To this then let us
proceed.
Mr. Fiske is very hard on the atheists, and so will probably repudiate with
scorn any insinuations to the effect that his theory of things is
"quasi-atheistic." Nevertheless, it seems to me that he is very unjust to
the atheists, in that while he spares no pains to "purify" and "refine" the
theory of the theists, so as at last to leave nothing but what he regards
as the distilled essence of Theism behind; he habitually leaves the theory
of the atheists as he finds it, without making any attempt either to
"purify" it by removing its weak and unnecessary ingredients, or to
"refine" it by adding such sublimated ingredients as modern speculation has
supplied. Thus, while he despises the atheists of the eighteenth century
for their irrationality in believing in the self-existence of a
_phenomenal_ universe, and reviles them for their irreligion in denying
that "the religious sentiment needed satisfaction;" he does not wait to
inquire whether, in its essential substance, the theory of these men is not
the one that has proved itself best able to withstand the grinding action
of more recent thought. But let us in fairness ask, What was the essential
substance of that theory? Apparently it was the bare statement of the
unthinkable fact that Something Is. It therefore seems to me useless in Mr.
Fiske to lay so much stress on the fact that this Something was originally
identified by atheists with the phenomenal universe.
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