372 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



power which has moulded us thus far has worked with 

 stern tools upon a very rigid stuff. What it has done 

 cannot be so readily undone ; and it has endowed us 

 with moral constitutions which take pleasure in the 

 noble, the beautiful, and the true, just as surely as it 

 has endowed us with sentient organisms, which find 

 aloes bitter and sugar sweet. That power did not work 

 with delusions, nor will it stay its hand when such are 

 removed. Facts, rather than dogmas, have been its 

 ministers hunger and thirst, heat and cold, pleasure 

 and pain, fervour, sympathy, aspiration, shame, pride, 

 love, hate, terror, awe such were the forces whose in- 

 teraction and adjustment throughout an immeasurable 

 past wove the triplex web of man's physical, intellectual, 

 and moral nature, and such are the forces that will 

 be effectual to the end. 



You may retort that even on my own showing ' the 

 power which makes for righteousness ' has dealt in 

 delusions ; for it cannot be denied that the beliefs of 

 religion, including the dogmas of theology and the free- 

 dom of the will, have had some effect in moulding the 

 moral world. Granted ; but I do not think that this 

 goes to the root of the matter. Are you quite sure 

 that those beliefs and dogmas are primary, and not 

 derived ? that they are not the products, instead of 

 being the creators, of man's moral nature ? I think 

 it is in one of the Latter-Day Pamphlets that Carlyle 

 corrects a reasoner, who deduced the nobility of man 

 from a belief in heaven, by telling him that he puts 

 the cart before the horse, the real truth being that the 

 belief in heaven is derived from the nobility of man. 

 The bird's instinct to weave its nest is referred to by 

 Emerson as typical of the force which built cathedrals, 

 temples, and pyramids : 



