350 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tlie bounds, which therefore seem unconscious, though production of 

 either by the other seems to imply that they are of the same essential 

 nature, this necessity we are under to think of the external energy in 

 terms of the internal energy gives rather a spiritualistic than a ma- 

 terialistic aspect to the universe ; further thought, however, obliging 

 us to recognize the truth that a conception given in phenomenal mani- 

 festations of this ultimate energy can in no wise show us what it is. 



While the beliefs to which analytic science thus leads are such as 

 do not destroy the object-matter of religion, but simply transfigure it, 

 science under its concrete forms enlarges the sphere for religious senti- 

 ment. From the very beginning the progress of knowledge has been 

 accompanied by an increasing capacity for wonder. Among savages, 

 the lowest are the least surprised when shown remarkable products of 

 civilized art, astonishing the traveler by their indifference. And so 

 little of the marvelous do they perceive in the grandest phenomena 

 of Nature that any inquiries concerning them they regard as childish 

 trifling. This contrast in mental attitude between the lowest human 

 beings and the higher human beings around us is paralleled by the 

 contrasts among the grades of these higher human beings themselves. 

 It is not the rustic, nor the artisan, nor the trader, who sees something 

 more than a mere matter of course in the hatching of a chick ; but it 

 is the biologist, who, pushing to the uttermost his analysis of vital phe- 

 nomena, reaches his greatest perplexity when a speck of protoplasm 

 under the microscope shows him life in its simplest form, and makes 

 him feel that however he formulates its processes the actual play of 

 forces remains unimaginable. Neither in the ordinary tourist nor in 

 the deer-stalker climbing the mountains above him does a Highland 

 glen rouse ideas beyond those of sport or of the picturesque ; but it 

 may, and often does, in the geologist. He, observing that the glacier- 

 rounded rock he sits on has lost by weathering but half an inch of its 

 surface since a time far more remote than the beginnings of human 

 civilization, and then trying to conceive the slow denudation which 

 has cut out the whole valley, has thoughts of time and of power to 

 which they are strangers — thoughts which, already utterly inadequate 

 to their objects, he feels to be still more futile on noting the contorted 

 beds of gneiss around, which tell him of a time, immeasurably more 

 remote, when far beneath the earth's surface they were in a half- 

 melted state, and again tell him of a time, immensely exceeding this 

 in remoteness, when their components were sand and mud on the shores 

 of an ancient sea. Nor is it in the primitive peoples who supposed that 

 the heavens rested on the mountain-tops, any more than in the modern 

 inheritors of their cosmogony who repeat that "the heavens declare 

 the glory of God," that we find the largest conceptions of the universe 

 or the greatest amount of wonder excited by contemplation of it. 

 Rather, it is in the astronomer, who sees in the sun a mass so vast 

 that even into one of his spots our earth might be plunged without 



