8 14 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



facts that have found their p]ace in the history of every great 

 crisis in thought. The religious emotions of every epoch, though 

 they have this of absolute and permanent about them, that they 

 belong to man's sense of the mystery that lies at the heart of 

 things, find their immediate and concrete expression in direct rela- 

 tion to what is currently known and thought of the world and of 

 man's place in it. By and by Science steps in, and shows that the 

 popular cosmology is childish, and the philosophic structure 

 erected upon it a mere house upon the sands ; and in the shock 

 that follows it is not surprising that so many fine religious natures 

 should feel themselves unhinged. The emotions have clung about 

 the old knowledge so long that when that old knowledge is swept 

 away they too seem in themselves to be hollow and untrust- 

 worthy, and a numbing sense of chaos and utter inanity settles 

 down upon the consciousness of the w^orld. This is the experience 

 through which mankind has passed in every age of unusual in- 

 tellectual movement and revision ; this is the experience through 

 which, in these days, we ourselves are passing. The wail of an- 

 guish that goes up to Heaven as foundations that have stood the 

 ,test of centuries crumble rapidly away ; the despair of many who, 

 driven hither and thither by adverse winds of doctrine, know not 

 where to turn for comfort or hope ; the Cassandra cry of not a few 

 who would have us believe that all faith has gone forever these 

 are simply signs of the times, unavoidable accompaniments of the 

 wrenching away of men's emotions from their old moorings under 

 the pressure of that extraordinary influx of new ideas that charac- 

 terizes the age in which we live. The progress of science during 

 the past half century has been so rapid and continuous that the 

 intellect has got a long way ahead of the feelings, and the world 

 is overweighted by a large body of unemotionalized knowledge. 

 This is the real meaning of our present predicament in thought. 

 Only hereafter can dawn the epoch of readjustment between feel- 

 ings and knowledge ; only after many years of such ferment and 

 commotion can men at last come to the understanding that the 

 new thought, too, is religious and poetic, and will furnish a soil 

 for all the higher emotions richer and more fertile than that 

 which the deluge has overflowed. 



The poet, more sensitive than other men to the subtle influ- 

 ences at work around him, finds himself in the storm and stress 

 of such a transitional period adrift amid currents and counter- 

 currents of thought, the trend of which is only dimly foreseen or 

 guessed at by the scientists and philosophers themselves. He 

 moves about " in worlds not realized," with many " blind mis- 

 givings," and much painful groping toward the light. Now, 

 whatever else poetry may or may not be, and whether we define 

 it, with Aristotle, as an imitation or, with Bacon, as an idealization 



