$7^ THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



short time either part with the old realizing or perfect a new one. 

 Lastly, Science turns her smoked eye-glass upon God, deliberately 

 diminishing the glory of what she looks at that she may distinguish 

 better. Here, too, she sees mechanism where will, purpose, and love, 

 had been supposed before ; she dx-ops the name God, and takes up the 

 less awful name of Nature instead. 



It is in this last case that the desecration produced by science is 

 most painfully felt. This is partly, of course, because the sacredness 

 violated was greatest here; but there is also another reason. Science 

 cannot easily destroy our feeling for human beings. We are in such 

 close contact with our own kind, our imagination and affections take 

 such fast hold of our fellow-men, as to defy physiology. If it were 

 otherwise we should want a word Ananthropism to answer to 

 atheism. Even as it is the thing is occasionally to be seen. Among 

 medical students there are not a few ananthropists, that is, men in 

 whom human affections have not been strong enough to resist the 

 effect of science in lowering the conception of humanity. But in gen- 

 eral the imagination triumphs in this case over the reason. In the 

 case of the physical world it is otherwise. This, for the majority of 

 men, is, I fancy, almost completely desecrated, so that sympathy, com- 

 munion with the forms of Nature, is pretty well confined to poets, 

 and is generally supposed to be an amiable madness in them. But 

 then this was not done by science, it had been done before by monkish 

 Christianity. Chaucer complains, hundreds of years before the advent 

 of physical science, of the divoi'ce that had been made between the 

 imagination and physical nature " But now may no man see none 

 elves mo." It was owing, according to him, to the preachings and 

 bannings of "limitours and other Jioly freres." Nature had been 

 made not merely a dead thing, but a disgusting and hideous thing, by 

 superstitions of imps, witches, and demons ; so much so that Goethe 

 celebrates science as having restored Nature to the imagination and 

 driven away the Walpurgisnacht of the middle ages ; and, indeed, by 

 turning attention upon the natural world, by bringing a large number 

 of people to take careful notice of its beauties, science may have given 

 back to the imagination, in this department, as much as it has taken 

 away. 



But the conception of God is so vast and elevated that it always 

 slips easily out of the human mind. The task of realizing what is too 

 great to be realized, of reaching with the imagination and growing 

 with the affections to a reality almost too great for the one, and almost 

 too awful for the other, is in itself exceptionally difiicult. To do this, 

 and yet at the same time carefully to restrain the imaginations and 

 affections as science prescribes, is almost impossible ; yet those who 

 perpetually study Nature, unless they specialize themselves too much, 

 will always in some sense feel the presence of God. The unity of what 

 they study will sometimes come home to them and give a sense of 



