ove all affection, then we need
have no anxiety; we may enter like the pilgrims into comfortable
houses of refreshment, where we can look with interest at pictures and
spiders and poultry and all the pleasant wonders of the place; we may
halt in wayside arbours to taste cordials and confections, and enjoy
from the breezy hill-top the pleasant vale of Beulah, with the
celestial mountains rising blue and still upon the far horizon.

XIX

SCIENCE

I read the other day a very downright book, with a kind of dry
insolence about it, by a man who was concerned with stating what he
called the _mechanistic_ theory of the universe. The worlds, it
seemed, were like a sandy desert, with a wind that whirled the sands
about; and indeed I seemed, as I looked out on the world through the
writer's eyes, to see nothing but wind and sand! One of his points was
that every thought that passed through the mind was preceded by a
change in the particles of the brain; so that philosophy, and
religion, and life itself were nothing but a shifting of the sand by
the impalpable wind--matter and motion, that was all! Again and again
he said, in his dry way, that no theory was of any use that was not
supported by facts; and that though there was left a little corner of
thought, which was still unexplained, we should soon have some more
facts, and the last mystery would be hunted down.

But it seemed to me, as I read it, that the thoughts of man were just
as much facts as any other facts, and that when a man had a vision of
beauty, or when a hope came to him in a bitter sorrow, it was just as
real a thing as the little particle of the brain which stirred and
crept nearer to another particle. I do not say that all theories of
religion and philosophy are necessarily true, but they are real
enough; they have existed, they exist, they cannot die. Of course, in
making out a theory, we must not neglect one set of facts and depend
wholly on another set of facts; but I believe that the intense and
pathetic desire of humanity to know why they are here, why they feel
as they do, why they suffer and rejoice, what awaits them, are facts
just as significant as the blood that drips from the wound, or the
leaf that unfolds in the sun. The comforting and uplifting conclusion
which the writer came to was that we were just a set of animated
puppets, spun out of the drift of sand and dew by the thing that he
called force. But if that is so, why are we not al