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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
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