in THE SCIENTIFIC MIND 51 



The savage endows his images of wood and stone with 

 divine attributes, and makes them objects of worship, 

 and the Gods of all men and ages reflect the thoughts 

 and aspirations of those who fall down before them. 

 Volney wrote in Les Ruines : " Ce n'est point Dieu qui 

 a fait 1'homme a son image, c'est 1'homme qui a figure 

 Dieu sur la sienne," but long before him Xenophanes 

 had said " Men make gods in their own image," and had 

 held that the representations of the gods in the human 

 form by Homer and Hesiod were directly responsible 

 for the moral corruption of the 'time. The image in 

 which man makes God is determined chiefly by extent of 

 knowledge of the universe ; the shape that satisfies the 

 common mind evokes no spirit of reverence in that 

 which stretches out to the stars or studies the profound 

 marvels of the life of the simplest organism. 



Science alone can give us true conception of ourselves and our 

 relation to the mysteries of existence. Only the sincere man of 

 science and by this title we do not mean the mere calculator 

 of distances, or analyzer of compounds, or labeler of species ; 

 but him who through lower truths seeks higher and eventually 

 the highest only the genuine man of science, we say, can truly 

 know how utterly beyond not only human knowledge but human 

 conception is the universal power of which nature, and life and 

 thought are manifestations. Herbert Spencer. 



The mind that thinks in aeons and sounds the depths 

 of interstellar space cannot be brought within the limits 

 of a narrow religious formulary ; yet it is essentially 

 devout, and it influences for good all with whom it 

 comes in contact. G. F. Watts exerted a remarkable 

 power over others by his elevating personality. On one 

 occasion a lad who was living a fast life owing to the 

 dissolute and vicious company he met at his father's 

 house, walked with Watts across a park in London, on 

 a night when the dome of the sky was brilliant with 



