he soul. This is true, at least,
when the matters dealt with are such as have engaged us here. It may be
true, too, of those who discern and urge the arguments, just as well as
of those upon whom they urge them. But the immediate barrenness of much
patient and careful reasoning should not make us think that it is lost
labour. One way or other it will some day bear its fruit. Sometimes the
intellect is the servant of the heart. At other times the heart must
follow slowly upon the heels of the intellect.

And such is the case now. For centuries man's faith and all his loftier
feelings had their way made plain before them. The whole empire of human
thought belonged to them. But this old state of things endures no
longer. Upon this Empire, as upon that of Rome, calamity has at last
fallen. A horde of intellectual barbarians has burst in upon it, and has
occupied by force the length and breadth of it. The result has been
astounding. Had the invaders been barbarians only, they might have been
repelled easily; but they were barbarians armed with the most powerful
weapons of civilisation. They were a phenomenon new to history: they
showed us real knowledge in the hands of real ignorance; and the work of
the combination thus far has been ruin, not reorganisation. Few great
movements at the beginning have been conscious of their own true
tendency; but no great movement has mistaken it like modern Positivism.
Seeing just too well to have the true instinct of blindness, and too ill
to have the proper guidance from sight, it has tightened its clutch upon
the world of thought, only to impart to it its own confusion. What lies
before men now is to reduce this confusion to order, by a patient and
calm employment of the intellect. Intellect itself will never re-kindle
faith, or restore any of those powers that are at present so failing and
so feeble; but it will work like a pioneer to prepare their way before
them, if they are ever revived otherwise, encouraged in its labours,
perhaps not even by hope, but at any rate by the hope of hope.

As a pioneer, and not as a preacher, I have tried to indicate the real
position in which modern knowledge has placed us, and the way in which
it puts the problem of life before us. I have tried to show that,
whatever ultimately its tendency may prove to be, it cannot be the
tendency that, by the school that has given it to us, it is supposed to
have been; and that it either does a great deal more than