GNOSTIC AGNOSTICISM.

NOTHING is more remarkable than the tendency among the natural philosophers of the day to deduce agnosti- cism, or our ignorance of the governing principle of the universe, from what we may fairly call a gnostic basis,—in other words, from the basis afforded by a dreamy exercise of imagination in picturing the vastness of the universe and the variety of the forms in which the primal energy expresses itself. A remark- able instance of an effort of this kind is the poem which Pro- fessor Minchin has recently published, and which we have reviewed in another column, called " Natorie Veritas." "Naturse Imaginatio " would have been a better name for it, if the author had been willing to give up his pleasant little fiction that the subject of his poem is a revelation from an inhabitant of one of the planets which circle round Aldebaran, instead of an effort of his own cultivated and well-schooled fancy. The whole subject of the poem is virtually a homily on the intellectual presumption and vanity of men in professing anything like theological convictions. And this is founded entirely on the intuition, or Gnosis, which the author imagines himself to have gained into the constitution of the universe from the study of its physical nature in the light of his mathematical knowledge. The following is the sort of satire with which the inhabitant of the planet of Aldebaran reproaches the soul of man for his belief in revelation i-

" Unnumbered myriads 611 the living air, And countless others hold the land and sea ; On that small patch of Earth which is thy share, The floods and earthquakes make a sport of thee !

That world was made for thee, without a doubt :— Fitly prepared, like some ancestral hall— Then Universal Heaven with joy did shout, When Nature bowed thee in—the lord of all !

A gardener's fault, which, in the creeds of men, Brought death into the world, and all their wee! Was there no rage of tooth and claw till then, No pain, no death ?—the fondled rooks will show !

Nay, when thy moral nature takes its flight, A perfect Scheme of Ethics for its goal, No single maxim can its power indite Which does not by confliction mar the whole!

The web thou oanst not weave—for Bad and Good, Virtue and Vice, thy moral warp and woof, Tossed to and fro upon the angry flood, From all thy grasping efforts hold aloof.

Yes, to thyself so dismal seems thy case, Thy life an endless round of pain and vice, That God must die to save thy wretched race- Think'st thou thy race were worth the sacrifice ?"

And the Aldebaran spirit goes on to explain that the real root of the evil which makes human life such a struggle is very simple,—it is the imperfection and rudeness of our physical body, which represents only the earliest stage of physio- logical development. "The atoms must arrange and re- arrange" themselves through millions of cycles before a body can result which will be in anything like true harmony with the universe, so that the existing clash of sense with sense, and of lives with lives, shall have ceased. In the meantime, it is childish, according to the Aldebaran spirit, to suppose that God has taken a human nature and died a human death in order to rectify a mischief which could not be thus cured, being

deeply rooted in the rudimentary character of our existing organisation. Oddly enough, the mighty spirit from Aldebaran, or at least his human interpreter, Professor Minchin, appears to be under the rather strange impression that Christian theology is grounded on the assumption that man is the true measure of the universe,—a view which is denounced in the account of the stellar journey of the author, with an earnestness that we should have supposed to be derived from Revelation, if it were not so obvious that the author thinks it totally inconsistent with Revelation. "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," says the Divine Spirit by the mouth of Isaiah; "for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts." Is not that a very powerful anticipation by some thousands of years of the revelation attributed to the Aldebaran spirit, "that the true magnificence of the Universe will never be appreciated by Men so long as they attempt to make their own aspirations and their own knowledge the measure of all things" ? "There is nothing so hurtful to the interests of that true religion which excited in the heart of Kant his pro- found admiration for • the starry heavens above,' as the wretched woirran ph-pav theory of Protagoras which has taken such firm root in the human mind." If it has taken firm root in the human mind, it is, at all events, not in con- sequence of, but in spite of the oracles of God which never weary of impressing on us the contrary. "When I con- sider thy heavens, the work of thy hands, the MQ011 and the stars which thou hast ordained, what is man that thou art mind- ful of him, and the son of man that thou visitest him P" says the Psalmist. Surely even the "mighty spirit" from Aldebaran could not have warned ne more effectually against making man the measure of all things than did the poets and prophets of Israel from two to three thousand years ago.

Doubtless, however, what the Aldebaran spirit meant to imply was something of the same kind as what Mr. Fronde has said. in his Life of Carlyle,—that the moment the earth was known to be a minute point in the least conspicuous part of the solar system, instead of the centre round which sun, moon, and stars all revolve, that moment it became impossible to think of man as either significant enough to be the special object of a divine redeeming purpose, or independent enough of the mighty order of which he is a minute part to be redeemable without some influence penetrating far deeper than one addressed only to his conscious life. Perhaps it needed a revelation from Aldebaran to enforce Mr. Froude's not otherwise very impressive remark ; but even when supported by that revelation, it hardly seems probable that the heliocentric astronomy and the dis- coveries of the telescope have succeeded more completely in humiliating men's self-conceit than the author of the book of Job had succeeded in humiliating it without any help from these sources,—indeed, with no better help than that which the com- plete possession of his mind by the majesty of God could impart to him. Even the spirit from the orbit of Aldebaran does not convince man of his impotence and insignificance in language quite so striking as this :— " Cana thou bind the sweet influence of the Pleiades, Or loose the bands of Orion ?

