Ill 



SCIENCE AND MORALS 123 



plain truth upon which I have made it my 

 business to insist over and over again it is this 

 and whether it is a truth or not, my insistence 

 upon it leaves not a shadow of justification for 

 Mr. Lilly's assertion. 



But I ask in this case also, how is it conceivable 

 that any man, in possession of all his natural 

 faculties, should hold such an opinion ? I do not 

 suppose that I am exceptionally endowed because 

 I have all my life enjoyed a keen perception of 

 the beauty offered us by nature and by art. Now 

 physical science may and probably will, some day, 

 enable our posterity to set forth the exact physical 

 concomitants and conditions of the strange rapture 

 of beauty. But if ever that day arrives, the 

 rapture will remain, just as it is now, outside and 

 beyond the physical world ; and, even in the 

 mental world, something superadded to mere sen- 

 sation. I do not wish to crow unduly over my 

 humble cousin the orang, but in the aesthetic 

 province, as in that of the intellect, I am afraid 

 he is nowhere. I doubt not he would detect a 

 fruit amidst a wilderness of leaves where I could 

 see nothing ; but I am tolerably confident that he 

 has never been awestruck, as I have been, by the 

 dim religious gloom, as of a temple devoted to the 

 earthgods, of the tropical forests which he in- 

 habits. Yet I doubt not that our poor long- 

 armed and short-legged friend, as he sits medita- 

 tively munching his durian fruit, has something 



