Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/506

Rh persons a Spirit that is not constantly producing noteworthy effects, and so getting himself into the newspapers, would seem unreal. Therefore, to such persons Religious Idealism depends for its life and warmth upon the vividness and the impressiveness of these phenomenal indications of the action of the great Spirit. Such persons, if they have given up traditional superstitions, still find their delight in dwelling on the mystery of “vital force,” on the occurrence of all sorts of wonderful things, on the theories of occult powers, or of ethereal essences. To them one of the best evidences of the spiritual nature of things is the inability of the biologist to tell us under what conditions life could be produced from dead matter. The mysterious nature of nervous action, the influence of the mind upon the body, and, above all, the occurrence of certain strange emotional experiences in us, such as the visions of mystics, these are to them the main proof that the world is divine and is full of spiritual life. We do not sympathize with this method of idealism. We respect its good intentions, but we are unwilling to look upon it as rationally significant. For us it makes absolutely no difference in our faith about the ultimate spiritual nature of things, whether the world that we see makes our hair stand on end or not, or whether the biologists ever come to succeed in making living matter or not. That we can make a fire, does not prove the world less divine. Nor would the truth of things be less spiritual, if we could also manufacture not only protoplasm, but whole whales or Shakespeares in our laboratories.