Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/440

424 far removed from nineteenth-century needs as the priests of the Homeric period. Omniscience might see in our brains the physical correlatives of our differences; and, were these organs incapable of change, the world, despite this internal commotion, would stand still as a whole. But happily that Power which, according to Mr. Arnold, "makes for righteousness" is intellectual as well as ethical; and by its operation, not as an outside but as an inside factor of the brain, even the mistaken efforts of that organ are finally overruled in the interests of truth.

It has been thought, and said, that, in the revised Address as here published, I have retracted opinions uttered at Belfast. A Roman Catholic writer, who may be taken as representative, is specially strong upon this point. Startled by the deep chorus of dissent with which my dazzling fallacies have been received, he convicts me of trying to retreat from my position. This he will by no means tolerate. "It is too late now to seek to hide from the eyes of mankind one foul blot, one ghastly deformity. Prof. Tyndall has himself told us how and where this Address of his was composed. It was written among the glaciers and the solitudes of the Swiss mountains. It was no hasty, hurried, crude production; its every sentence bore marks of thought and care."

My critic intends to be severe: he is simply just. In the "solitudes" to which he refers I worked with deliberation; endeavoring even to purify my intellect by disciplines similar to those enjoined by his own Church for the sanctification of the soul. I tried in my ponderings to realize not only the lawful, but the expedient; and to permit no fear to act upon my mind save that of uttering a single word on which I could not take my stand, either in this or any other world.

Still my time was so brief, and my process of thought and expression so slow, that, in a literary point of view, I halted, not only behind the ideal, but behind the possible. Hence, after the delivery of the Address, I went over it with the desire, not to revoke its principles, but to improve it verbally, and above all to remove any word which might give color to the notion of "heat and haste." In holding up as a warning to writers of the present the errors and follies of the denouncers of the past, I took occasion to compare the intellectual propagation of such denouncers to that of thistle-germs; the expression was thought offensive, and I omitted it. It is still omitted from the Address. There was also another passage, which ran thus: "It is vain to oppose this force with a view to its extirpation. What we should oppose, to the death if necessary, is every attempt to found upon this elemental bias of man's nature a system which should exercise despotic sway over his intellect. I do not fear any such consummation. Science has already, to some extent, leavened the world, and it will leaven it more and more. I should look upon the mild light