n tender to a young child, is a
sentiment inevitable even toward artificial organisms. Could we better
perceive the fine fruits of order, the dire consequences of every
specific cruelty or jar, we should grow doubly considerate toward all
forms; for we exist through form, and the love of form is our whole real
inspiration.

[Sidenote: and partly artificial.]

The artificial prejudice against mechanism is a fruit of party spirit.
When a myth has become the centre or sanction for habits and
institutions, these habits and institutions stand against any conception
incompatible with that myth. It matters nothing that the values the
myth was designed to express may remain standing without it, or may be
transferred to its successor. Social and intellectual inertia is too
great to tolerate so simple an evolution. It divides opinions not into
false and true but into high and low, or even more frankly into those
which are acceptable and comforting to its ruffled faith and those which
are dangerous, alarming, and unfortunate. Imagine Socrates "viewing with
alarm" the implications of an argument! This artificial prejudice is
indeed modern and will not be eternal. Ancient sages, when they wished
to rebuke the atheist, pointed to the very heavens which a sentimental
religion would nowadays gladly prove to be unreal, lest the soul should
learn something of their method. Yet the Ptolemaic spheres were no more
manlike and far less rich in possibilities of life than the Copernican
star-dust. The ancients thought that what was intelligible was divine.
Order was what they meant by intelligence, and order productive of
excellence was what they meant by reason. When they noticed that the
stars moved perpetually and according to law, they seriously thought
they were beholding the gods. The stars as we conceive them are not in
that sense perfect. But the order which nature does not cease to
manifest is still typical of all order, and is sublime. It is from these
regions of embodied law that intelligibility and power combined come to
make their covenant with us, as with all generations.

[Sidenote: Biassed judgments inspired by moral inertia.]

The emotions and the moral principles that are naturally allied to
materialism suffer an eclipse when materialism, which is properly a
primary or dogmatic philosophy, breathing courage and victory, appears
as a destructive force and in the incongruous role of a critic. One
dogmatism is not fit to cri