II PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM 73 



regions should be converted into ocean depths 

 and the floor of oceans raised into mountains ; 

 and the earth become a scene of horror which 

 even the lurid fancy of the writer of the 

 Apocalypse would fail to portray. And yet, to 

 the eye of science, there would be no more disorder 

 here than in the sabbatical peace of a summer 

 sea. Not a link in the chain of natural causes and 

 effects would be broken, nowhere would there be 

 the slightest indication of the "suspension of a 

 lower law by a higher." If a sober scientific 

 thinker is inclined to put little faith in the wild 

 vaticinations of universal ruin which, in a less 

 saintly person than the seer of Patmos, might seem 

 to be dictated by the fury of a revengeful fanatic, 

 rather than by the spirit of the teacher who bid 

 men love their enemies, it is not on the ground 

 that they contradict scientific principles; but 

 because the evidence of their scientific value does 

 not fulfil the conditions on which weight is at- 

 tached to evidence. The imagination which 

 supposes that it does, simply does not " assume 

 the air of scientific reason." 



I repeat that, if imagination is used within the 

 limits laid down by science, disorder is unimagin- 

 able. I If a being endowed with perfect intellectual 

 and aesthetic faculties, but devoid of the capacity 

 for suffering pain, either physical or moral, were 

 to devote his utmost powers to the investigation 

 of nature, the universe would seem to him to be a 



