518 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 
words, after exciting a desire which he is incompetent to 
appease. 
" We are," he says, in another place, " forever shaping 
onr representations of invisible tilings into forms of defi- 
nite 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 refusing to be seen, or 
to pass from a divine hue of thinking into a human pattern 
of thought." This is very 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," 
en the one hand, and that " objective knowledge," on the 
other, which have drawn this suicidal fire from Mr. Marti- 
neau's battery. 
I now come to one of the most serious portions of Mr. 
Marfeiueau's pamphlet serious far less on account of its 
"personal errors," than of its intrinsic gravity, though its 
author has thought fit to give it a witty and sarcastic tone. 
He analyzes and criticises " the materialist doctrine, 
which, in our time, is proclaimed with so much pomp, and 
resisted with so much passion. * Matter is all I want,' 
says the physicist; 'give me its atoms alone, and I will 
explain the universe.' " It is thought, even by Mr. 
Martineau's intimate friends, that in this pamphlet he is 
answering me. I must therefore ask the reader to con- 
trast the foregoing travesty with what I really do say 
regarding atoms: " I do not think that he [the materialist] 
is entitled to say that his molecular groupings and motions 
explain everything. In reality, they explain nothing. 
The utmost he can affirm is the association of two classes 
of phenomena, of whose real bond of union he is in abso- 
lute ignorance."* This is very different from saying, 
" Give me its atoms alone, and I will explain the uni- 
verse." Mr. Martineau continues his dialogue with the 
*Address on ' ' Scientific Materialism. " 
