286 SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 



to the primitive savage mind. For hundreds of 

 years the human mind has been evolving a type 

 able to appreciate and able to use the machinery of 

 law — able to imagine the unseen, and able to dis- 

 cern real identity in apparent diversity. Century 

 after century the stronger minds of men have 

 fought upwards from a tangled wilderness of in- 

 consistencies to a knowledge of consistent law — to 

 the knowledge that " it is absolutely decreed what 

 each thing can do and what it cannot do, according 

 to the conditions of Nature," and that " each thing 

 has its properties fixed and its deepest boundary- 

 mark." To the primitive mind, on the other hand, 

 nature is incoherent, inconsequent, and capricious ; 

 and incoherent, inconsequent, and capricious is 

 nature as seen by the Christian Scientist. The 

 Christian Scientist cooks his dinner over a fire, yet if 

 he happens to cook his finger the latter cookery is 

 merely a wicked imagination. The resemblance 

 between his finger and a beefsteak is beyond him. 

 The Christian Scientist believes that lions and fleas 

 and midges can bite and digest people, but the idea 

 that microbes can bite and digest people is quite 

 beyond his grasp, and is to him a wicked imagination. 

 His world is a world at the mercy of the caprice of 

 the individual, and he cannot grasp its larger 

 relationships. He has no scientific imagination ; 

 he has no philosophic insight ; he has indeed the 



