l perfectly
complacent and contented, why do we love and grieve and wish to be
different? I do still believe that there is a spirit that mingles with
our hopes and dreams, something personal, beautiful, fatherly, pure,
something which is unwillingly tied to earth and would be free if it
could. The sense that we are ourselves wholly separate and distinct,
with experience behind us and experience before us, seems to me a fact
beside which all other facts pale into insignificance. And next in
strength to that seems the fact that we can recognise, and draw near
to, and be amazingly desirous of, as well as no less strangely hostile
to, other similar selves; that our thought can mingle with theirs,
pass into theirs, as theirs into ours, forging a bond which no
accident of matter can dissolve.

Does it really satisfy the lover, when he knows that his love is
answered, to realise that it is all the result of some preceding
molecular action of the brain? That does not seem to me so much a
truculent statement as a foolish statement, shirking, like a glib and
silly child, the most significant of data. And I think we shall do
well to say to our scientist, as courteously as Sir Lancelot said to
the officious knight, who proffered unnecessary service, that we have
no need for him at this time.

Now, I am not saying, in all this, that the investigation of science
is wrong or futile. It is exactly the reverse; the message of God is
hidden in all the minutest material things that lie about us; and it
is a very natural and even noble work to explore it; but it is wrong
if it leads us to draw any conclusions at present beyond what we can
reasonably and justly draw. It is the inference that what explains the
visible scheme of things can also explain the invisible. That is
wrong!

Let me here quote a noble sentence, which has often given me
much-needed help, and served to remind me that thought is after all as
real a thing as matter, when I have been tempted to feel otherwise. It
was written by a very wise and tender philosopher, William James, who
was never betrayed by his own severe standard of truth and reality
into despising the common dreams and aspirations of simpler men. He
wrote:

"I find it preposterous to suppose that if there be a
feeling of unseen reality, shared by numbers of the best
men in their best moments, responded to by other men in
their deep moments, good to live by, strength-giving--I find