456 COSMIC FEILOSOPHY. [pt. iii. 



difference in the technical expression of it is as great as 

 the difference between the theology of the " Imitation " and 

 the science of " First Principles." Kow when a law ol 

 nature has been violated (to use the current phrase), the 

 religion of the scientific inquirer tells him that a sin has 

 been committed ; and he is smitten with a sense of sell- 

 reproach no whit less keen than that experienced by hia 

 mediaeval predecessor. The distinction between the scientific 

 and the religious view of the breach of law is thus apparent. 

 When an act has been committed which must entail more 

 or less misery either upon the individual himself or upon 

 others, science merely recognizes that there has been a 

 breach of law ; but religion further declares that sin has 

 been done, and there ensues a painful state of consciousness 

 which, as we must carefully note, is not due to selfish dread 

 of suffering to be encountered (since similar suffering in a 

 righteous cause would be met with a feeling of self- approval), 

 but is made up chiefly of self-condemnation for the in- 

 excusable infraction of nature's ordinance. Regarded as a 

 product of psychical evolution, this sense of sin, peculiar to 

 the most highly developed organisms, is the analogue of the 

 sense of pain shared in some degree by all organisms endowed 

 with consciousness. The sense of sin, like the sense of pain, 

 is normally the deterrent from actions which tend to diminish 

 the completeness of the correspondence in which life consists. 

 But while the sense of pain is common to those creatures 

 whose incentives to action are purely selfish, the sense of 

 sin can be possessed only by those creatures whose intelli- 

 gence is sufficiently complex to enable them to recognize the 

 relationship in which they stand to the omnipresent Power, 

 and whose highest incentives to action are therefore quite 

 impersonal. To feel the sting of self-reproach because of 

 wrong-doing, without any selfish reference to the misery 

 which the wrong-doing must inevitably entail, is the high 

 prerogative of that creature whose future career of evolution, 



