RELIGIOUS RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT. 349 



a true belief from a belief which was wholly false. Contrariwise, the 

 ultimate form of the religious consciousness is the final development 

 of a consciousness which at the outset contained a germ of truth ob- 

 scured by multitudinous errors. 



Those who think that science is dissipating religious beliefs and 

 sentiments seem unaware that whatever of mystery is taken from the 

 old interpretation is added to the new. Or, rather, we may say that 

 transference from the one to the other is accompanied by increase ; 

 since, for an explanation which has a seeming feasibility, it substitutes 

 an explanation which, carrying us back only a certain distance, there 

 leaves us in presence of the avowedly inexplicable. 



Under one of its aspects scientific progress is a gradual transfigura- 

 tion of Nature. Where ordinary perception saw perfect simplicity it 

 reveals great complexity ; where there seemed absolute inertness it 

 discloses intense activity ; and in what appears mere vacancy it finds 

 a marvelous play of forces. Each generation of physicists discovers, 

 in so-called " brute matter," powers which, but a few years before, the 

 most instructed physicists would have thought incredible ; as instance 

 the ability of a mere iron plate to take up the complicated aerial vibra- 

 tions produced by articulate speech, which, all translated into multitu- 

 dinous and varied electric pulses, are retranslated a thousand miles 

 off by another iron plate and again heard as articulate speech. When 

 the explorer of Nature sees that, quiescent as they appear, surrounding 

 solid bodies are thus sensitive to forces which are infinitesimal in their 

 amounts — when the spectroscope proves to him that molecules on the 

 earth pulsate in harmony with molecules in the stars — when there is 

 forced on him the inference that every point in space thrills with an 

 infinity of vibrations passing through it in all directions — the concep- 

 tion to which he tends is much less that of a universe of dead matter 

 than that of a universe everywhere alive : alive, if not in the restricted 

 sense, still in a general sense. 



This transfiguration, which the inquiries of physicists continually 

 increase, is aided by that other transfiguration resulting from meta- 

 physical inquiries. Subjective analysis compels us to admit that our 

 scientific interpretations of the phenomena which objects present are 

 expressed in terms of our own variously-combined sensations and ideas 

 — are expressed, that is, in elements belonging to consciousness, which 

 are but symbols of the something beyond consciousness. Though 

 analysis afterward reinstates our primitive beliefs, to the extent of 

 showing that behind every group of phenomenal manifestations there 

 is always a nexus, which is the reality that remains fixed amid appear- 

 ances which are variable, yet we are shown that this nexus of reality 

 is forever inaccessible to consciousness. And when, once more, we 

 remember that the activities constituting consciousness, being rigorous- 

 ly bounded, can not bring in among themselves the activities beyond 



