Anthropomorphism [pp. 120-144]

A V TIR OP OOAIORPHISM.
earlier still. Humanity advances very slowly towards the agnostic truth. Only "a few cultured minds" are as yet sufficiently
evolved to be able to penetrate the sophisms of the vulgar theology which degrades deity to the level of personality, and
childishly paints the great Unknowable as having thoughts and
feelings and volitions. But the day will come-is it not written
in the prophecy of the comparative method?-the day will come
when developed intelligence will smile at the worship of a God
who plans, as we smile at the worship of Osiris or the Ganges.
Ultimate religion must denude God of every human attribute.
We are sorry for the tears of the children in the nursery who
cry for the moon; but science tells us that the human arm is
not long enough to reach the coveted object. We wish sometimes that we were back in the innocent and happy days when
we took such pleasure with the cradle of faith and the doll of
immortality. But we live too late for that. The childish things
of the race must be put away. Science is,science. As honest
men we must throw aside the remnants of inherited superstition,
must discard the toys of the barbarian cultus, and must face
the truth in its naked nothingness-Something is! It does not
see, nor hear, nor taste, nor smell. It does not think, nor feel,
nor wish. It is, and that is all. We spell it with a capital S,
lest irreverent criticism should fail to appreciate its dignity; and
we hold it out before humanity as the final triumph of science
in its analysis of the great mystery of the universe. And to this
vacuum of a concept religion must finally come as the ripened
fruit of its painful evolution. Ultimate religious truth is the
ultimate annihilation of religion.
This conclusion of modern agnosticism, by which the spiritual as well as the bodily attributes of man are denied to deity,
is supported by arguments which we may class in three groups,
and which, for convenience, we may roughly term the logical,
the physical, and the metaphysical. No agnostic has thus divided
his own process of demonstration. Most of them, in fact, not
only fail to discriminate these three distinct elements, but further
confuse the whole argument by mixing in with it the general
principle of relativity, a doctrine which I propose to consider as
-what it really is-an entirely separate form of the argument.
But, comparing the various agnostic discussions, we can easily
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