from various standpoints, we endeavour to carry the newer, the intellectual virtues into regions where dispassionate tranquillity has seldom yet been known. As compared with the claims of Theologians, we set before ourselves a humbler, yet a difficult task. We do not seek to shape the clauses of the great Act of Faith, but merely to prove its preamble. To prove the preamble of all religions; to be able to say to theologian or to philosopher: "Thus and thus we demonstrate that a spiritual world exists - a world of independent and abiding realities, not a mere 'epiphenomenon' or transitory effect of the material world - a world of things, concrete and living, not a mere system of abstract ideas; now, therefore, reason on that world or feel towards it as you will." This would indeed, in my view, be the weightiest service which any research could render to the deep disquiet of our time; - nay, to the desiderium orbis catholici, the world-old and world-wide desire.

First, then, we adopt the ancient belief - implied in all monotheistic religion, and conspicuously confirmed by the progress of modern science - that the world as a whole, spiritual and material together, has in some way a systematic unity; and on this we base the novel presumption that there should be a unity of method in the investigation of all fact. We hold therefore that the attitude, the habits of mind, the methods, by aid of which physical science has grown deep and wide, should be applied also to the spiritual world. We endeavour to approach the problems of that world by careful collection, scrutiny, testing, of particular facts; and we account no unexplained fact too trivial for our attention. Seeking knowledge before edification, we aim not at what we should most like to learn, but at what we have the best chance of learning; we dabble among beggarly elements; we begin at the beginning.

Into this frame of mind the long habit of our race in matters religious has made it difficult fully to enter. I have found it helpful to imagine what would be the procedure of some extraneous inquirer into the nature and fate of men - some inquirer exempt from their hopes, their fears, their presuppositions.

Let us suppose, then, that "a spectator of all time and all existence," a kind of minor Cosmotheorus, as Plato might call him, were speculating from the standpoint of this planet, as to what was likely to be the true position of the human race in the scheme of the Universe. Such an observer would be compelled to start from the facts before him. He would begin his investigation, therefore, not with God but with man. He would analyse the faculties of which he found man possessed, and would infer in what environment they were designed to operate; - of what system, that is to say, of cosmic laws, expressing a special modification of the ultimate energy, the energy contained in the human race formed an integral element. His first discovery would be that the obvious material environment, which is all that most men know, does not exhaust the faculties nor cover the phenomena of human life. Most of man's senses, indeed, he could explain as concerned solely with matter. Sight he could not thus explain; and the study of light would lead him to discover the etherial environment, - a system of laws, that is to say, which, while fundamentally continuous with the laws of matter, does yet supply a new conception of the Cosmos, at once more generalised and more profound.