APOLOGY FOR THE BELFAST ADDRESS. 497 



Here we have a very fair example of subjective religious 

 vigor. . But my quarrel with such exhibitions is that they 

 do not always represent objective fact. No atheistic 

 reasoning can, 1 hold, dislodge religion from the human 

 heart. Logic cannot deprive us of life, and religion is 

 life to the religious. As an experience of consciousness it 

 is beyond the assaults of logic. But the religious life is 

 often projected in external forms I use the word in its 

 widest sense and this embodiment of the religious senti- 

 ment will have to bear more and more, as the world becomes 

 more enlightened, the stress of scientific tests. We must 

 be careful of projecting into external nature that which 

 belongs to ourselves. My critic commits this mistake: he 

 feels, and takes delight in feeling, that I am struggling, 

 and he obviously experiences the most exquisite pleasures 

 of "the muscular sense" in holding me down. His feel- 

 ings are as real as if his imagination of what mine are 

 were equally real. His picture of my " struggles " is, 

 however, a mere delusion. I do not struggle. I do not 

 fear the charge of atheism; nor should I even disavow it, 

 in reference to any definition of the Supreme which he, or 

 his order, would be likely to frame. His "links" and his 

 " steel " and his "dread imputations " are, therefore, even 

 more unsubstantial than my "streaks of morning cloud/' 

 and they may be permitted to vanish together. 



These minor and more purely personal matters at an 

 end, the weightier allegation remains, that at Belfast I 

 misused my position by quitting the domain of science, and 

 making an unjustifiable raid into the domain of theology. 

 This I fail to see. Laying aside abuse, I hope my accusers 

 will consent to reason with me. Is it not lawful for a 

 scientific man to speculate on the antecedents of the solar 

 system? Did Kant, Laplace and William Herschel quit their 

 legitimate spheres, when they prolonged the intellectual 

 vision beyond the boundary of experience, and propounded 

 the nebular theory? Accepting that theory as probable, is 

 it not permitted to a scientific man to follow up, in idea, 

 the series of changes associated with the condensation of 

 the nebulae; to picture the successive detachment of planets 

 and moons, and the relation of all of them to the sun? 

 If I look upon our earth, with its orbital revolution and 

 r.:-:iu,l rotation, as one small issueof the process which made 



