erfume of a rose. Such facts of
consciousness (for which, by the way, no adequate reason has ever been
rendered) are quite as old as the understanding; and many other things
can boast an equally ancient origin. Mr. Spencer at one place refers
to that most powerful of passions--the amatory passion--as one which,
when it first occurs, is antecedent to all relative experience
whatever; and we may press its claim as being at least as ancient, and
as valid, as that of the understanding itself. Then there are such
things woven into the texture of man as the feeling of Awe, Reverence,
Wonder--and not alone the sexual love just referred to, but the love
of the beautiful, physical, and moral, in Nature, Poetry, and Art.
There is also that deep-set feeling, which, since the earliest dawn of
history, and probably for ages prior to all history, incorporated
itself in the Religious of the world. You, who have escaped from
these religions into the high-and-dry light of the intellect, may
deride them; but in so doing you deride accidents of form merely, and
fail to touch the immovable basis of the religious sentiment in the
nature of man. To yield this sentiment reasonable satisfaction is the
problem of problems at the present hour. And grotesque in relation to
scientific culture as many of the religions of the world have been and
are--dangerous, nay, destructive, to the dearest privileges of freemen
as some of them undoubtedly have been, and would, if they could, be
again--it will be wise to recognise them as the forms of a force,
mischievous if permitted to intrude on the region of objective
knowledge, over which it holds no command, but capable of adding, in
the region of poetry and emotion, inward completeness and dignity to
man.

Feeling, I say again, dates from as old an origin and as high a source
as intelligence, and it equally demands its range of play. The wise
teacher of humanity will recognise the necessity of meeting this
demand, rather than of resisting it on account of errors and
absurdities of form. What we should resist, at all hazards, is the
attempt made in the past, and now repeated, to found upon this
elemental bias of man's nature a system which should exercise despotic
sway over his intellect. I have no fear of such a consummation.
Science has already to some extent leavened the world; it will leaven
it more and more. I should look upon the mild light of science
breaking in upon the minds of the youth