SCIENCE AND MAN. 613 
ing of a 'phenomenon which refuses the yoke of ordinary 
physical laws, I, for one, would not object to this 
exercise of ideality. Amid all our speculative uncer- 
tainty, however, there is one practical point as clear as the 
day; namely, that the brightness and the usefulness of 
life, as well as its darkness and disaster, depend to a 
great extent upon our own use or abuse of this miraculous 
organ. 
Accustomed as I am to harsh language, I am quite 
prepared to hear my "poetic rendering" branded as a 
Sf falsehood " and a " fib." The vituperation is unmerited, 
for poetry, or ideality, and untruth are assuredly very dif- 
ferent things. The one may vivify, while the other kills. 
When St. John extends the notion of a soul to "souls 
washed in the blood of Christ" does he " fib? " Indeed, 
if the appeal to ideality is censurable, Christ himself ought 
not to have escaped censure. Nor did he escape it. " How 
can this man give us his flesh to eat?" expressed the 
skeptical flouting of unpoetic natures. Such are still 
among us. Cardinal Manning would doubtless tell any 
Protestant who rejects the doctrine of transubstantiation 
that he " fibs" away the plain words of his Saviour when 
he reduces " the Body of the Lord" in the sacrament to a 
mere figure of speech. 
Though misuse may render it grotesque or insincere, the 
idealization of ancient conceptions, when done consciously 
and above board, has, in my opinion, an important future. 
We are not radically different from our historic ancestors, 
and any feeling which affected them profoundly requires 
only appropriate clothing to affect us. The world will not 
lightly relinquish its heritage of poetic feeling, and meta- 
phvsic will be welcomed when it abandons its pretensions 
to scientific discovery and consents to be ranked as a kind 
of poetry. " A good symbol," says Emerson, " is a 
missionary to persuade thousands. The Vedas, the Edda, 
the Koran, are each remembered by its happiest figure. 
There is no more welcome gift to men than a new symbol. 
They assimilate themselves to it, deal with it in all ways, 
and it will last a hundred years. Then comes a new genius 
and brings another." Our ideas of God and the soul are 
obviously subject to this symbolic mutation. They are not 
now what they were a century ago. They will not be a cen- 
tury hence what they are now. Such ideas constitute a 
