to this: are Man's highest spiritual qualities, into the production of
which all this creative energy has gone, to disappear with the rest? Has
all this work been done for nothing? Is it all ephemeral, all a bubble
that bursts, a vision that fades? Are we to regard the Creator's work as
like that of a child, who builds houses out of blocks, just for the
pleasure of knocking them down? For aught that science can tell us, it
may be so, but I can see no good reason for believing any such thing. On
such a view the riddle of the universe becomes a riddle without a
meaning. Why, then, are we any more called upon to throw away our belief
in the permanence of the spiritual element in Man than we are called
upon to throw away our belief in the constancy of Nature? When
questioned as to the ground of our irresistible belief that like causes
must always be followed by like effects, Mr. Mill's answer was that it
is the result of an induction coextensive with the whole of our
experience; Mr. Spencer's answer was that it is a postulate which we
make in every act of experience;[20] but the authors of the "Unseen
Universe," slightly varying the form of statement, called it a supreme
act of faith,--the expression of a trust in God, that He will not "put
us to permanent intellectual confusion." Now the more thoroughly we
comprehend that process of evolution by which things have come to be
what they are, the more we are likely to feel that to deny the
everlasting persistence of the spiritual element in Man is to rob the
whole process of its meaning. It goes far toward putting us to permanent
intellectual confusion, and I do not see that any one has as yet
alleged, or is ever likely to allege, a sufficient reason for our
accepting so dire an alternative.

For my own part, therefore, I believe in the immortality of the soul,
not in the sense in which I accept the demonstrable truths of science,
but as a supreme act of faith in the reasonableness of God's work. Such