CHAPTER IX

GOD THE UNKNOWN

The reader will already have felt that the panzoistic conceptionof God- the conception, that is to say, of God as comprising allliving units in His own single person-does not help us tounderstand the origin of matter, nor yet that of the primordialcell which has grown and unfolded itself into the present life ofthe world.How was the world rendered fit for the habitation ofthe first germ of Life? How came it to have air and water,without which nothing that we know of as living can exist? Wasthe world fashioned and furnished with aqueous and atmosphericadjuncts with a view to the requirements of the infant monad, andto his due development?If so, we have evidence of design, andif so of a designer, and if so there must be Some far vasterPerson who looms out behind our God, and who stands in the samerelation to him as he to us.And behind this vaster and moreunknown God there may be yet another, and another, and another.

It is certain that Life did not make the world with a view to itsown future requirements.For the world was at one time red hot,and there can have been no living being upon it.Nor is itconceivable that matter in which there was no life-inasmuch as itwas infinitely hotter than the hottest infusion which any livinggerm can support-could gradually come to be alive withoutimpregnation from a living parent.All living things that we knowof have come from other living things with bodies and souls,whose existence can be satisfactorily established in spite oftheir being often too small for our detection.Since, then, theworld was once without life, and since no analogy points in thedirection of thinking that life can spring up spontaneously, weare driven to suppose that it was introduced into this world fromsome other source extraneous to it altogether, and if so we findourselves irresistibly drawn to the inquiry whether the source ofthe life that is in the world-the impregnator of this earth-maynot also have prepared the earth for the reception of hisoffspring, as a hen makes an egg- shell or a peach a stone for theprotection of the germ within it? Not only are we drawn to theinquiry, but we are drawn also to the answer that the

earthwas so prepared designedly by a Person with body and soulwho knew beforehand the kind of thing he required, and who tookthe necessary steps to bring it about.

If this is so we are members indeed of the God of this world, butwe are not his children; we are children of the Unknown andVaster God who called him into existence; and this in a far moreliteral sense than we have been in the habit of realising [sic]to ourselves.For it may be doubted whether the monads are not astruly seminal in character as the procreative matter from whichall animals spring.

It must be remembered that if there is any truth in the view putforward in "Life and Habit," and in "Evolution Old and New" (andI have met with no serious attempt to upset the line of argumenttaken in either of these books), then no complex animal or plantcan reach its full development without having already gonethrough the stages of that development on an infinite number ofpast occasions.An egg makes itself into a hen because it knowsthe way to do so, having already made itself into a hen millionsand millions of times over; the ease and unconsciousness withwhich it grows being in themselves sufficient demonstration ofthis fact.At each stage in its growth {he chicken is reminded,by a return of the associated ideas, of the next step that itshould take, and it accordingly takes it.

But if this is so, and if also the congeries of all theliving forms in the world must be regarded as a single person,throughout their long growth from the primordial cell onwards tothe present day, then, by parity of reasoning, the person thuscompounded-that is to say, Life or God-should have already passedthrough a growth analogous to that which we find he has takenupon this earth on an infinite number of past occasions; and thedevelopment of each class of life, with its culmination in thevertebrate animals and in man, should be due to recollectionby God of his having passed through the same stages, or nearlyso, in worlds and universes, which we know of from personalrecollection, as evidenced in the growth and structure of ourbodies, but concerning which we have no other knowledgewhatsoever.

So small a space remains to me that I cannot pursue further thereflections which suggest themselves.A few concludingconsiderations

are here alone possible.

We know of three great concentric phases of life, and we are notwithout reason to suspect a fourth.If there are so many thereare very likely more, but we do not know whether there are ornot.The innermost sphere of life we know of is that of our owncells.These people live in a world of their own, knowing nothingof us, nor being known by ourselves until very recently.Yet theycan be seen under a microscope; they can be taken out of us, andmay then be watched going here and there in perturbation of mind,endeavouring [sic] to find something in their new environmentthat will suit them, and then dying on finding how hopelesslydifferent it is from any to which they have been accustomed.Theylive in us, and make us up into the single person which weconceive ourselves to form; we are to them a world comprising anorganic and an inorganic kingdom, of which they considerthemselves to be the organic, and whatever is not very likethemselves to be the inorganic.Whether they are composed ofsubordinate personalities or not we do not know, but we have noreason to think that they are, and if we touch ground, so tospeak, with life in the units of which our own bodies arecomposed, it is likely that there is a limit also in an upwarddirection, though we have nothing whatever to guide us as towhere it is, nor any certainty that there is a limit at all.

We are ourselves the second concentric sphere of life, we beingthe constituent cells which unite to form the body of God.Of thethird sphere we know a single member only-the God of this world;but we see also the stars in heaven, and know their multitude. Analogy points irresistibly in the direction of thinking thatthese other worlds are like our own, begodded and full of life;it also bids us believe that the God of their world is begottenof one more or less like himself, and that his growth hasfollowed the same course as that of all other growths we know of.

If so, he is one of the constituent units of an unknown andvaster personality who is composed of Gods, as our God iscomposed of all the living forms on earth, and as all thoseliving forms are composed of cells.This is the Unknown God. Beyond this second God we cannot at present go, nor should wewish to do so, if we are wise.It is no reproach to

a system thatit does not profess to give an account of the origin of things;the reproach rather should lie against a system which professedto explain it, for we may be well assured that such a professionwould, for the present at any rate, be an empty boast.It isenough if a system is true as far as it goes; if it throws newlight on old problems, and opens up vistas which reveal a hope offurther addition to our knowledge, and this I believe may befairly claimed for the theory of life put forward in "Life andHabit" and "Evolution, Old and New," and for the corollaryinsisted upon in these pages; a corollary which follows logicallyand irresistibly if the position I have taken in the above-namedbooks is admitted.

Let us imagine that one of the cells of which we are composedcould attain to a glimmering perception of the manner in which heunites with other cells, of whom he knows very little, so as toform a greater compound person of whom he has hitherto knownnothing at all.Would he not do well to content himself with themastering of this conception, at any rate for a considerabletime? Would it be any just ground of complaint against him on thepart of his brother cells, that he had failed to explain to themwho made the man (or, as he would call it, the omnipotent deity)whose existence and relations to himself he had just caught sightof?

But if he were to argue further on the same lines as those onwhich he had travelled hitherto, and were to arrive at theconclusion that there might be other men in the world.besidesthe one whom he had just learnt to apprehend, it would be stillno refutation or just ground of complaint against him that he hadfailed to show the manner in which his supposed human race hadcome into existence.

Here our cell would probably stop.He could hardly be expectedto arrive at the existence of animals and plants differing fromthe human race, and uniting with that race to form a singlePerson or God, in the same way as he has himself united withother cells to form man.The existence, and much more theroundness of the earth itself, would be unknown to him, except byway of inference and deduction.The only universe which he couldat all understand would be the body of the man of whom he was acomponent part.

How would not such a cell be astounded if all that we knowourselves

could be suddenly revealed to him, so that not onlyshould the vastness of this earth burst upon his dazzled view,but that of the sun and of his planets also, and not only these,but the countless other suns which we may see by night around us. Yet it is probable that an actual being is hidden from us, whichno less transcends the wildest dream of our theologians than theexistence of the heavenly bodies transcends the perception of ourown constituent cells.

THE END