232 FKAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



John Stuart Mill. But in the light of Mill's philosophy, 

 benevolence, honour, purity, having ' shrunk into mere 

 unaccredited subjective susceptibilities, have lost all 

 support from Omniscient approval, and all presumable 

 accordance with the reality of things.' If Mr. Marti- 

 neau had given them any inkling of the process by 

 which he renders the ' subjective susceptibilities ' ob- 

 jective, or how he arrives at an objective ground of 

 ' Omniscient approval,' gratitude from his pupils would 

 have been his just meed. But, as it is, he leaves them 

 lost in an iridescent cloud of words, after exciting a 

 desire which he is incompetent to appease. 



' We are,' he says, in another place, ' for ever shap- 

 ing our representations of invisible things into forms 

 of definite opinion, and throwing them to the front, 

 as if they were the photographic equivalent of our real 

 faith. It is a delusion which affects us all. Yet some- 

 how the essence of our religion never finds its way 

 into these frames of theory: as we put them together it 

 slips away, and, if we turn to pursue it, still retreats 

 behind; ever ready to work with the will, to unbind 

 and sweeten the affections, and bathe the life with rev- 

 erence, but refusing to be seen, or to pass from a divine 

 hue of thinking into a human pattern of thought.' 

 This is very beautiful, and mainly so because the man 

 who utters it obviously brings it all out of the treasury 

 of his own heart. But the ( hue ' and ' pattern ' here 

 so finely spoken of, the former refusing to pass into the 

 latter, are neither more nor less than that * emotion/ 

 on the one hand, and that ' objective knowledge,' on 

 the other, which have drawn this suicidal fire from Mr. 

 Martineau's battery. 



I now come to one of the most serious portions of 

 Mr. Martineau's pamphlet serious far less on account 

 of its * personal errors,' than of its intrinsic gravity, 



