SOUNDINGS 



beautiful and admirable, and there are good natu- 

 ralistic reasons why this should be so. But our re- 

 ligious history has begotten a whole brood of ideas 

 that must gradually fade and go out, and our stand- 

 ards will more and more be those of this world. 



Mr. Balfour would hardly deny that the organ 

 with which we do our thinking and reasoning and 

 form our deductions, the organ which is the seat of 

 our emotions of the beautiful and of religious as- 

 pirations, is a mass of gray and white matter, and 

 that all these things are the result of certain molec- 

 ular changes or movements in the fluids or solids of 

 the brain substance ; in other words, that there is a 

 physical and physiological basis to all our mental 

 and emotional life. Does this material side in any 

 way discredit these faculties and feelings? Does not 

 all that we call the spiritual adhere in the material? 

 Can we find that inner world, or any clue to it, by 

 dissecting the brain? Has it, therefore, any reality 

 except in our imagination? Prove that it exists 

 apart from or independent of the body, and there is 

 no more to be said. 



But what I wanted most to say is that the reason 

 of things, or final explanation of things seems to take 

 the poetry and romance out of them. Reduce re- 

 ligion or aesthetics or art to terms of psychology, 

 and they no longer appeal to the emotions or stimu- 

 late the imagination. Naturalism is true — reason 

 can reach no other conclusion — but the truths of 



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