118 THE LIGHT OF DAT 



Things take no less portentous forms ; the eye and 

 not the imagination rules. What power there is in 

 mere darkness or obscurity itself ! Take a person 

 of unenlightened mind and see what things he will 

 accept, simply because they are mysterious and tran- 

 scend experience. In my youth the belief in ghosts, 

 haunted houses, witches, signs and warnings, was 

 almost universal among country people ; now there 

 is hardly a vestige of such belief left. The change 

 indicated is not merely a change of weather, as Car- 

 dinal Newman thought ; it is more than that, — 

 it is the passing of one geological period into an- 

 other. 



The world is real, and goes its own way. The 

 poet has a harder problem before him ; the priest 

 has a harder problem before him, but the men who 

 are to do the world's real work find the problem 

 much easier, — I mean the men who are to clothe, 

 and feed, and shelter, and warm, and transport it ; 

 who are to fight its battles and subdue and re- 

 claim its waste places. Science has its own mys- 

 teries and sublimities, and they have this advantage 

 — they are real ; they are not the reflection of the 

 mood or the fancy of the observer ; they are not the 

 result of obscurity, but of the limitations of the hu- 

 man mind. Knowledge outstrips imagination. 



Feeling, emotion, falls helpless before the reve- 

 lations of science. The heights and the depths that 

 surround us, and the world of vital forces in which 

 our lives are embosomed, and which the darkness of 

 earlier ages did not permit us to see, baffle speech. 



