prayers as a matter of patriotic
duty and habit.

Voltaire recognized the greatness of Newton's intellect, but he could
not restrain his aqua fortis, and so he said this: "All the scientists
were jealous of Newton when he discovered the Law of Gravitation, but
they got even with him when he wrote his book on the Hebrew Prophecies!"
Newton wrote that book in his water-tight compartment.

But Newton was no hypocrite. The attitude of the Primrose Sphinx who
bowed his head in the Church of England Chapel--the Jew who rose to the
highest office Christian England had to offer--and repeated Ben Ezra's
prayer, was not the attitude of Newton. Darwin waived religion, and if
he ever heard of the Bible no one knew it from his writings.

Huxley danced on it. Tyndall and Spencer regarded the Bible as a
valuable and more or less interesting collection of myths, fables and
folklore tales. Wallace sees in it a strain of prophetic truth and
regards it as gold-bearing quartz of a low grade.

Fiske regarded it as the word of God, Holy Writ, expressed often
vaguely, mystically, and in the language of poetry and symbol, but true
when rightly understood.

And so John Fiske throughout his life spoke in orthodox pulpits to the
great delight of Christian people, and at the same time wrote books on
science and dedicated them to Thomas Huxley, Bishop of all Agnostics.

To the scientist the word "supernatural" is a contradiction. Everything
that is in the Universe is natural; the supernatural is the natural not
yet understood. And that which is called the supernatural is often the
figment of a disordered, undisciplined or undeveloped imagination.

Simple people think of imagination as that quality of mind which revels
in tales of fairies and hobgoblins, but imagination of this character is
undisciplined and undeveloped. The scientist who deals with the sternest
of facts must be highly imaginative, or his work is vain. The engineer
sees his structure complete, ere he draws his plans. So the scientist
divines the thing first and then looks for it until he finds it. Were
this not so, he would not be able to recognize things hitherto unknown,
when he saw them; nor could he fit fact to fact, like bones in a
skeleton, and build a complete structure, if it all did not first exist
as a thought.

To reprove and punish children for flights of imagination, John Fiske
argued, was one of the things done only by a barbaric people.

Children first play