374 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



ennobled until they finally emerged in the mythology 

 and art of Greece : 



Where still the magic robe of Poesy 

 Wound itself lovingly around the Truth. 1 



As poets, the priesthood would have been justified, 

 their deities, celestial and otherwise, with all their 

 retinue and appliances, being more or less legitimate 

 symbols and personifications of the aspects of nature 

 and the phases of the human soul. The priests, how- 

 ever, or those among them who were mechanics, and 

 not poets, claimed objective validity for their concep- 

 tions, and tried to base upon external evidence that 

 which sprang from the innermost need and nature of 

 man. It is against this objective rendering of the 

 emotions this thrusting into the region of fact and 

 positive knowledge of conceptions essentially ideal and 

 poetic that science, consciously or unconsciously, wages 

 war. Religious feeling is as much a verity as any other 

 part of human consciousness ; and against it, on its 

 subjective side, the waves of science beat in vain. But 

 when, manipulated by the constructive imagination, 

 mixed with imperfect or inaccurate historic data, and 

 moulded by misapplied logic, this feeling makes claims 

 which traverse our knowledge of nature, science, as in 

 duty bound, stands as a hostile power in its path. It is 

 against the mythologic scenery, if I may use the term, 

 rather than against the life and substance of religion, 

 that Science enters her protest. Sooner or later among 

 thinking people, that scenery will be taken for what it is 

 worth as an effort on the part of man to bring the 

 mystery of life and nature within the range of his capa- 

 cities ; as a temporary and essentially fluxional render- 



1 ' Da der Dichtung zauberische Hiille 

 Sich noch lieblich urn die Wahrheit wand.' -Schiller. 