Cana thou bring forth Narzaroth in his season, Or canst thou guide Arcturus with his seas? Know'st thou the ordinances of Heaven ? Canst thou set the dominion thereof in the Earth ? Cant thou lift up thy voice to the clouds That abandance of waters may covert thee ? Can'st thou send lightnings that they may go And say unto thee, here we are ? "

We fail to see how the agnostic argument, so far as it hinges on the mightiness of the physical universe and the pettiness of human powers, can be forced home as effectively even by a modern astronomer, as it was by the poet of Jehovah. Indeed, the truth is, that while we may conjecture on grounds reasonable enough that multitudes of beings of all orders of mind, from those beneath to those infinitely above man, may exist in the infinite universe that science has revealed to us, the certainty, if we could obtain it, that this conjecture was true, would not reduce,—perhaps might greatly increase,—for us the moral significance of our own lives, which, far from depending on the empty dream that God has no other world to care for except our own, rests exclusively on the positive conviction that God does care, does infinitely care, that we should order our own lives aright. How does it concern us that there are millions of other worlds, if so it be, unknown to us, where a revelation of the divine Will has been as needful and as momentous as it has been here P If it were so, that would enhance, rather than reduce, the significance of the divine love from which all revelation proceeds. The vainest method we could imagine of reducing the moral import of any revelation would be to prove to us that that revelation represents the highest truth that our minds can as yet grasp, not only for this obscure corner of the universe, but for an infinite number of spheres so mighty that the absolute disappearance of ours would not make any difference appreciable to such perceptions as ours, in the mighty total.

But it is not the magnifying of the physical universe on which the Aldebaran spirit really lays stress, still less the magnifying of the moral universe beyond the limits to which man has access ; his real drift is the depreciation of the moral universe that we know, the substitution of a physical for a moral doctrine of regeneration,—the gnosis, for it is nothing better, that we cannot make, or help to make, wrong right in our own lives without a complete rearrangement of the whole framework of nature, a recast of all the atoms of which it consists, a recast which it will take ages and cycles of ages to effect. That is the true gist of the Aldebaranite's teaching, that man is only a part, and an utterly subordinate part, of a physical constitution far too vast to be seriously affected by the reflex action upon it of the puny human will. The doctrine is that the individual consciousness perishes in order that the type may improve

"When Death shall loose the bonds once more and drive, By countless paths, the atoms into space, 'Tis true thy gains of Knowledge will survive, And pass as sacred heirlooms to thy race.

But Conscious Self is not among the grains Which Nature gathers from the beaten sheaf,— Should she, with boundless treasure, be at pains To store the memories of human grief F" Farther, we are taught,—as we understand the Aldebaranite'a oommunication,—that no conscious purpose runs through Nature's "mighty plan," though every step in evolution brings "fitness for higher means to higher ends ;" that this results from a continual strife amongst the various types of life, in which the lower forms succumb, and the higher conquer, as the corresponding organisms become less or more responsive to the innumerable energies of Nature ; and that confidence in this vast process,—of which it is impossible to comprehend the rationale or the scope,—is to be the substitute for that trust in God which the Aldebaranite describes as nothing but faith in the "mighty bungler who contrived the whole."

This is indeed a revelation or a gnosis which tondo to the very degeneracy by which the lower types of mind wart extinction. It saves us from the false teaching that man is the measure of all things, only to inculcate the still falser teaching that man is the sport of all things. If anything be certain, it is that the loss of resolution, the loss of power to strive, has always followed the loss of belief in the reality and freedom of human agency, and in the divine guidance which can alone keep that agency in the right channels. How can that strife of atoms by which, according to this agnostic gnostic, the organisation of the higher races is sifted out, teach the lesson to which even the Aldebaranite most illogically and irrelevantly comes at last /1— " To tune the chords to Misery's appeal, Thine eye the gem that shines through Pity's tear, The grief that rends another heart to feel,— Sweet harmony is this in Nature's ear

Why, the very drift of the whole discourse, if it has any drift, is that the weeding out of the feebler types is the very thing that Nature aims at ; and if so, how can sympathy with misery, and the tear of pity, be sweet harmony in the ear of the great extinguishing agency P The revelation of a power of love and righteousness to a being free enough to follow the lightgiven, is the one spiritual antiseptic which prevents the human race from losing confidence in its destiny, and rotting back into the corruption in which all moral agencies that are overwhelmed by the spectacle of Nature's vastness, inevitably end. There never was yet any nerve in any race which had permanently lost faith in the love and power of God. Neither in this little planet, nor inthe mightier spheres of space, can purity and pity spring from a conviction that the strife of atoms will sift out the lower types of being in acoordance with some inecrutable law of unconscious evolution, of which we know only that man is its plaything and that consciousness is one of its least durable tools,