of science at least as much as I did; but nobody raised an outcry against him. The freedom that he took I claim, but in a more purely scientific direction. And looking at what I must regard as the extravagances of the religious world; at the very inadequate and foolish notions concerning this universe entertained by the majority of our religious teachers; at the waste of energy on the part of good men over things unworthy, if I might say it without discourtesy, of the attention of enlightened heathens: the fight about the fripperies of Ritualism, the mysteries of the Eucharist, and the Athanasian Creed; the forcing on the public view of Pontigny Pilgrimages; the dating of historic epochs from the definition of the Immaculate Conception; the proclamation of the Divine Glories of the Sacred Heart—standing in the midst of these insanities, it did not appear to me extravagant to claim the public tolerance for an hour and a half for the statement of what I hold to be more reasonable views: views more in accordance with the verities which science has brought to light, and which many weary souls would, I thought, welcome with gratification and relief.
But to come to closer quarters. The expression to which the most violent exception has been taken is this: "Abandoning all disguise, the confession I feel bound to make before you is that I prolong the vision backward across the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern, in that Matter which we, in our ignorance, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of every form and quality of life." To call it a "chorus of dissent," as my Catholic critic does, is a mild way of describing the storm of opprobrium with which this statement has been assailed. But, the first blast of passion being past, I hope I may again ask my opponents to consent to reason. First of all, I am blamed for crossing the boundary of the experimental evidence. I reply that this is the habitual action of the scientific mind—at least of that portion of it which applies itself to physical investigation. Our theories of light, heat, magnetism, and electricty, all imply the crossing of this boundary. My paper on the "Scientific Use of the Imagination" illustrates this point in the amplest manner; and in the lecture above referred to I have sought, incidentally, to make clear how in physics the experiential incessantly leads to the ultra-experiential; how out of experience there always grows something finer than mere experience, and that in their different powers of ideal extension consists for the most part the difference between the great and the mediocre investigator. The kingdom of science, then, cometh not by observation and experiment alone, but is completed by fixing the roots of observation and experiment in a region inaccessible to both, and in dealing with which we are forced to fall back upon the picturing power of the mind.
Passing the boundary of experience, therefore, does not, in the
