RELIGION AND SCIENCE 281 



or difficult thought, it is likely that they will continue 

 to account for much in the future. 



These are facts of extreme importance. The 

 professional sceptic is at once tempted to exclaim 

 that every such projection and illogical symbolism 

 is illusion through and through, and must be wholly 

 swept aside. He would be wrong. We each of us 

 must know from our own experience the ' influence ' 

 (to use a general term) which may inhere in certain 

 things and places. True that the influence is of 

 our own mind's making j but it is none the less real, 

 not only as a momentary existence, but, as the term 

 implies, as exerting a definite and often a great effect 

 upon our lives. The lover who cherishes a ring or 

 a lock of hair ; the man who is drawn back to the 

 haunts of his childhood or his youth ; the mind 

 refreshing itself with some loved poem or picture ; — 

 what do we have in these and innumerable other 

 instances but a peculiarity of mind whereby it may 

 take external objects into itself and invest them with 

 its own emotions and ideas, in such a way that those 

 same objects may later reflect their stored-up emotion 

 back again into the mind ? It operates by a form of 

 association ; but the actual working resembles the 

 charging of a battery, which may subsequently dis- 

 charge back. We have in it, in fact, a special faculty 

 which, if rightly used, is of the greatest practical value. 

 Further, the symbol, if rightly used and rightly 

 limited, is of service to most minds in giving a more 



