beliefs. The argument that because evil and good are mixed wherever we
can observe, therefore there is elsewhere unmixed good, does not obey
any recognized canons of induction. It would certainly be pleasant to
believe that everybody was going to be happy forever, but whether such a
belief would be favorable to that stern sense of evil which should fit
us to fight the hard battle of this life is a question too easily
answered. Thinkers of a high order do not have recourse to these simple
devices. They retain the doctrine as a protest against materialism, but
purposely retain it in the vaguest possible shape. They say that this
life is not all; if it were all, they argue, we should be rightly ruled
by our stomachs; but they scrupulously decline to give form and
substance to their anticipations. We must, they think, have avowedly a
heavenly background to the world, but our gaze should be restricted
habitually within the visible horizon. The future life is to tinge the
general atmosphere, but not to be offered as a definite goal of action
or a distinct object of contemplation.

The persons against whom, so far as I know, the charge of materialism
can be brought with the greatest plausibility at the present day are
those who still force themselves to bow before the most grossly material
symbols, and give a physical interpretation to the articles of her
creed. A man who proposes to look for God in this miserable world and
finds Him visiting the diseased imagination of a sickly nun, may perhaps
be in some sense called a materialist, and there is more materialism of
this variety in popular sentimentalisms about the "blood of Jesus" than
in all the writings of the profane men of science. But in a
philosophical sense the charge rests on a pure misunderstanding.

The man of science or, in other words, the man who most rigidly confines
his imagination within the bounds of the knowable, is every whit as
ready to protest against "materialism" as his antagonist. Those who
distinguish man into two parts, and give the higher qualities to the
soul and the sensual to the body, assume that all who reject their
distinction abolish the soul, and with it abolish all that is not
sensual. Yet every genuine scientific thinker believes in the existence
of love and reverence as he believes in any other facts, and is likely
to set just as high a value upon them as his opponent. He believes
equally with his opponent, that to cultivate the higher em