ni iu.tmL.iri 1 ABfD THE NEW *^ 

 INFIDELITY. 



AN admiring friend of Humboldt probably Mr. 

 Bayard Taylor in a review of his letters to Varn- 

 hagen, published in The Tribune of the 5th mat , 

 thus sums up the religious faith of the great 

 physicist : 



"From a religious point of view, Humboldt must 

 perhaps be called a materialist philosopher, or perhaps 

 an atheist. Considered from a philosophical stand- 

 point, the term < realist' would seem more appropriate 

 to the views entertained by Humboldt than that of 

 materialist.' But, in stating this, it ought never to 

 be forgotten that Humboldt had been reared and lived 

 in a mental atmosphere, where the idea of positive 

 n had long since ceased to be considered as 

 ^separable from the idea of morality and humanity. 

 In England or America the all but universal oelief is 

 it an unbeliever cannot but be an immoral man at 

 the same time. That belief did not and does not exist 

 m the society in which Humboldt lived. In aU his 

 domgs he might well be called a Christian; in h* 

 faith he was not, nor did he pretend to be." 



We were not prepared for so full a concession as 

 this from such a source, nor are we quite willing 

 to pronounce so stern a judgment against Humboldt 

 the evidence which lies before us in his 

 wnuogs. The Kosmos, to be sure, nowhere ex- 

 presses that positive belief in a personal God which 

 constantly appears in the writings of Agassiz, and 

 >h is still more prominent in those of Dana 

 Guyot, and Ritter. W e cannot agree with that 

 school of science of which Darwin is perhaps the 

 most prominent living representative, which re- 

 rds it as unscientific to introduce the idea of a 

 frejf First Cause into a& investigation of second 

 causes. Yet we would not infer that Darwin is a* 

 atheist from the merely negative evidence of his 

 recent work on species-nor should we infer thac 

 Humboldt was an atheist or only a materialist, 

 from tne absence of the name and thought 6f a 

 personal God from the pages of the Kosmos. 



Tfce use of the term LAW by physicists, and the 

 conetant endeavor of science to classify all act-^1 

 phenomena under natural laws, doubtless tends to 

 produce m minds accustomed to no higher sphere 

 >f thought, a materialistic moda of conception and 

 Of expression. To counteract this tendency Prof. 

 Cooke, in the introduction to his admirable treatise 

 Chemical Physics, carefully distinguishes be- 

 tween law* txdftrces, and defines a law to be th* 



