Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/146

134 bears the title "Religion as affected by Modern Materialism;" and its references and general tone make evident the depth of its author's discontent with my previous deliverance at Belfast. I find it difficult to grapple with the exact grounds of this discontent. Indeed, logically considered, the impression left upon my mind by an essay of great æsthetic merit, containing many passages of exceeding beauty, and many sentiments which none but the pure in heart could utter as they are uttered here, is vague and unsatisfactory—the author appears at times so brave and liberal, at times so timid and captious, and at times so imperfectly informed regarding the position he assails.

At the outset of his address, Mr. Martineau states with some distinctness his "sources of religious faith." They are two—"the scrutiny of Nature" and "the interpretation of sacred books." It would have been a theme worthy of his intelligence to have deduced from these two sources his religion as it stands. But not another word is said about the "sacred books." Having swept with the besom of Science various "books" contemptuously away, he does not define the sacred residue; much less give us the reasons why he deems them sacred. His references to "Nature," on the other hand, are magnificent tirades against Nature, intended, apparently, to show the wholly abominable character of man's antecedents if the theory of evolution be true. Here, also, his mood lacks steadiness. While joyfully accepting, at one place, "the widening space, the deepening vistas of time, the detected marvels of physiological structure, and the rapid filling-in of the missing links in the chain of organic life," he falls, at another, into lamentation and mourning over the very theory which renders "organic life" a "chain." He claims the largest liberality for his sect, and avows its contempt for the dangers of possible discovery. But immediately afterward he damages the claim, and ruins all confidence in the avowal. He professes sympathy with modern science, and almost in the same breath he treats, or certainly will be understood to treat, the atomic theory, and the doctrine of the conservation of energy, as if they were a kind of scientific thimble-riggery.

His ardor, moreover, renders him inaccurate; causing him to see discord between scientific men, where nothing but harmony reigns. In his celebrated address to the Congress of German Naturforscher, delivered at Leipsic, three years ago, Du Bois-Reymond speaks thus: "What conceivable connection subsists between definite movements of definite atoms in my brain, on the one hand, and on the other hand such primordial, indefinable, undeniable facts as these: I feel pain or pleasure; I experience a sweet taste, or smell a rose, or hear an organ, or see something red?... It is absolutely and forever inconceivable that a number of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen atoms, should be otherwise than indifferent as to their own position and motion, past, present, or future. It is utterly inconceivable how consciousness should result from their joint action."