cesses of feeling, the
darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world
in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how
events happen, and how work is actually done.[338] Compared with this
world of living individualized feelings, the world of generalized
objects which the intellect contemplates is without solidity or life.
As in stereoscopic or kinetoscopic pictures seen outside the
instrument, the third dimension, the movement, the vital element, are
not there. We get a beautiful picture of an express train supposed to
be moving, but where in the picture, as I have heard a friend say, is
the energy or the fifty miles an hour?[339]

[338] Hume's criticism has banished causation from the world of
physical objects, and "Science" is absolutely satisfied to define cause
in terms of concomitant change-read Mach, Pearson, Ostwald. The
"original" of the notion of causation is in our inner personal
experience, and only there can causes in the old-fashioned sense be
directly observed and described.

[339] When I read in a religious paper words like these: "Perhaps the
best thing we can say of God is that he is THE INEVITABLE INFERENCE," I
recognize the tendency to let religion evaporate in intellectual terms.
Would martyrs have sung in the flames for a mere inference, however
inevitable it might be? Original religious men, like Saint Francis,
Luther, Behmen, have usually been enemies of the intellect's pretension
to meddle with religious things. Yet the intellect, everywhere
invasive, shows everywhere its shallowing effect. See how the ancient
spirit of Methodism evaporates under those wonderfully able
rationalistic booklets (which every one should read) of a philosopher
like Professor Bowne (The Christian Revelation, The Christian Life The
Atonement: Cincinnati and New York, 1898, 1899, 1900). See the
positively expulsive purpose of philosophy properly so called:--

"Religion," writes M. Vacherot (La Religion, Paris, 1869, pp. 313,
436, et passim), "answers to a transient state or condition, not to a
permanent determination of human nature, being merely an expression of
that stage of the human mind which is dominated by the imagination....
Christianity has but a single possible final heir to its estate, and
that is scientific philosophy."

In a still more radical vein, Professor Ribot (Psychologie des
Sentiments, p. 310) describes the evaporation of religion. He sums it