largely virtual.]

The ancients were happily inspired when they imagined that beyond the
gods and the fixed stars the cosmos came to an end, for the empyrean
beyond was nothing in particular, nothing to trouble one's self about.
Many existences are either out of relation to man altogether or have so
infinitesimal an influence on his experience that they may be
sufficiently represented there by an atom of star-dust; and it is
probable that if, out of pure curiosity, we wished to consider very
remote beings and had the means of doing so, we should find the detail
of existence in them wholly incommensurable with anything we can
conceive. Such beings could be known virtually only, in that we might
speak of them in the right key, representing them in appropriate
symbols, and might move in their company with the right degree of
respectful indifference.

[Sidenote: and dialectic explicit.]

The present situation of science, however, reverses the ideal one.
Physics, in so far as it exists, is explicit, and at variance with our
acquired attitude toward things; so that we may justly infer, by the
shock our little knowledge gives us, that our presumptions and
assumptions have been so egregious that more knowledge would give us
still greater shocks. Meantime dialectic, or knowledge of ideal things,
remains merely virtual. The ideal usually comes before us only in
revulsions which we cannot help feeling against some scandalous
situation or some intolerable muddle. We have no time or genius left,
after our agitated soundings and balings, to think of navigation as a
fine art, or to consider freely the sea and sky or the land we are
seeking. The proper occupation of the mind is gone, or rather not
initiated.

A further bad consequence of this illiberal state is that, among many
who have, in spite of the times, adoration in their souls, to adore
physics, to worship Being, seems a philosophical religion, whereas, of
course, it is the essence of idolatry. The true God is an object of
intent, an ideal of excellence and knowledge, not a term belonging to
sense or to probable hypothesis or to the prudent management of affairs.
After we have squared our accounts with nature and taken sufficient
thought for our bodily necessities, the eyes can be lifted for the first
time to the eternal. The rest was superstition and the quaking use of a
false physics. That appeal to the supernatural which while the danger
threatens is but forlorn medicin