sted; that even {132} when their gratification seems
farthest off, the uneasiness they occasion is still the best guide of
his life, and will lead him to issues entirely beyond his present
powers of reckoning. Prune down his extravagance, sober him, and you
undo him. The appetite for immediate consistency at any cost, or what
the logicians call the 'law of parsimony,'--which is nothing but the
passion for conceiving the universe in the most labor-saving
way,--will, if made the exclusive law of the mind, end by blighting the
development of the intellect itself quite as much as that of the
feelings or the will. The scientific conception of the world as an
army of molecules gratifies this appetite after its fashion most
exquisitely. But if the religion of exclusive scientificism should
ever succeed in suffocating all other appetites out of a nation's mind,
and imbuing a whole race with the persuasion that simplicity and
consistency demand a _tabula rasa_ to be made of every notion that does
not form part of the _soi-disant_ scientific synthesis, that nation,
that race, will just as surely go to ruin, and fall a prey to their
more richly constituted neighbors, as the beasts of the field, as a
whole, have fallen a prey to man.

I have myself little fear for our Anglo-Saxon race. Its moral,
aesthetic, and practical wants form too dense a stubble to be mown by
any scientific Occam's razor that has yet been forged. The knights of
the razor will never form among us more than a sect; but when I see
their fraternity increasing in numbers, and, what is worse, when I see
their negations acquiring almost as much prestige and authority as
their affirmations legitimately claim over the minds of the docile
public, I feel as if the influences working in the direction of our
mental barbarization were {133} beginning to be rather strong, and
needed some positive counteraction. And when I ask myself from what
quarter the invasion may best be checked, I can find no answer as good
as the one suggested by casting my eyes around this room. For this
needful task, no fitter body of men than the Unitarian clergy exists.
Who can uphold the rights of department Three of the mind with better
grace than those who long since showed how they could fight and suffer
for department One? As, then, you burst the bonds of a narrow
ecclesiastical tradition, by insisting that no fact of sense or result
of science must be left out of account in the reli