Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/594

576 short time either part with the old realizing or perfect a new one. Lastly, Science turns her smoked eye-glass upon God, deliberately diminishing the glory of what she looks at that she may distinguish better. Here, too, she sees mechanism where will, purpose, and love, had been supposed before; she drops the name God, and takes up the less awful name of Nature instead.

It is in this last case that the desecration produced by science is most painfully felt. This is partly, of course, because the sacredness violated was greatest here; but there is also another reason. Science cannot easily destroy our feeling for human beings. We are in such close contact with our own kind, our imagination and affections take such fast hold of our fellow-men, as to defy physiology. If it were otherwise we should want a word—Ananthropism—to answer to atheism. Even as it is the thing is occasionally to be seen. Among medical students there are not a few ananthropists, that is, men in whom human affections have not been strong enough to resist the effect of science in lowering the conception of humanity. But in general the imagination triumphs in this case over the reason. In the case of the physical world it is otherwise. This, for the majority of men, is, I fancy, almost completely desecrated, so that sympathy, communion with the forms of Nature, is pretty well confined to poets, and is generally supposed to be an amiable madness in them. But then this was not done by science, it had been done before by monkish Christianity. Chaucer complains, hundreds of years before the advent of physical science, of the divorce that had been made between the imagination and physical nature—"But now may no man see none elves mo." It was owing, according to him, to the preachings and bannings of "limitours and other holy frères." Nature had been made not merely a dead thing, but a disgusting and hideous thing, by superstitions of imps, witches, and demons; so much so that Goethe celebrates science as having restored Nature to the imagination and driven away the Walpurgisnacht of the middle ages; and, indeed, by turning attention upon the natural world, by bringing a large number of people to take careful notice of its beauties, science may have given back to the imagination, in this department, as much as it has taken away.

But the conception of God is so vast and elevated that it always slips easily out of the human mind. The task of realizing what is too great to be realized, of reaching with the imagination and growing with the affections to a reality almost too great for the one, and almost too awful for the other, is in itself exceptionally difficult. To do this, and yet at the same time carefully to restrain the imaginations and affections as science prescribes, is almost impossible; yet those who perpetually study Nature, unless they specialize themselves too much, will always in some sense feel the presence of God. The unity of what they study will sometimes come home to them and give a sense of