234 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



emotional that he scorns the emotions ; it is when he 

 is most purely subjective that he rejects subjectivity. 

 He pays a just and liberal tribute to the character of 

 John Stuart Mill. But in the light of Mill's philosophy, 

 benevolence, honour, purity, having ' shrunk into mere 

 unaccredited subjective susceptibilities, have lost all 

 support from Omniscient approval, and all presumable 

 accordance with the reality of things.' If Mr. Marti- 

 neau had given them any inkling of the process by 

 which he renders the ' subjective susceptibilities ' objec- 

 tive, or how he arrives at an objective ground of 

 6 Omniscient approval,' gratitude from his pupils would 

 have been his just meed. But, as it is, he leaves them 

 lost in an iridescent cloud of words, after exciting a 

 desire which he is incompetent to appease. 



' We are,' he says, in another place, ' for ever shaping 

 our representations of invisible things into forms of 

 definite opinion, and throwing them to the front, as if 

 they were the photographic equivalent of our real faith. 

 It is a delusion which affects us all. Yet somehow the 

 essence of our religion never finds its way into these 

 frames of theory : as we put them together it slips away, 

 and, if we turn to pursue it, still retreats behind ; ever 

 ready to work with the will, to unbind and sweeten the 

 affections, and bathe the life with reverence, but re- 

 fusing to be seen, or to pass from a divine hue of think-J 

 ing into a human pattern of thought.' This is verjf 

 beautiful, and mainly so because the man who utters it 

 obviously brings it all out of the treasury of his own 

 heart. But the ( hue ' and ' pattern ' here so finely 

 spoken of, the former refusing to pass into the latter, 

 are neither more nor less than that ' emotion,' on the one 

 hand, and that 'objective knowledge,' on the other, 

 which have drawn this suicidal fire from Mr. Marti- 

 neau's battery. 



