490 FftA OMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



has turned so skillfully round upon its own antecedents- 

 is itself a result of the play between organism and environ- 

 ment through cosmic ranges of time. Never, surely, did 

 prescription plead so irresistible a claim. But then it 

 comes to pass that, over and above his understanding, 

 there are many other things appertaining to man, whose 

 prescriptive rights are quite as strong as those of the under- 

 standing itself. It is a result, for example, of the play of 

 organism and environment that sugar is sweet, and that 

 aloes are bitter; that the smell of henbane differs from the 

 perfume of a rose. Such facts of consciousness (for which, 

 by the way, no adequate reason has ever been rendered) 

 are quite as old as the understanding; and many other 

 things can boast an equally ancient origin. Mr. Spencer 

 at one place refers to that most powerful of passions the 

 amatory passion as one which, when it first occurs, is 

 antecedent to all relative experience whatever; and we may 

 press its claim as being at least as ancient, and as valid, 

 as that of the understanding itself. Then there are such 

 things woven into the texture of man as the feeling of a\ve, 

 reverence, wonder and not alone the sexual love just 

 referred to, but the love of the beautiful, physical, and 

 moral, in nature, poetry, and art. There is also that 

 deep- set feeling, which since the earliest dawn of history, 

 and probably for ages prior to all history, incorporated 

 itself in the religions of the world. You, who have 

 escaped from these religions into the high-aud-dry light of 

 the intellect, may deride them; but in so doing you deride 

 accidents of form merely, and fail to touch the immovable 

 basis of the religious sentiment in the nature of man. To 

 yield this sentiment reasonable satisfaction is the problem 

 of problems at the present hour. And grotesque in rela- 

 tion to scientific culture as many of the religions of the 

 world have been and are dangerous, nay, destructive, to 

 the dearest privileges of freemen as some of them un- 

 doubtedly have been, and would, if they could, be again 

 it will be wise to recognize them as the forms of a force, 

 mischievous if permitted to intrude on the region of 

 objective kuoivledge, over which it holds no command, but 

 capable of adding, in the region of poetry and emotion, 

 inward completeness and dignity to man. 



Feeling, I say again, dates from as old an origin and as 

 high a source as intelligence, and it equally demands its 



