Professor Beale asks the question, whether "a man who has the gift of
science must ever be wanting in the gift of faith?" It is certain that
this inquiry sharply emphasizes the antagonism at present existing between
materialistic science and religious faith. But there is only one reason
why this antagonism should be continued, and that is, the persistent claim
of science to superior recognition in all cases where there is the
slightest apparent conflict between the two. Certainly no man ever did
more to popularize the genuine truths of science in this country than
Professor Agassiz, or worked more successfully to that end. He was willing
to place the decorative wreath on the starry forehead of science, but
refused to pluck from the soul "the starry eyes of faith and hope," that
man might be dwarfed down to the "nearest of kin" to the anthropoid ape.
When we come to this assumed relationship in genetic types, we have not so
much as laid the first abutment of the bridge by which these revivers of
Lucretian materialism would span the chasm between mind and matter,
between the spiritual and physical side of man, between dark brute sense
and "a soul as white as heaven." For going back to undifferentiated
primeval mist, and following down the whole line of vital phenomena, from
whatever subtle molecular combinations their first manifestation may have
arisen, until we reach the highest differentiated organism below man, we
shall find the chasm between the physical and the psychical not a
thousandth part spanned. And even if man, with the assistance of all the
maleficent spirits that "walk the air both when we wake and sleep," could
span this chasm, it would be only by another bridge of Mirza across which
no daring mortal could ever pass.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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