Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/148

136 has ceased, and the pause of reflection has set in, the scientific investigator finds himself overshadowed by the same awe. Breaking contact with the hampering details of earth, it associates him with a power which gives fullness and tone to his existence, but which he can neither analyze nor comprehend."

Though "knowledge" is here disavowed, the "feelings" of Mr. Martineau and myself are, I think, very much alike. But, notwithstanding this mutual independence of religious feeling and objective knowledge thus demonstrated, he censures me—almost denounces me—for referring religion to the region of emotion. Surely he is inconsistent here. The foregoing words refer to an inward hue or temperature, rather than to an external object of thought. When I attempt to give the power which I see manifested in the universe an objective form, personal or otherwise, it slips away from me, declining all intellectual manipulation, I dare not, save poetically, use the pronoun "he" regarding it; I dare not call it a "mind;" I refuse to call it even "a cause." Its mystery overshadows me; but it remains a mystery, while the objective frames which my neighbors try to make it fit, simply distort and desecrate it.

It is otherwise with Mr. Martineau, and hence his discontent. He professes to know where I only claim to feel. He could make his contention good against me if he would transform, by a process of verification, the foregoing three assumptions into "objective knowledge." But he makes no attempt to do so. They remain assumptions from the beginning of his address to its end. And yet he frequently uses the word "unverified," as if it were fatal to the position on which its incidence falls. "The scrutiny of Nature" is one of his sources of "religious faith:" what logical foothold does that scrutiny furnish on which any one of the foregoing three assumptions could be planted? Nature, according to his picturing, is base and cruel: what is the inference to be drawn regarding its author? If Nature be "red in tooth and claw," who is responsible? On a mindless Nature, Mr. Martineau pours the full torrent of his gorgeous invective; but could the "assumption" of "an Eternal Mind"—even of a beneficent Eternal Mind—render the world objectively a whit less mean and ugly than it is? Not an iota. It is man's feelings, and not external phenomena, that are influenced by the assumption. It adds not a ray of light nor a strain of music to the objective sum of things. It does not touch the phenomena of physical Nature—storm, flood, or fire—nor diminish by a pang the bloody combats of the animal world. But it does add the glow of religious emotion to the human