eries about the evolution of
life if, instead of observing life and the structure of living beings,
they had shut themselves up in a laboratory and there made chemical
experiments with tissue cut out of an organism? Would Lyell have been
able to describe the development of the crust of the earth if, instead
of examining strata and their contents, he had scrutinised the
chemical qualities of innumerable rocks? Let us really follow in the
footsteps of these investigators who tower like giants in the domain
of modern science. We shall then apply to the higher regions of
spiritual life the methods they have used in the study of nature. We
shall not then believe we have understood the nature of the "divine"
tragedy of Hamlet by saying that a wonderful chemical process
transformed a certain quantity of food into that tragedy. We shall
believe it as little as an investigator of nature could seriously
believe that he has understood the mission of heat in the evolution of
the earth, when he has studied the action of heat on sulphur in a
retort. Neither does he attempt to understand the construction of the
human brain by examining the effect of liquid potash on a fragment of
it, but rather by inquiring how the brain has, in the course of
evolution, been developed out of the organs of lower organisms.

It is therefore quite true that one who is investigating the nature of
spirit can do nothing better than learn from natural science. He need
only do as science does, but he must not allow himself to be misled by
what individual representatives of natural science would dictate to
him. He must investigate in the spiritual as they do in the physical
domain, but he need not adopt the opinions they entertain about the
spiritual world, confused as they are by their exclusive
contemplation of physical phenomena.

We shall only be acting in the spirit of natural science if we study
the spiritual development of man as impartially as the naturalist
observes the sense-world. We shall then certainly be led, in the
domain of spiritual life, to a kind of contemplation which differs
from that of the naturalist as geology differs from pure physics and
biology from chemistry. We shall be led up to higher methods, which
cannot, it is true, be those of natural science, though quite
conformable with the spirit of it. Such methods alone are able to
bring us to the heart of spiritual developments, such as that of
Christianity, or other worlds of religi