to me; I do deny your God, who is an impossibility. I am without
God."[5] Up to 1887 I find myself writing on the same lines: "No man
can rationally affirm 'There is no God,' until the word 'God' has for
him a definite meaning, and until everything that exists is known to
him, and known with what Leibnitz calls 'perfect knowledge.' The
Atheist's denial of the Gods begins only when these Gods are defined
or described. Never yet has a God been defined in terms which were not
palpably self-contradictory and absurd; never yet has a God been
described so that a concept of Him was made possible to human
thought--Nor is anything gained by the assertors of Deity when they
allege that He is incomprehensible. If 'God' exists and is
incomprehensible, His incomprehensibility is an admirable reason for
being silent about Him, but can never justify the affirmation of
self-contradictory propositions, and the threatening of people with
damnation if they do not accept them."[6] "The belief of the Atheist
stops where his evidence stops. He believes in the existence of the
universe, judging the accessible proof thereof to be adequate, and he
finds in this universe sufficient cause for the happening of all
phenomena. He finds no intellectual satisfaction in placing a gigantic
conundrum behind the universe, which only adds its own
unintelligibility to the already sufficiently difficult problem of
existence. Our lungs are not fitted to breathe beyond the atmosphere
which surrounds our globe, and our faculties cannot breathe outside
the atmosphere of the phenomenal."[7] And I summed up this essay with
the words: "I do not believe in God. My mind finds no grounds on which
to build up a reasonable faith. My heart revolts against the spectre
of an Almighty Indifference to the pain of sentient beings. My
conscience rebels against the injustice, the cruelty, the inequality,
which surround me on every side. But I believe in Man. In man's
redeeming power; in man's remoulding energy; in man's approaching