230 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



an objective form, personal or otherwise, it slips away 

 from me, declining all intellectual manipulation. I 

 dare not, save poetically, use the pronoun ' He ' re- 

 garding it; I dare not call it a ' Mind; ' I refuse to 

 call it even a 'Cause.' Its mystery overshadows me; 

 but it remains a mystery, while the objective frames 

 which some of my neighbours try to make it fit, seem 

 to me to distort and desecrate it. 



It is otherwise with Mr. Martineau, and hence his 

 discontent. He professes to know where I only claim 

 to feel. He could make his contention good against 

 me if, by a process of verification, he would transform 

 his assumptions into ' objective knowledge.' But he 

 makes no attempt to do so. They remain assumptions 

 from the beginning of his Address to its end. And yet 

 he frequently uses the word ' unverified,' &s if it were 

 fatal to the position on which its incidence falls. ' The 

 scrutiny of Nature ' is one of his resources of * re- 

 ligious faith: ' what logical foothold does that scrutiny 

 furnish, on which any one of the foregoing three as- 

 sumptions could be planted? Nature, according to 

 his picturing, is base and cruel: what is the inference 

 to be drawn regarding its Author? If Nature be ' red 

 in tooth and claw,' who is responsible? On a Mindless 

 nature Mr. Martineau pours the full torrent of his gor- 

 geous invective; but could the * assumption ' of ' an 

 Eternal Mind ' even of a beneficent Eternal Mind 

 render the world objectively a whit less mean and ugly 

 than it is? Not an iota. It is man's feelings, and not 

 external phenomena, that are influenced by the as- 

 sumption. It adds not a ray of light nor a strain of 

 music to the objective sum of things. It does not 

 touch the phenomena of physical nature storm, flood, 

 or fire nor diminish by a pang the bloody combats of 

 the animal world. But it does add the glow of re- 



