388 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE 



posed to human nature." So much for Fichte. Faraday 

 was equally distinct. "I have no intention," he says, "of 

 substituting anything for religion, but I wish to take that 

 part of human nature which is independent of it. Moral- 

 ity, philosophy, commerce, the various institutions and 

 habits of society, are independent of religion and may ex- 

 ist without it." These were the words of his youth, but 

 they expressed his latest convictions. I would add that 

 the muse of Tennyson never reached a higher strain than 

 when it embodied the sentiment of duty in ^Enone: 



And, because right is right, to follow right 

 "Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence. 



Not in the way assumed by our dogmatic teachers has 

 the morality of human nature been built up. The power 

 which has molded 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 consti- 

 tutions 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, fervor, sympathy, aspiration, 

 shame, pride, love, hate, terror, awe such were the forces 

 whose interaction and adjustment throughout an immeas- 

 urable past wove the triplex web of man's physical, in- 

 tellectual, 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 



