"The highest ambition of the beneficent will be to have a share--even though an utterly inappreciable and unknown share--in 'the making of Man.'... As time goes on, there will be more and more of those whose unselfish end will be the further evolution of Humanity. While contemplating from the heights of thought that far-off life of the race never to be enjoyed by them, but only by a remote posterity, they will feel a calm pleasure in the consciousness of having aided the advance towards it." Spencer, then, evidently deserves the important place that he occupies in the history of thought. For though he was forced, for lack of those final scientific results which he vainly hoped might soon be forthcoming, to leave some vital gaps in his scheme,[43] he had made an imposing attempt to systematise and unify all human experience. And his attempt to base an idealistic morality upon sure grounds of natural science was valuable and important. SPENCER'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.--At the same time, Spencer could not remain satisfied with a mere _description_ of natural phenomena, however complete and comprehensive such description might seem; he desired to offer, besides this, an _explanation_ of these phenomena--how did they come to be, and how do they continue to exist? To provide this explanation, Spencer postulated the existence of an Unknown Power which is at once the origin and the sustaining ground of everything. This power he regarded as lying quite out of range not only of the human senses, but of the human intellect. It was not only unknown but _unknowable_. This celebrated doctrine of the Unknowable is not the least interesting or important part of Spencer's system, and it is perhaps more germane than any other speculation of his to our present subject, as this _terra incognita_ was allotted by him to religion as its peculiar province. He hoped that the undisputed possession and occupation by religion of this territory might put an end to its perpetual conflict with science, and substitute for this a reasonable, if not cordial, understanding. Science might contentedly appropriate the sphere of the knowable, and leave to religion the undefined and perhaps infinite area of the unknowable; and he hoped this division of labour would be both fruitful and permanent. THE VICTORIAN AGNOSTICS.--Through this doctrine of the Unknowable, Herbert Spencer was the father of that form of belief or disbelief which was pertinently named Agnosticism by the most celebrated of its exponents--Huxley. This combination of Positivism in science with Agnosticism in religion and philosophy, became highly popular in a wide circle in England during the last third of the nineteenth century, especially among the scientifically educated. Leslie Stephen, with the pride of a disciple and the pardonable zeal of a propagandist, claimed for it the distinction of being "the religion of all sensible men."