HARMONIES OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 305 



make it a rule not to expose to any further risk. They avoid, as it were, 

 meeting the universe in front, and endeavor to overcome it in detail. 

 For its immediate purpose this plan is the best that can be pursued. 

 If in all our actions we allowed ourselves to remember the greatness 

 of the power with which we have to do, we should accomplish noth- 

 ing ; if, because Nature's laws are large and comjirehensive, we never 

 acted except on the largest principles, we should either fall a prey to 

 unsound generalizations, the more ruinous because of their grandeur, 

 or we should become paralyzed with a Turkish fatalism. Far better, 

 no doubt, it is to make the utmost use of what precise knowledge we 

 have, however little may be the amount of it, and, not to suffer our 

 minds to be bewildered by coping too freely with an adversary whose 

 play is beyond us. It is these humble, cautiously inductive people 

 that prosper most in the world up to a certain point. To them belong 

 the large populations, the thriving communities, the stable politics. 

 They never dream of defying Nature ; they win an endless series of 

 small victories over her. 



There is no reason why this cautiousness should necessarily degen- 

 erate into little-mindedness. It does not take its beginning in any 

 deficiency in the feeling for what is great. On the contrary, it is the 

 direct result of an overwhelming sense of the greatness and, so to 

 speak, the dangerousness of Nature. Those who proceed thus warily, 

 probing Nature as they go, may with most reason expect to penetrate 

 far and to elevate their minds gradually until they can venture to 

 cope with the grandeur of the world and become familiar with great 

 ideas. And when this is done they will have escaped the danger of 

 atheism. Their minds will become the mirror of an Infinite Being, 

 and their whole natures will be conformed to his. But in the earlier 

 stages of such a process the temptation to a kind of atheism is strong. 

 From the habit of leaving out of account all larger considerations in 

 every problem, on the ground that they are vague and not precisely 

 calculable, they are led easily to forget the very existence of such con- 

 siderations. In some cases this habit even leads to great practical 

 miscalculations. It is evidently a mistake in algebra to assume that 

 all unknown quantities = ; yet this mistake is constantly made by 

 the practical men I am describing. When vague considerations are 

 suggested to them, instead of assigning them an approximate value, 

 which, since they cannot get the true value, is evidently what they 

 ought to do, they leave them out of account altogether, though an in- 

 determinate value may just as easily be large as small. But it is not 

 with these practical mistakes that I am now concerned ; practically 

 these men are more often right than wrong, though in the exceptional 

 cases, when every thing turns on a great principle, they fail deplorably. 

 But the habit of never suffering the mind to dwell on any thing 

 great produces often an atheism of the most pitiable and helpless kind. 

 The soul of man lives upon the contemplation of laws or principles ; 



VOL, VII. 20 



