4 90 FRA GMENTS OF SCIENCE. 
has turned so skillfully round upon its own antecedents 
is itself a result of the play between organism and environ- 
ment through cosmic ranges of time. Never, surely, did 
prescription plead so irresistible a claim. But then it 
comes to pass that, over and above his understanding, 
there are many other things appertaining to man, whose 
prescriptive' rights are quite as strong as those of the under- 
standing itself. It is a result, for example, of the play of 
organism and environment that sugar is sweet, and that 
aloes are bitter; that the smell of henbane differs from the 
perfume of a rose. Such facts of consciousness (for which, 
by the way, no adequate reason has ever been rendered) 
are quite as old as the understanding; and many other 
things can boast an equally ancient origin. Mr. Spencer 
at one place refers to that most powerful of passions the 
amatory passion as one which, when it first occurs, is 
antecedent to all relative experience whatever; and we may 
press its claim as being at least as ancient, and as valid, 
as that of the understanding itself. Then there are such 
things woven into the texture of man as the feeling of awe, 
reverence, wonder and not alone the sexual love just 
referred to, but the love of the beautiful, physical, and 
moral, in nature, poetry, and art. There is also that 
deep- set feeling, which since the earliest dawn of history, 
and probably for ages prior to all history, incorporated 
itself in the religions of the world. You, who have 
escaped from these religions into the high-and-dry light of 
the intellect, may deride them; but in so doing you deride 
accidents of form merely, and fail to touch the immovable 
basis of the religious sentiment in the nature of man. To 
yield this sentiment reasonable satisfaction is the problem 
of problems at the present hour. And grotesque in rela- 
tion to scientific culture as many of the religions of the 
world have been and are dangerous, nay, destructive, to 
the dearest privileges of freemen as some of them un- 
doubtedly have been, and would, if they could, be again 
it will be wise to recognize them as the forms of a force, 
mischievous if permitted to intrude on the region of 
objective knowledge, over which it holds no command, but 
capable of adding, in the region of poetry and emotion, 
inward completeness and dignity to man. 
Feeling, I say again, dates from as old an origin and as 
high a source as intelligence, and it equally demands its 
