Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 21.djvu/694

678 the senses which has found of late years so many able advocates among the men of science and the younger thinkers of England. The perceptions of the senses are undoubtedly the only guides we possess to a knowledge of the material world, and the inferences drawn from them by the faculties of the understanding are the legitimate conquests of physical science. But they entirely fail to explain the higher functions of the intellect, which are the domain of metaphysics; still less do we derive from the senses the moral laws of justice, of truth, of charity, of conscience; and least of all that conception of the supernatural and the infinite which it is the glory of man to trace in nature and in the emotions of the soul. Man alone, said Goethe, is a religious animal, and those who would degrade his nature to that of the brutes, begin by extinguishing in him the sense of religion.

These are, in other words, the sentiments expressed by M. Dumas and M. Pasteur. And who are they who hold this language? The one is a chemist, conversant with all the known properties of natural bodies and the marvelous combinations of the atomic theory which reduces them all to a few primitive elements. The other is a physiologist who has refuted the theory of spontaneous generation, and established on a solid basis that life alone can impart life. They have both traveled as far on the road of natural science as it will take them; they have even enlarged the bounds of physical knowledge. But, arrived at that term of man's labor, they acknowledge that an infinite horizon of thought, of action, of forces, and of power lies beyond the scope of sensuous observation. He studies Nature with a careless eye and a benighted mind who does not perceive that the supernatural lies in it and above it. For when all is said that science can teach, and all is done that skill can achieve to cultivate the earth and bring forth its fruits, one gift remains without which everything else were vain—that gift which the Supreme Creator has reserved absolutely to himself—that gift which man and every living creature can take away, but can never restore—that gift without which this earth would be no more than the cinder of a planet—the mystery and the miracle of Life is everywhere; without life nothing would exist at all: matter would be the caput mortuum of the universe. With the diffusion of life creation begins; and of that act all but a supernatural power is incapable. The seed of cummin you commit to the earth includes it; the single grain of wheat shoots up, not only to reproduce itself, but to multiply its ears a hundred-fold and in successive generations, millions upon millions of times, and to nourish a world; the acorn carries in its little cup a thousand years of vitality; the midge and the butterfly that sport for a day upon the rushes and the blossoms enjoy it; the laborious earth-worm that builds up the fertile soil of our fields and gardens has it; it ascends through all the scale of existence until it arrives at Man, a being capable of conceiving Infinite Power and hopes