ADDRESS. XCV 
henbane differs from the perfume of a rose. Such facts of consciousness 
(for which, by the way, no adequate reason has yet been rendered) are 
quite as old as the understanding; and many other things can boast an 
equally ancient origin. Mr. Spencer at one place refers to that most 
powerful of passions—the amatory passion—as one which, when it first 
occurs, is antecedent to all relative experience whatever; and we may pass 
its claim as being at least as ancient and yalid as that of the understanding. 
Then there are such things woven into the texture of man as the feeling 
of Awe, Reverence, Wonder—and not alone the sexual love just referred 
to, but the love of the beautiful, physical, and moral, in Nature, Poetry, 
and Art, There is also that deep-set feeling which, since the earliest 
dawn of history, and probably for ages prior to all history, incorporated 
itself in the Religions of the world. You who have escaped from these 
religions into the high-and-dry light of the intellect may deride them; 
but in so doing you deride accidents of form merely, and fail to touch the 
immoyable basis of the religious sentiment in the nature of man. To yield 
this sentiment reasonable satisfaction is the problem of problems at the pre- 
sent hour. And grotesque in relation to scientific culture as many of the 
religions of the world have been and are—dangerous, nay, destructive, to 
the dearest privileges of freemen as some of them undoubtedly have been, 
and would, if they could, be again—it will be wise to recognize them as 
the forms of a force, mischievous, if permitted to intrude on the region of 
objective knowledge, over which it holds no command, but capable of adding 
in the region of poetry and emotion, inward completeness and dignity to man. 
Feeling, I say again, dates from as old an origin and as high a source ag 
intelligence, and it equally demands its range of play. The wise teacher of 
humanity will recognize the necessity of meeting this demand rather than of 
resisting it on account of errors and absurdities of form. What we should 
resist, at all hazards, is the attempt made in the past, and now repeated, to 
found upon this elemental bias of man’s nature a system which should exer- 
cise despotic sway over his intellect. I have no fears as to such a consumma- 
tion, Science has already to some extent leavened the world: it will leaven 
it more and more ; and I should look upon the light of science breaking in upon 
the minds of the youth of Ireland, and strengthening gradually to the per- 
fect day, as a surer check to any intellectual or spiritual tyranny which now 
threatens this island, than the laws of princes or the swords of emperors, 
We fought and won our battle even in the Middle Ages: should we doubt 
the issue of a conflict with our broken foe? 
The impregnable position of science may be described in a few words. 
We claim, and we shall wrest, from theology the entire domain of cosmo- 
logical theory. All schemes and systems which thus infringe upon the 
domain of science must, in so far as they do this, submit to its control, and 
relinquish all thought of controlling it. Acting otherwise proved disastrous 
in the past, and it is simply fatuous to-day. Every system which would 
escape the fate of an organism too rigid to adjust itself to its environment, 
must be plastic to the extent that the growth of knowledge demands. When 
this truth has been thoroughly taken in, rigidity will be relaxed, exclusive- 
ness diminished, things now deemed essential will be dropped, and elements 
now rejected will be assimilated, The lifting of the life is the essential 
point; and as long as dogmatism, fanaticism, and intolerance are kept out, 
yarious modes of leverage may be employed to raise life to a higher level. 
Science itself not unfrequently derives motive power from an ultra- 
scientific source. Some of its greatest discoveries have been made under the 
