“’Twenty years ago the leaders of our science asserted that they knew many things which, as a matter of fact, they did not know.  Nowadays we know what we know.  I can only reckon up our account in so far as to say that we have made no debts; that is, we have made no loan from hypotheses; we are in no danger of seeing that which we know over-turned in the course of the next moment.  We have levelled the ground so that the coming generation may make abundant use of the material at their disposition.  As an attainable objective of the next twenty years, we must look to the anthropology of the European nationalities.’”

5.  Another demoralizing type of speculation which has exerted a wide influence in many ages and on many nations is pantheism.  By abdicating the place and function of the conscious ego, by making all things mere specialized expressions of infinite Deity, and yet failing to grasp any clear conception of what is meant by Deity, men have gradually destroyed that sense of moral responsibility which the most savage show to have been a common heritage.  It is not among the lowest and most simple races that missionaries find the greatest degree of obtuseness and insensibility with respect to sin; it is among populations like those of India, where the natural promptings of conscience have been sophisticated by philosophic theories.  The old Vedantism, by representing all things as mere phenomenal expressions of infinite Brahm, tended necessarily to destroy all sense of personal responsibility.  The abdication of the personal ego is an easy way of shifting the burden of guilt.  The late Naryan Sheshadri declared that one thing which led him to renounce Hinduism was the fact that, when he came to trace its underlying principles to their last logical result he saw no ground of moral responsibility left.  It plunged him into an abyss of intellectual and moral darkness without chart or compass.  It paralyzed conscience and moral sensibility.

It is equally impossible to reason ourselves into any consciousness of merit or demerit, if we are moved only by some vague law of nature whose behest, as described by Mr. Buckle, we cannot resist, whose operations within us we cannot discern, and whose drift or tendency we cannot foresee.  It makes little difference whether we build our faith upon the god of pantheism or upon the unknowable but impersonal force which is supposed to move the world, which operates in the same ways upon all grades of existence from the archangel to the mote in the sunbeam, which moves the molecules of the human brain only as it stirs the globules of sap in the tree or plant.  It is difficult to see how, upon any such hypothesis, we are any more responsible for our volitions and affections than we are for our heart-beats or respirations.  And yet we are conscious of responsibility in the one case and not in the other.  Consciousness comes in with tremendous force at just this point, all theories and speculations to the contrary notwithstanding.  And we dare not disregard its testimony or its claims.  We know that we are morally responsible.