g made this confession, and
relinquished the views of the mechanical theologian, you desire for
the satisfaction of feelings which I admit to be, in great part, those
of humanity at large, to give ideal form to the Power that moves all
things--it is not by me that you will find objections raised to this
exercise of ideality, if it be only consciously and worthily carried
out.

*****

Again, I think Professor Virchow's position, in regard to the question
of _contagium animatum_, is not altogether that of true philosophy. He
points to the antiquity of the doctrine. 'It is lost,' he says, 'in
the darkness of the middle ages. We have received this name from our
forefathers, and it already appears distinctly in the sixteenth
century. We possess several works of that time which put forward
_contagium animatum_ as a scientific doctrine, with the same confidence,
with the same sort of proof, with which the "Plastidulic soul" is now
set forth.'

These speculations of our 'forefathers' will appeal differently to
different minds. By some they will be dismissed with a sneer; to
others they will appeal as proofs of genius on the part of those who
enunciated them. There are men, and by no means the minority, who,
however wealthy in regard to facts, can never rise into the region of
principles; and they are sometimes intolerant of those who can. They
are formed to plod meritoriously on the lower levels of thought,
unpossessed of the pinions necessary to reach the heights. They cannot
realise the mental act--the act of inspiration it might well be
called--by which a man of genius, after long pondering and proving,
reaches a theoretic conception which unravels and illuminates the
tangle of centuries of observation and experiment. There are minds,
it may be said in passing, who at the present moment stand in this
relation to Mr. Darwin. For my part, I should be inclined to ascribe
to penetration rather than to presumption the notion of a _contagium
animatum_. He who invented the term ought, I think, to be held in
esteem; for he had before him the quantity of fact, and the measure of
analogy, that would justify a man of genius in taking a step so bold.
'Nevertheless,' says Professor Virchow, 'no one was able throughout
a long time to discover these living germs of disease. The sixteenth
century did not find them, nor did the seventeenth, nor the
eighteenth.' But it may be urged, in reply to this, that the theoretic
conjectu