e felt anything, they have felt melancholy. Their allegiance
and affection were still fixed on those mythical sentimental worlds
which they saw to be illusory. The mechanical world they believed in
could not please them, in spite of its extent and fertility. Giving
rhetorical vent to their spleen and prejudice, they exaggerated nature's
meagreness and mathematical dryness. When their imagination was chilled
they spoke of nature, most unwarrantably, as dead, and when their
judgment was heated they took the next step and called it unreal. A man
is not blind, however, because every part of his body is not an eye, nor
every muscle in his eye a nerve sensitive to light. Why, then, is nature
dead, although it swarms with living organisms, if every part is not
obviously animate? And why is the sun dark and cold, if it is bright and
hot only to animal sensibility? This senseless lamentation is like the
sophism of those Indian preachers who, to make men abandon the illusions
of self-love, dilated on the shocking contents of the human body. Take
off the skin, they cried, and you will discover nothing but loathsome
bleeding and quivering substances. Yet the inner organs are well enough
in their place and doubtless pleasing to the microbes that inhabit them;
and a man is not hideous because his cross-section would not offer the
features of a beautiful countenance. So the structure of the world is
not therefore barren or odious because, if you removed its natural outer
aspect and effects, it would not make an interesting landscape. Beauty
being an appearance and life an operation, that is surely beautiful and
living which so operates and so appears as to manifest those qualities.

[Sidenote: nor especially cruel.]

It is true that materialism prophesies an ultimate extinction for man
and all his works. The horror which this prospect inspires in the
natural man might be mitigated by reflection; but, granting the horror,
is it something introduced by mechanical theories and not present in
experience itself? Are human things inwardly stable? Do they belong to
the eternal in any sense in which the operation of material forces can
touch their immortality? The panic which seems to seize some minds at
the thought of a merely natural existence is something truly
hysterical; and yet one wonders why ultimate peace should seem so
intolerable to people who not so many years ago found a stern religious
satisfaction in consigning almost the whole