SCIENCE AND MAN. 613 



ing of a phenomenon which refuses the yoke of ordinary 

 physical laws, I, for one, would not object to this 

 exercise of ideality. Amid all our speculative uncer- 

 tainty, however, there is one practical point as clear as the 

 day; namely, that the brightness and the usefulness of 

 life, as well as its darkness and disaster, depend to a 

 great extent upon our own use or abuse of this miraculous 

 organ. 



Accustomed as I am to harsh language, I am quite 

 prepared to hear my "poetic rendering" branded as a 

 " falsehood " and a " fib." The vituperation is unmerited, 

 for poetry, or ideality, and untruth are assuredly very dif- 

 ferent things. The one may vivify, while the other kills. 

 When St. John extends the notion of a soul to "souls 

 washed in the blood of Christ" does he " fib?" Indeed, 

 if the appeal to ideality is censurable, Christ himself ought 

 not to have escaped censure. Nor did he escape it. " How 

 can this man give us his flesh to eat?" expressed the 

 skeptical flouting of unpoetic natures. Such are still 

 among us. Cardinal Manning would doubtless tell any 

 Protestant who rejects the doctrine of transubstantiation 

 that he " fibs" away the plain words of his Saviour when 

 he reduces " the Body of the Lord " in the sacrament to a 

 mere figure of speech. 



Though misuse may render it grotesque or insincere, the 

 idealization of ancient conceptions, when done consciously 

 and above board, lias, in rny opinion, an important future. 

 We are not radically different from our historic ancestors, 

 and any feeling which affected them profoundly requires 

 only appropriate clothing to affect us. The world will not 

 lightly relinquish its heritage of poetic feeling, and m eta- 

 physic will be welcomed when it abandons its pretensions 

 to scientific discovery and consents to be ranked as a kind 

 of poetry. "A good S} T mbol," says Emerson, "is a 

 missionary to persuade thousands. The Vedas, the Edda, 

 the Koran, are each remembered by its happiest figure. 

 There is no more welcome gift to men than a new symbol. 

 They assimilate themselves to it, deal with it in all ways, 

 and it will last a hundred years. Then comes a new genius 

 and brings another." Our ideas of God and the soul are 

 obviously subject to this symbolic mutation. They are not 

 now what they were a century ago. They will not be a cen- 

 tury hence what they are now. Such ideas constitute a 



