product. The first stand of spiritual philosophy is faith in the validity of our own evolved being, and to this we have as much right as to faith in the reliability of our five senses.
The geologist might say: To me the grandeur of the mountain means nothing; I know how it was made. The cooling and contraction of the earth, the crushing and uplifting of strata, the action of air, wind, and water, the sculpturing of time, the planting of vegetation by a chance breeze—and you have your mountain, a thing of science. Yet Coleridge, standing in the vale of Chamounix and gazing on Mont Blanc,
"Till the dilating Soul, enrapt, transfused,
Into the mighty Vision passing—there,
As in her natural form, swelled vast to Heaven,"
found it an emblem of sublimity, a voice from the throne of God. We shall find it hard to believe that the poetry of science can be explained on a merely physical basis. One may say: The religious sentiment means nothing to me; I know its origin; it is the result of bad dreams. A primitive ancestor, after a successful hunt, ate too much raw meat and dreamed of his grandfather. Thus arose the belief in disembodied spirits and a whole train of false conceptions. Yet we shall hardly grant that the religious feeling of the martyrs, which enabled the exalted spirit to lose the sense of unutterable physical torture, is adequately explained by the dream hypothesis.
A Beethoven string orchestra, to the musical mind, discourses most excellent music. It is a connected series of sublimated and elusive metaphors,
