So the old questions, still unsolved, are ever asked anew.  The same wearying researches and the same confident assertions, to be replaced by others equally confident, are found both in the ancient and in the modern history of mankind.  By wisdom the present generation has come no nearer to finding out God than men of the remotest times.  The cheerless conclusion of agnosticism was reached in India twenty-four centuries ago, and Confucius expressed it exactly when he said, with reference to the future, “We do not know life; how can we know death?” This same dubious negation probably has the largest following of all types of unbelief in our time.  It is not atheism:  that, to the great mass of men, is unthinkable; it is easier to assume simply that “we do not know.”  Yet almost every form of agnosticism, ancient or modern, claims to possess a vast amount of very positive knowledge.  Speculative hypothesis never employed the language of dogmatic assurance so confidently as now.  Even theosophic occultism speaks of itself as “science.”

That which strikes one first of all in the history of philosophy is the similarity between ancient and modern speculations upon the great mysteries of the world.

1.  Notice with what accord various earlier and later theories dispense with real and personal creatorship in the origin of the universe.  The atomic theory of creation is by no means a modern invention, and so far as evolution is connected with that hypothesis, evolution is very old.  Mr. Herbert Spencer states his theory thus:  “First in the order of evolution is the formation of simple mechanical aggregates of atoms, e.g., molecules, spheres, systems; then the evolution of more complex aggregations or organisms:  then the evolution of the highest product of organization, thought; and lastly, the evolution of the complex relations which exist between thinking organisms, or society with its regulative laws, both civil and moral.”  Between these stages, he tells us, “there is no fixed line of demarcation....  The passage from one to the other is continuous, the transition from organization to thought being mediated by the nerve-system, in the molecular changes of which are to be found the mechanical correlates and equivalents of all conscious processes.”  It will be seen that this comprehensive statement is designed to cover, if not the creation, at least the creative processes of all things in the universe of matter and in the universe of thought.

Mr. Spencer does not allude here to the question of a First Cause back of the molecules and their movements, though he is generally understood to admit that such a Cause may exist.  He does not in express terms deny that at some stage in this development there may have been introduced a divine spark of immortal life direct from the Creator’s hand.  He even maintains that “the conscious soul is not the product of a collocation of material particles, but is in the deepest sense a Divine effluence."[184] Yet he seems to get on without any very necessary reliance upon such an intervention, since the development from the atom to the civilized man is “a continuous process,” and throughout the whole course from molecule to thought and moral and social law, “there are no lines of demarcation.”  He leaves it for the believer in theistic evolution to show when and where and how the Divine effluence is introduced.