nce, let him own at least that its priority shows that it is near
and vital in life as science is not. We can do, it seems, without
Kepler's laws, but not without the Decalogue. The race acquires first
what is most needful for life; and man's heart was always with him, and
his fate near. A second reason, it may be noted, for the later
development of science is that our senses, as used by science, are more
mental now, and the object itself is observable only by the intervention
of the mind through the telescope or microscope or a hundred instruments
into which, though physical, the mind enters. Our methods, too, as well
as our instruments, are things of the mind. It behooves us to remember
in an age which science is commonly thought to have materialized, that
more and more the mind enters into all results, and fills an ever larger
place in life; and this should serve to make materialism seem more and
more what it is--a savage conception. But recognizing the great place of
mind in modern science, and its growing illumination of our earthly
system, I am not disposed to discredit its earliest results in art and
morals. I find in this penetration of the order of the world within us
our most certain truth; and as our bodies exist only by virtue of
sharing in the general order of nature, so, I believe, our souls have
being only by sharing in this order of the inward, the spiritual world.

What, then, is this order? We do not merely contemplate it: we are
immersed in it, it is vital in us, it is that wherein we live and move
and have our being, ever more and more in proportion as the soul's life
outvalues the body in our experience. It is necessary to expand our
conception of it. Hitherto it has been presented only as an order of
truth appealing to the intellect: but the intellect is only one function
of the soul, and thinkers are the merest fraction of mankind. We know
this order not only as truth, but as righteousness; we know that certain
choices end in enlarging and invigorating our faculties, and other
choices in their enfeeblement and extinction; and the race adds, acting
under the profound motive of self-preservation, that it is a duty to do
the one thing and avoid the other, and stores up this doctrine in
conscience. We know this order again under the aspect of joy, for joy
attends some choices, and sorrow others; and again under the aspect of
beauty, for certain choices result in beauty and others in deformity.
What I m