otions than are other subjects of investigation. Those who have made
the pursuit of "cold scientific truth" their life's work have shown
every whit as much ardour and passion as those who have given their life
to religion. The picture of man sacrificing himself in the cause of
religion is easily matched by a Vesalius haunting the charnel houses of
Europe, and risking the most loathsome diseases in the interests of
scientific research. The abiding passion for truth in a character such
as that of Roger Bacon or Bruno easily matches the enthusiasm of the
missionary monk. The passion and the enthusiasm for science is less
advertised than the passion and the enthusiasm for religion, but it is
quite as real, and certainly not less valuable. The state of mind of
Kepler on discovering the laws of planetary motion was hardly less
ecstatic than that of a religious visionary describing his sense of
"spiritual" communion. Only in the case of the scientist, it is emotion
guided by reason, not reason checked and partly throttled by emotion.

When, therefore, Matthew Arnold defined religion as morality touched
with emotion, he substituted a fallacy for a definition. Primarily
religion is as much a conviction as is the Copernican system of
astronomy. It exists first as an idea; it only exists as an emotion at a
later stage. There is really no such thing as a religious emotion, there
are only emotions connected with religion. Originally all religion is in
the nature of an inference from observed or experienced facts. This
inference may not be of the elaborate kind that we associate with modern
scientific work, but it is there. The inference is an illogical one, but
under the conditions inevitable. And being an inference religion is not
primarily an emotion but a conviction, and it must stand or fall by its
intellectual trustworthiness. It seems, indeed, little less than a
truism to say that unless men first of all _believed_ something about
religion they could never have emotions concerning it. Hope and fear may
colour our convictions, they may prevent the formation of correct
opinions, but they originate in connection with a belief in every case.
And an emotion, if it be a healthful one, must be ultimately capable of
intellectual justification. When this cannot be done, when we have mere
emotion pleaded as a ground for rejecting rational examination, we have
irrationalism driven to its last ditch.

FOOTNOTE:

[4] "The present powerle