242 THE HUMAN HEART. 



ungodliness and unreason by rote and rule into the sciences. And 

 a fuddle of fetischism would then arise, compared to which the pre- 

 sent materialism, happily dead as it is, would be but a slight evil. 

 From this we are saved by Revelation, which gives the loadstars of 

 every science; not indeed bestowing knowledge, but opening our 

 eyes and speeding our aims to the ends of knowledge — wisdom, love, 

 mercy, life, power, the Word, which are with God, and which are 

 God. 



Thus much of the visceral psychology, which as it proceeds upon 

 sensation or experience, and the sensation is but faint and glimmer- 

 ing as yet, must needs be of feeble growth. Yet we have made 

 a beginning, because the body of the mind must be added to the 

 head of the mind,* and the arms and legs to the body, in order that 

 the mind may be as good as the body in its own sphere, and that 

 materialism may receive the full tilt of a personality as weighty as 

 its own. Our views aim ultimately at a piece for piece proof that 

 the soul is the man, and in the human form. For if the soul-doc- 

 trine has two auricles and two ventricles, and a heart ; if it has 

 stomach, guts and liver ; if it has limbs, and if it has any brains, 

 then it is in manly guise, like ourselves. And if the soul be the 

 true body, and the only thing material to us, then it is no estranged 

 essence, but a person with whom we can have affairs, and keep in- 

 telligible relations. Of how great moment this is in society, moral 

 life, and religion, we leave others to say : being ourselves but a 

 backwoodsman eager to clear away swamps and forests, and to open 

 sane ground upon which far other workmen than we can base the 

 truth, and carry up the spires of the pious in the impregnable cities 

 of the just. 



We now recur to our canon (p. 225), to illustrate the ground of 

 organization, and its connection with life. And we say, that given 

 an organic structure that will lift the juices of fruit and flesh to- 

 wards human blood, choosing what is best in the world of food, and 

 making it better by new shapes and constant reformations — then 

 sensibility, or in the full sense, mercy, will and can associate with 



* The present philosophies are decapitations, and their doctrine of immor- 

 tality reminds us of Danton's consolation to his companion on the scaffold, 

 " Our heads will meet in that sack." 



