Moreover, all our _esthetic convictions_ will have to share that
banishment. We know that some things are beautiful. The consensus of
the race's judgment has not so much agreed to accept the new astronomy
as it has agreed to think sunrise glorious and snow-capped mountains
wonderful. Take from our lives our judgments on beauty, so that we may
call no music marvelous, no poetry inspiring, no scenery sublime, and
some of the most intimate and assured convictions we possess will have
to go. A man who has seen the Matterhorn at dawn, when the first shaft
of light reaches its rocky pinnacle and streams down in glory over the
glaciers that cape its shoulders, will not disbelieve the splendor of
the scene, though all the world beside unanimously should cry that it
is not beautiful. But prove it by the methods of a laboratory? When
the geologist has analyzed all the mountain's rocks, the chemist all
its minerals; when the astronomer has traced the earth's orbit that
brings on the dawn, and the physicist has counted and tabulated the
rays of light that make the colors, our conviction of the scene's
beauty will be as little explained or proved as is our confidence in
God. It becomes clear that some convictions which we both do and must
hold are not amenable to the sort of proof which a scientific
laboratory furnishes.
Moreover, if we will have no truth beyond the reach of a physicist's
demonstration, all our _convictions in the realm of personal
relationship_ will have to go. We _know_ that friendship-love is the
crown of every human fellowship. Father and son, mother and daughter,
brother and sister, wife and husband--these relationships are in
themselves bare branches wanting the foliage and fruit of friendship.
Of no truth is man at his best more sure than he is that "Life is just
our chance o' the price of learning love." But no laboratory ever can
deal with such a truth, much less establish it. For this is the
neglected insight, for the want of which our religious confidence is
needlessly unstable: _Every realm of reality has its own appropriate
kind of proof, and a method of proof available in one realm is seldom,
if ever, usable in another._ That truthfulness is right is in a way
provable, but methods proper to the moral realm must be allowed; that
the Matterhorn is sublime is in a sense provable, but by methods which
the esthetic realm permits; that love is the crown of life can be
soundly established, but one must employ a method appropriate to
personal relationships. If, obsessed by the procedure of a laboratory
as the solitary path to knowledge, one will have no convictions which
cannot meet its tests, then in good logic there must be a great
emigration from his soul. All his convictions about morals and
beauty, all his convictions about personal friendships and about God
must leave together. He will have a depopulated spirit. No man could
live on such terms for a single hour. The most essential and valuable
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