THE B EL FA ST ADDRESS, 443 



also know the limits beyond which science ceases to be 

 strong. They best know that questions offer themselves to 

 thought, which science, as now prosecuted, has not even 

 the tendency to solve. They have as little fellowship with 

 the atheist who says there is no God, as with the theist 

 who professes to know the mind of God. " Two things/' 

 said Immanuel Kant, " fill me with awe: the starry 

 heavens and the sense of moral responsibility in man." 

 And in his hours of health and strength and sanity, when 

 the stroke of action has ceased, and the pause of reflection 

 has set in, the scientific investigator finds himself over- 

 shadowed by the same awe. Breaking contact with the 

 hampering details of earth, it associates him with a Power 

 which gives fullness and tone to his existence, but which 

 he can neither analyze nor comprehend. 



CHAPTER XXXI. 



THE BELFAST ADDRESS.* 



There is one God supreme over all gods, diviner than mortals, 

 Whose form is not like unto man's, and as unlike his nature; 

 But vain mortals imagine that gods like themselves are begotten, 

 With human sensations and voice and corporeal members; 

 So, if oxen or lions had hands and could work in man's fashion, 

 And trace out with chisel or brush their conception of Godhead, 

 Then would horses depict gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, 

 Each kind the divine with its own form and nature endowing. 

 XENOPHANES of COLOPHON (six centuries B. c.), 

 Supernatural Religion, vol. i., p. 76. 



SECTION 1. An impulse inherent in primeval man 

 turned his thoughts and questionings betimes toward the 

 sources of natural phenomena. The same impulse, 

 inherited and intensified, is the spur of scientific action to- 

 day. Determined by it, by a process of abstraction from 

 experience we form physical theories which lie beyond the 

 pale of experience, but which satisfy the desire of the mind 

 to see every natural occurrence resting upon a cause. In 

 forming their notions of the origin of things, our earliest 

 historic (and doubtless, we might add, our prehistoric) 

 ancestors pursued, as far as their intelligence permitted, 



* Delivered before the British Association on Wednesday evening, 

 , August 19, 1874. 

 i~ 

 U, 



