SCIENCE AND MAN 375 



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. l ' How 

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

 tical flouting of unpoetic natures. Such are still among 

 us. Cardinal Manning would doubtless tell any Protes- 

 tant who rejects the doctrine of transubstantiation that he 

 *'fibs" away the plain words of his Saviour when he re- 

 duces "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 con- 

 sciously and aboveboard, has, in my opinion, an impor- 

 tant 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 metaphysics will be welcomed when 

 it abandons its pretensions to scientific discovery and con- 

 sents to be ranked as a kind of poetry. "A good sym- 

 bol," says Emerson, "is a missionary to persuade thou- 

 sands. The Yedas, the Edda, the Koran, are each remem- 

 bered by its happiest figure. There is no more welcome 

 gift to men than a new symbol. They assimilate them- 

 selves 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 cent- 

 ury hence what they are now. Such ideas constitute a 



