SCIENCE AND MAN. 623 



ity, philosophy, commerce, the various institutions and 

 habits of society, are independent of religion and may 

 exist without it." These were the words of his youth, but 

 they expressed his latest convictions. I would add, that 

 the muse of Tennyson never reached a higher strain than 

 when it embodied "the sentiment of duty in ^Enone: 



And, because right is right, to follow right 

 Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence. 



Not in the way assumed by our dogmatic teachers has 

 the morality of human nature been built up. The power 

 which has molded us thus far has worked with stern tools 

 upon a very rigid stuff. What it has done cannot be so 

 readily undone; and it has endowed us with moral consti- 

 tutions which take pleasure in the noble, the beautiful, 

 and the true, just as surely as it has endowed us with 

 sentient organisms, which find aloes bitter and sugar sweet. 

 That power did not "work with delusions, nor will it stay 

 its hand when such are removed. Facts, rather than 

 dogmas, have been its ministers hunger and thirst, heat 

 and cold, pleasure and pain, fervor, sympathy, aspiration, 

 shame, pride, love, hate, terror, awe such were the forces 

 whose interaction and adjustment throughout an immeas- 

 urable past wove the triplex web of man's physical, 

 intellectual and moral nature, and such are the forces that 

 will be effectual to the end. 



You may retort that even on my own showing " the 

 power which makes for righteousness" has dealt in delu- 

 sions; for it qannot be denied that the beliefs of religion, in- 

 cluding the dogmas of theology and the freedom of the will, 

 have had some effect in molding the moral world. Granted; 

 but I do not think that this goes to the root of the matter. 

 Are you quite sure that those beliefs and dogmas are 

 primary, and not derived? that they are not the products,. 

 instead of being the creators, of man's moral nature? I 

 think it is in one of the Latter- Day Pamphlets that Carlyle 

 corrects a re.'isoner, who deduced the nobility of man from 

 a belief in lieaven, by telling him that he puts the cart 

 before the horse, the real truth being that the belief in 

 heaven is derived from the nobility of man. The bird's 

 instinct to weave its nest is referred to by Emerson as 

 typical of the force which built cathedrals, temples,, and 

 pyramids: 



