Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/836

 facts that have found their place in the history of every great crisis in thought. The religious emotions of every epoch, though they have this of absolute and permanent about them, that they belong to man's sense of the mystery that lies at the heart of things, find their immediate and concrete expression in direct relation to what is currently known and thought of the world and of man's place in it. By and by Science steps in, and shows that the popular cosmology is childish, and the philosophic structure erected upon it a mere house upon the sands; and in the shock that follows it is not surprising that so many fine religious natures should feel themselves unhinged. The emotions have clung about the old knowledge so long that when that old knowledge is swept away they too seem in themselves to be hollow and untrustworthy, and a numbing sense of chaos and utter inanity settles down upon the consciousness of the world. This is the experience through which mankind has passed in every age of unusual intellectual movement and revision; this is the experience through which, in these days, we ourselves are passing. The wail of anguish that goes up to Heaven as foundations that have stood the test of centuries crumble rapidly away; the despair of many who, driven hither and thither by adverse winds of doctrine, know not where to turn for comfort or hope; the Cassandra cry of not a few who would have us believe that all faith has gone forever—these are simply signs of the times, unavoidable accompaniments of the wrenching away of men's emotions from their old moorings under the pressure of that extraordinary influx of new ideas that characterizes the age in which we live. The progress of science during the past half century has been so rapid and continuous that the intellect has got a long way ahead of the feelings, and the world is overweighted by a large body of unemotionalized knowledge. This is the real meaning of our present predicament in thought. Only hereafter can dawn the epoch of readjustment between feelings and knowledge; only after many years of such ferment and commotion can men at last come to the understanding that the new thought, too, is religious and poetic, and will furnish a soil for all the higher emotions richer and more fertile than that which the deluge has overflowed.

The poet, more sensitive than other men to the subtle influences at work around him, finds himself in the storm and stress of such a transitional period adrift amid currents and counter-currents of thought, the trend of which is only dimly foreseen or guessed at by the scientists and philosophers themselves. He moves about "in worlds not realized," with many "blind misgivings," and much painful groping toward the light. Now, whatever else poetry may or may not be, and whether we define it, with Aristotle, as an imitation or, with Bacon, as an idealization