66 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of the full-grown man. Let Science go on with its keenest analysis. 

 It will return, when it is completed, to the living synthesis. If, with 

 all our processes, we cannot manufacture a man, if even the mineral 

 water we concoct is not quite the same as Nature brews in her labora- 

 tory, much more sliall we give up the fruitless task of dissolving the 

 ultimate facts of mind and life. I have been struck with a sentence 

 of the late Mr. Mill, in his autobiography, where he speaks of a long 

 stage of mental depression which destroyed his zeal for all his favor- 

 ite studies. " I saw," he says, " that the habit of analysis tends to 

 wear away the feelings. My education Iiad failed to create these feel- 

 ings in sufficient strength to resist this dissolving influence, while the 

 whole course of my intellectual cultivation had made such analysis 

 the inveterate habit of the mind. I was thus left stranded at the 

 commencement of my voyage, with a well-equipped ship and a rudder, 

 but no sail ; without any desire for the ends I had been so carefully 

 fitted to work for." That is the autobiography of our time, of its 

 strength and of its weakness. Let such experience teach us the honest 

 pursuit of science, but teach us also its limit. Our age will gather up 

 the real gains of its knowledge. We shall have learned many of the 

 laws of our being ; we shall apply ourselves to a broader culture of 

 the mind; we shall feel a more earnest interest in all aims for the im- 

 provement of the race. But we shall prize no less the treasures of 

 letters and art bequeathed us by the past ; the ideal truths which have 

 employed the wise and good ; and, above all, that Christian faith 

 which has inspired the richest knowledge of mankind, and without 

 which our best culture will be as dead as the fossils of a prehistoric 

 cavern. 



Such, gentlemen, is the result I anticipate for the next period of 

 our scientific growth. Pardon me if I have given you too long or too 

 dry an essay ; but let me beg you to receive it as the conviction of 

 one who feels a generous sympathy with all the real aims of his time. 

 This is the best spirit of your noble profession. If you so pursue it, 

 as honest interpreters of Nature and reverent worshipers of Him who 

 is above Nature, you will make it a sacred ministry for not only phys- 

 ical kiiowledjre, but for the service of God and man. 







THE DEEPER HAPvMONIES OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION.' 



THERE are two very opposite parties among us at the present day, 

 whose language is in one respect very strikingly similar. The 

 Christian Church has from the beginning spoken Avith a certain con- 

 tempt of learning. " The wisdom of the world," " oppositions of 



^ This article appeared in Macmillaii's Magazine under the title of " Natural Religion." 



