336 THE LIFE OF PHILIP HENRY GOSSE. 



impressions of nature and his convictions of religion. If 

 the former offered any opposition to the latter, they were 

 swept away. The rising tide is " reconciled " in the same 

 fashion to a child's battlements of sand along the shore. 

 Awe, an element almost eliminated from the modern mind, 

 was strongly developed in Philip Gosse's character. He 

 speaks of himself, in one of his letters, as having been 

 under "the subjugation of spiritual awe to a decidedly 

 morbid degree " during the whole of his life. He meant by 

 this, I feel no doubt, that he was conscious of an ever- 

 present bias towards the relinquishing of any idea pre- 

 sumably unpalatable to his inward counsellor. It was 

 under the pressure of this sense of awe that, when his 

 intellect was still fresh, he deliberately refused to give a 

 proper examination to the theory of evolution which his 

 own experiments and observations had helped to supply 

 with arguments. It was certainly not through vagueness 

 of mind or lack of a logical habit that he took up this 

 strange position, as of an intellectual ostrich with his head 

 in a bush, since his intelligence, if narrow, was as clear as 

 crystal, and his mind eminently logical. It was because a 

 " spiritual awe " overshadowed his conscience, and he could 

 not venture to take the first step in a downward course of 

 scepticism. He was not one who could accept half-truths 

 or see in the twilight. It must be high noon or else utter 

 midnight with a character so positive as his. 



It followed, then, that his abundant and varied scientific 

 labours were undertaken, whenever they were fruitful, in 

 fields where there was no possibility of contest between 

 experimental knowledge and revelation. Where his work 

 was technical, not popular, it was exclusively concerned 

 with the habits, or the forms, or the structure of animals, 

 not observed in the service of any theory or philosophical 

 principle, but for their own sake. In the two departments 



