all
forms of life, and with his Irish graphic lucidity made a picture of a
world of magnetic atoms, each atom with a positive and a negative pole,
arranging itself by attraction and repulsion in orderly crystalline
structure. Such a picture is dangerously fascinating to thinkers
oppressed by the bloody disorders of the living world. Craving for purer
subjects of thought, they find in the contemplation of crystals and
magnets a happiness more dramatic and less childish than the happiness
found by the mathematicians in abstract numbers, because they see in the
crystals beauty and movement without the corrupting appetites of fleshly
vitality. In such Materialism as that of Lucretius and Tyndall there
is a nobility which produces poetry: John Davidson found his highest
inspiration in it. Even its pessimism as it faces the cooling of the
sun and the return of the ice-caps does not degrade the pessimist: for
example, the Quincy Adamses, with their insistence on modern democratic
degradation as an inevitable result of solar shrinkage, are not
dehumanized as the vivisectionists are. Perhaps nobody is at heart fool
enough to believe that life is at the mercy of temperature: Dante was
not troubled by the objection that Brunetto could not have lived in the
fire nor Ugolino in the ice.

But the physicists found their intellectual vision of the world
incommunicable to those who were not born with it. It came to the public
simply as Materialism; and Materialism lost its peculiar purity and
dignity when it entered into the Darwinian reaction against Bible
fetichism. Between the two of them religion was knocked to pieces; and
where there had been a god, a cause, a faith that the universe was
ordered however inexplicable by us its order might be, and therefore a
sense of moral responsibility as part of that order, there was now an
utter void. Chaos had come again. The first effect was exhilarating:
we had the runaway child's sense of freedom before it gets hungry and
lonely and frightened. In this phase we did not desire our God back
again. We printed the verses in which William Blake, the most religious
of our great poets, called the anthropomorphic idol Old Nobodaddy, and
gibed at him in terms which the printer had to leave us to guess from
his blank spaces. We had heard the parson droning that God is not
mocked; and it was great fun to mock Him to our hearts' content and not
be a penny the worse. It did not occur to us that Old Nobod