626 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 
capacities and needs. As time advanced in other words, 
as the savage opened out into civilized man these forms 
were purified and ennobled until they finally emerged in 
the mythology and art of Greece: 
Where still the magic robe of Poesy 
Wound itself lovingly around the Truth.* 
As poets, the priesthood would have been justified, their 
deities, celestial and otherwise, with all their retinue and 
appliances, being more or less legitimate symbols and 
personifications of the aspects of nature and the phases of 
the human soul. The priests, however, or those among 
them who were mechanics, and not poets, claimed objective 
validity for their conceptions, and tried to base upon 
external evidence that which sprang from the innermost 
need and nature of man. It is against this objective ren- 
dering of the emotions this thrusting into the region of 
fact and positive knowledge of conceptions essentially ideal 
and poetic that science, consciously or unconsciously, 
wages war. Religious feeling is as much a verity as any 
other part of human, consciousness; and against it, on its 
subjective side, the waves of science beat in vain. But 
when, manipulated by the constructive imagination, mixed 
with imperfect or inaccurate historic data, and molded by 
misapplied logic, this feeling makes claims which traverse 
our knowledge of nature, science, as in duty bound, stands 
as a hostile power in its path. It is against the mythologic 
scenery, if 1 may use the term, rather than against the life 
and substance of religion, that Science enters her protest. 
Sooner or later among thinking people, that scenery will be 
taken for what it is worth as an effort on the part of man 
to bring the mystery of life and nature within the range of 
his capacities; as a temporary aifd essentially fluxional 
rendering in terms of knowledge of that which transcends 
all knowledge, and admits only of ideal approach. 
The signs of the times, I think, point in this direction. 
It is, for example, the obvious aim of Mr. Matthew Arnold 
to protect, amid the wreck of dogma, the poetic basis of 
religion. And it is to be remembered that under the cir- 
cumstances poetry may be the purest accessible truth. In 
* " Da der Dichtung zauberische Hulle 
Sich noch lieblich um die Wahrheit wand." Schiller. 
