SCIENCE AND MAN. 623 
ity, philosophy, commerce, the various institutions and 
habits of society, are independent of religion and may 
exist 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 scoru 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, 
intellectual 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 
power which makes for righteousness" has dealt in delu- 
sions; for it cannot be denied that the beliefs of religion, in- 
cluding the dogmas of theology and the freedom of the will, 
have had some effect in molding the moral world. Granted; 
but I do not think that this goes to the root of the matter. 
Are you quite sure that those beliefs and dogmas are 
primary, and not derived? that they are not the products, 
instead of being the creators, of man's moral nature? I 
think it is in one of the Latter- Day Pamphlets that Carlyle 
corrects a reasoner, who deduced the nobility of man from 
a belief in heaven, by telling him that he puts the cart 
before the horse, the real truth being that the belief in 
heaven is derived from the nobility of man. The bird's 
instinct to weave its nest is referred to by Emerson as 
typical of the force which built cathedrals, temples, and 
pyramids: 
