wills and the energies, and the faiths and the virtues and the
personalities."

"You are caricaturing."

"How so? How can I judge otherwise, when I hear a man talking, as
he did, of God in terms which, every one of them involved what we
call the essential properties of matter-space, time, passibility,
motion; setting forth phrenology and mesmerism as the great organs
of education, even of the regeneration of mankind; apologising for
the earlier ravings of the Poughkeepsie seer, and considering his
later eclectico-pantheist farragos as great utterances: while,
whenever he talked of Nature, he showed the most credulous craving
after everything which we, the countrymen of Bacon, have been taught
to consider unscientific-Homoeopathy, Electro-biology, Loves of the
Plants a la Darwin, Vestiges of Creation, Vegetarianisms,
Teetotalisms-never mind what, provided it was unaccredited or
condemned by regularly educated men of science?"

"But you don't mean to assert that there is nothing in any of these
theories?"

"Of course not. I can no more prove a universal negative about them
than I can about the existence of life on the moon. But I do say
that this contempt for that which has been already discovered-this
carelessness about induction from the normal phenomena, coupled with
this hankering after theories built upon exceptional ones-this
craving for 'signs and wonders,' which is the sure accompaniment of
a dying faith in God, and in nature as God's work-are symptoms which
make me tremble for the fate of physical as well as of spiritual