518 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



words, after exciting a desire which he is incompetent to 

 appease. 



" We are," he says, in another place, " forever shaping 

 our representations of invisible things into forms of defi- 

 nite 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 somehow 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 reverence, 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," 

 en the one hand, and that " objective knowledge," on the 

 other, which have drawn this suicidal fire from Mr. Marti- 

 neau'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, though its 

 author has thought fit to give it a witty and sarcastic tone. 

 He analyzes and criticises "the materialist doctrine, 

 which, in our time, is proclaimed with so much pomp, and 

 resisted with so much passion. ' Matter is all I want/ 

 says the physicist; 'give me its atoms alone, and I will 

 explain the universe." It is thought, even by Mr. 

 Martineau's intimate friends, that in this pamphlet he is 

 answering me. I must therefore ask the reader to con- 

 trast the foregoing travesty with what I really do say 

 regarding atoms: " I do not think that he [the materialist] 

 is entitled to say that his molecular groupings and motions 

 explain everything. In reality, they explain nothing. 

 The utmost he can affirm is the association of two classes 

 of phenomena, of whose real bond of union he is in abso- 

 lute ignorance."* This is very different from saying, 

 " Give me its atoms alone, and I will explain the uni- 

 verse." Mr. Martineau continues his dialogue with the 



^Address on " Scientific Materialism." 



