PROFESSOR VIRCHOW AND EVOLUTION 393 



in other words, as the savage opened out into civilized 

 man these forms were purified and 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, however, or those among 

 them who were mechanics, and not poets, claimed objec- 

 tive validity for their conceptions, and tried to base upon 

 external evidence that which sprang from the innermost 

 need and nature of man. It is against this objective ren- 

 dering of the emotions this thrusting into the region of 

 fact and positive knowledge of conceptions essentially 

 ideal and poetic that science, consciously or uncon- 

 sciously, wages war. Keligious feeling is as much a ver- 

 ity 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 

 molded 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 think- 

 ing people, that scenery will be taken for what it is worth 



1 "Da der Dichtung zauberische Hiille 



Sich uoch lieblich um die Wahrheit wand." Schiller. 



