It may well be that what we call the unknowable will be for ever the
unknown. In that thought is there not a pathos beyond words? It may be
that the human race will live and pass away; all mankind, from him who in
the world's dawn first shaped to his fearful mind an image of the Lord of
Life, to him who, in the dusking twilight of the last age, shall crouch
before a deity of stone or wood; and never one of that long lineage have
learnt the wherefore of his being. The prophets, the martyrs, their
noble anguish vain and meaningless; the wise whose thought strove to
eternity, and was but an idle dream; the pure in heart whose life was a
vision of the living God, the suffering and the mourners whose solace was
in a world to come, the victims of injustice who cried to the Judge
Supreme--all gone down into silence, and the globe that bare them
circling dead and cold through soundless space. The most tragic aspect
of such a tragedy is that it is not unthinkable. The soul revolts, but
dare not see in this revolt the assurance of its higher destiny. Viewing
our life thus, is it not easier to believe that the tragedy is played
with no spectator? And of a truth, of a truth, what spectator can there
be? The day may come when, to all who live, the Name of Names will be
but an empty symbol, rejected by reason and by faith. Yet the tragedy
will be played on.
It is not, I say, unthinkable; but that is not the same thing as to
declare that life has no meaning beyond the sense it bears to human
intelligence. The intelligence itself rejects such a supposition; in my
case, with impatience and scorn. No theory of the world which ever came
to my knowledge is to me for one moment acceptable; the possibility of an
explanation which would set my mind at rest is to me inconceivable; no
whit the less am I convinced that there is a Reason of the All; one which
transcends my understanding, one no glimmer of which will ever touch my
apprehension; a Reason which must imply a creative power, and therefore,
even whilst a necessity of my thought, is by the same criticized into
nothing. A like antinomy with that which affects our conception of the
infinite in time and space. Whether the rational processes have reached
their final development, who shall say? Perhaps what seem to us the
impassable limits of thought are but the conditions of a yet early stage
in the history of man. Those who make them a proof of a "future state"
must necessarily suppose gradations in that futurity; does the savage,
scarce risen above the brute, enter upon the same "new life" as the man
of highest civilization? Such gropings of the mind certify our
ignorance; the strange thing is that they can be held by any one to
demonstrate that our ignorance is final knowledge.