620 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



capacities and needs. As time advanced 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.* 



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 objective 

 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 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 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 themythologic 

 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 capacities; as a temporary and essentially fluxional 

 rendering in terms of knowledge of that which transcends 

 all knowledge, and admits only of ideal approach. 



The signs of the times, I think, point in this direction. 

 It is, for example, the obvious aim of Mr. Matthew Arnold 

 to protect, amid the wreck of dogma, the poetic basis of 

 religion. And it is to be remembered that under the cir- 

 cumstances poetry may be the purest accessible truth. In 



* " Da der Dichtung zauberische Hiille 



Sich noch lieblich urn die Wahrheit wand." Schiller. 



